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Pyscho With the San Francisco Symphony

Michael Zwiebach on July 13, 2010
Who could forget the shower scene?

Film buffs are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho this year, and music buffs are celebrating Bernard Herrmann's film score, one of the most instantly recognizable and highly regarded of all time. (And that shower scene – Herrmann had to plead with Hitchcock to use his cue for the scene, which the director had originally meant to be without music.)

Herrmann's effort is one more testament to the effectiveness of musical modernism at evoking mental derangement and anxiety. This weekend, you can hear the San Francisco Symphony play the score live, synching to a showing of the movie, and if you really want to get the full skin-crawling effect of the musical sequences in this cinematic landmark you probably can't do better.