An Urban Requiem: A Look at Bernard Herrmann's "Taxi Driver" Score

Driving is not my favorite activity by any stretch of the imagination, but having some music on acts as a good buffer for navigating the congested streets of Philadelphia.  Yesterday's choice for the morning commute was the score to Taxi Driver.  A logical choice, especially since it provided an intensely brooding soundtrack to driving through the ghettos of Philadelphia, (and especially when circling around looking for parking near Temple University). 

The Troubadour of Anxiety:
Bernard Herrmann around the time
he scored Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver was the swansong of legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann (he died Christmas Eve of 1975, only hours after completing the final recording session).  Given its prominent use of the jazz idiom, it's an unusual score for the classically-trained Herrmann, who once expressed a skepticism bordering on distaste for jazz (I believe he was referring to a score by Andre Previn).  Whatever prompted his shift in thinking, Herrmann's musical instincts for underscoring the lonely world of Travis Bickle proved to be correct.  


At the film's outset, Herrmann employs the visceral combination of saxophone and swooning strings to evoke a powerful atmosphere appropriate to the film; it's not hard to imagine a nightclub patronized by the sleazy drinkers and lechers observed by the protagonist Travis Bickle on his nocturnal journeys around New York City.  On the flip side, this music of loneliness is offset by the angry muscularity of a brass and percussion ensemble, softened only slightly by clarinets, contrabassoons, and two menacing harps, as Travis prepares for his apocalyptic killing of "the scum, the dogs, and the filth" at the film's climax.

Taxi Driver: Getting Into Shape

Herrmann had spent the last 35 years of his career honing his genius for writing film scores of dark power, often employing unusual instrumental combinations.  This is apparent in his scores for HItchcock's films, and by the time he reached this final collaboration with none other than Martin Scorcese, he had earned his reputation as film music's troubadour of anxiety. 

God's Lonely Man:
Robert De Niro as antihero
 Travis Bickle

The essence of Travis's psychology is summed up in the score's first two chords: a dissonant crescendo backed by a rapidly accelerating snare drum, racing inexorably towards a violent C major catharsis, then subsiding back into the silence from whence it came.  This motif runs throughout the Taxi Driver soundtrack; crescendos leading to nowhere, the music receding back into its own repetitive pattern and gathering more and more energy for its explosive final release. There are stretches of music in the score repeated bar for bar, note for note, and passages of the sparsest writing reminiscent of Anton Webern.  This aspect of the score gave me the initial impression that Herrmann had fallen back on a rather lazy use of his stock of repeated musical patterns and gestures (as he had done in some of his throwaway scores like The Bride Wore Black), but it recently clicked in my mind that the obsessiveness of Herrmann's musical style reached its ultimate synthesis in this score.  The mechanical rigidity of the score, which is almost entirely in 4/4 time, mirrors Travis, going nowhere, and similarly is trapped in its own stultifying routine, stewing in its rage and sense of negligibility.  The music draws us into his world, as if it is a direct descendant of Travis's weltanschauung: "The days move along with regularity over and over.  And suddenly, there is change."

Taxi Driver: Main Title

The change that takes place in Herrmann's music provides the score's masterstroke, and refutes any charge of lazy writing on the part of the composer.  Travis's thoughts have led him to avenge a teenage prostitute in a bloody shootout at the film's (anti-) climax.  The shootout itself has no music, but the rage that has been steadily gathering bubbles over in the snarling polytonal dissonance of the brass, like a monster has been unleashed in all its fury, and the steady beat of the drums is now a furious rumble.  When a steady drumbeat does return, it is the timpani and bass drum acting as a dirge rhythm backing the funereal incantation of the opening theme in the horns.  On screen, we are surveying the carnage, gradually removing ourselves from a nightmarish battleground, made no better by the excited crowd that is gathering outside, seemingly unbothered by the immense bloodbath that has just occurred.  

Taxi Driver: After the Carnage (begins at 1:32)

Herrmann's final film score is an urban requiem, a chilling document of the decay and crime overtaking America's cities in the 1970s, and would worsen into the 1980s.  More importantly, it is his ultimate testament to the human suffering that breeds such a decline, and its sometimes disastrous consequences.  Travis, like many of us, is forced to repress his deepest suffering and frustration on a daily basis.  Any psychologist will tell you that inner turmoil, if left unchecked, invariably breeds a cycle of despair and desperation.  In the worst case scenario, it may find its outlet in brutal violence.  

But why consult a psychologist for this sad truth?  Even apart from Scorcese's unforgettable film, Bernard Herrmann paints a disturbingly vivid picture of modern America.

(Note: I do not own any of the music or the photos posted on this page.)