“Psycho” may be full of murder and intrigue, but thanks to Dr. Stephan Prock’s analysis, it brought out smiles — not screams.

Prock, visiting from the New Zealand School of Music, spoke about the role of music in Alfred Hitchcock’s famous film to a small, but spirited group of about 10 faculty members and students on Sept. 16. After the lecture, entitled Music and the Modern Subject in Hitchcock’s Psycho, Prock fielded questions and engaged in a discussion with the audience. The Department of Art and Music Histories hosted the lecture in Bowne Hall as part of its Departmental Colloquium series.

Theo Cateforis, chair of the department, introduced Prock, who immediately dove into his presentation, reading rapidly from a stack of papers. The lecture asserted that the soundtrack to “Psycho” separates viewers from any single character’s perspective and places them firmly under the director’s control. He explained that the director’s perspective is the only safe one in a film filled with such confusing, horrific and conflicting characters.

“The music represents and confuses all points of view,” Prock said.

But audiences are likely to feel anything but safe when they watch “Psycho.” The famous 1960 thriller, created by Hitchcock, tells the story of Marion Crane, who finds herself at a creepy motel after running away with $40,000 of her boss’s money. The seemingly mild-mannered Norman Bates runs the motel with his domineering mother. From there, things get ugly, and cinematic history is made.

Prock described how Hitchcock meticulously controlled all aspects of the film, including how people were admitted to it at movie theaters.

At the time, he explained, moviegoers would arrive at any point during a film and stay through the beginning of the next showing to see what they missed. Hitchcock did not want his audiences to find out the film’s ending before seeing the beginning, so he gave cinemas specific instructions, forbidding late arrivals.

Amanda Winkler, an associate professor of music history and cultures who attended the lecture, suggested Hitchcock’s desire for complete control was intensified because he had invested a huge amount of his own money into the film.

An accompanying slideshow of pictures and video clips provided visual references for Prock’s lecture. At one point, Prock showed the famous shower scene without its soundtrack to demonstrate, by absence, the effect of the music.

“Herrmann is playing with our expectations for leitmotiv subjectivity,” he said, referring to Bernard Herrmann, the soundtrack’s composer.

Prock explained that the use of leitmotivs — recognizable, repeated musical passages that symbolize a character or emotion — was common and came from classical opera. The soundtrack to “Psycho,” he said, has repeating portions that do not represent any one person or thing, but rather act on their own and “suspend musical legibility.”

Hitchcock never intended to have music during the shower scene, Prock said, but when he heard Herrmann’s score that included the iconic screeching violin sounds with this scene, he changed his mind.

Prock emphasized that separating audiences from individual characters was a technique that differed from other movie soundtracks of the time. Usually, film scores added to the portrayal of individual characters and gave audiences cues to the emotional tone of scenes. In the shower scene, for example, numerous theories suggest what the violin shrieks represent, such as the stabbing knife movements, Marion’s screams or even birdcalls, Prock said.

Although he does not remember exactly the first time he watched “Psycho,” Prock said he does recall being too afraid to shower for a few days after. Beyond that, his love of movies and music goes back to his childhood.

“The first soundtrack I bought was an LP of ‘Star Wars.’ How geeky is that?” he said.

Geeky, maybe, but Prock’s work was by no means outcast. His research — including his work on “Psycho” — will eventually take shape as a book about movie soundtracks.

Published on September 16, 2013 at 11:39 pm

Contact Ian: insimonc@syr.edu