Taxi driver

ARISTA RECORDS

Some soundtracks are decorative or illustrative, others emotionally instructive. For his 1976 “New York gothic” psychodrama, Martin Scorsese wanted something different, more immersive. “You get to know what you like if you see enough films,” he wrote on his soundtrack sleeve notes. And what he liked was the idea of the veteran composer whose Hitchcock scores – for Vertigo and Psycho, especially showed a profoundly expressive aptitude for inner-states cinema.

Not that getting Bernard Herrmann was easy. He rebuffed Scorsese repeatedly, claiming he didn’t

“do things about cab drivers”. If Herrmann’s stated reason for eventually taking the job seems equally unlikely (he said he liked the bit where Travis Bickle poured peach brandy and milk on sugar-coated white bread), there’s no doubting he was worth the effort. Between his queasily sensual swells of brassy dread and deliberately sickly sweet jazz melodies, Herrmann dredged up a classic of first-person scoring from Bickle’s slanted psyche.

And he made a killer entrance. Sound, image and subtext merge seamlessly as Herrmann’s languid

two-note brass theme and Bickle’s yellow cab emerge from the fog of the opening titles, almost as if the taxi is breathing in tune with Travis. A sense of noir-ish romanticism skewed emerges from the tense strings, low-end brood and percussive clusters, all reflecting subjective ties to Bickle’s POV.

When we cut to Betsy’s theme (a lush saxophone melody, repurposed from an earlier Herrmann stage work), a simultaneous cut to Bickle’s eyes instructs us to hear the melody as an extension of the cabbie’s warped ideas about women with keen precision.

Elsewhere, Herrmann maps out the trajectory of Bickle’s decline in percussive markers; a snare snap here, a hustling cymbal rustle there. The use of drawn-out chords stresses mood over melody; harp glissandos, meanwhile, suggest a highly strung mindset tightening. A progressive darkening sets in as the music edges into horror terrain, echoing Herrmann’s work for 1962’s Cape Fear. After the music-free slaughter sequence, the score re-emerges in extraordinarily distressed form, rising and falling like a zoom-in followed by a sickened reversal.

To close, Herrmann – who died shortly after completing the score left us with one clear indicator of

Taxi Driver’s class. Placed to suggest Bickle’s insanity is far from purged, the end credits music finishes with a three-note echo of ‘The Madhouse’, a cue from Herrmann’s Psycho soundtrack. Much to Scorsese’s liking, Taxi Driver’s sulphurous score breathes the same thickened air as Herrmann’s finest works. Kevin Harley