Infinite Monkeys

"That Damned Tune"

Forget Mitt Romney's record fundraising haul. And pay no mind to the absurd Donald vs. Rosie nonsense. The truly relevant stuff this week? Alfred Hitchcock and his music.

Well, maybe not. But read and learn...

Bernard Herrmann, for example, who created the scores for "Psycho," "North by Northwest" and some of Hitchcock's other masterpieces, said there were only "a handful of directors like Hitchcock who really know the score and fully realize the importance of its relationship to a film."

But it was more than that. For Hitchcock music was not merely an accompaniment. It was a focus. And it didn't just reveal something about the characters who sang the score's songs or moved under its canopy of sound; music could seem to be a character itself.

This might sound a bit grandiose, but take a look at Jack Sullivan's fascinating new book, "Hitchcock's Music." Sullivan, who is director of American studies at Rider University in New Jersey, shows that it isn't just that Hitchcock believed that sound should serve image; he believed that image should serve sound.