Real and Imagined Suspense

Herrmann uses what a sort of patient suspense music to set the mood for a fabricated threat. The audience has no idea Ambrose Chappell will lead Ben to a dead end as he walks toward the taxidermists, but Herrmann gives it a hint. His scoring calls for creeping chromatic strings over an emphatic bas clarinet drone. This effect gives us little taste for the seeming direness of the situation. Though the music is suspenseful, it is not necessarily nervous, per se. If this scene had been scored differently, the audience's emotions would run much higher. Here is a commutation using the first movement of John Corigliano's Symphony 1, "Of Rage and Remembrance." It creates a more immediate and desparate nervousness rather than the passive Herrmann example. This nervousness, though, would likely subvert Hitchcock's intentions, so the audience is left in a corner with both the plot and the music. This pointless sequence hints at a less meanignful interpretation of the espionage plot as a whole.