Sacred Heart sixth formers say thank you for the music

There was an extra dimension to their film studies, when sixth formers at a Sacred Heart Catholic High School in Newcastle took part in a special music masterclass.

The nine Year 13 students had been studying the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller Vertigo, when their teacher, Jessie-May Perry, discovered that another member of staff had valuable expertise to share about the composer of the film score, Bernard Hermann.

“I left the DVD of Vertigo in the Auditorium after we watched it,” explained Mrs Perry. “Our Music Teacher, Jonathan Cornish, picked it up because of his interest in Hitchcock and Hermann, and I went to collect it from him.

“We discovered that we both teach the composer Bernard Hermann for A-Level – me for Film Studies, due to the fact that he’s the composer on Vertigo, and Jonathan for Music, because they study film composers.

“So I teach Hermann from the perspective of being a Film Studies Teacher, whilst perhaps lacking the musical knowledge and expertise to go anywhere beyond the very basic in my teaching of this specific aspect. So, a total accident led to us discovering this lovely overlap in our teaching.”

The result was Mr Cornish agreeing to lead a masterclass for the Film Studies group, where he was able to introduce them in more depth to the diverse and innovative musical techniques employed by the composer in the film.

“Mr Cornish took us through Hermann’s background, and his inspiration – Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde,” continued Mrs Perry. “What was particularly lovely was that Mr Cornish sat at the piano and was able to take us through the different moments in the film.

“He explained the leitmotif which was composed to support Hitchcock’s ideas around unfulfilled love; he explained the use of the broken arpeggios that Hermann used to accompany the main motif of the vertigo itself – something that the main character can never escape, so the sound itself is unfinished; he walked us through the opening credits where Hermann used ‘contrary motion’, where one note is ascending and the other is descending, to create the feeling of vertigo as an aural landscape.

“We also looked at the Carlotta sequence, and he explained about the use of ostinato notes, short and repetitive, with a Habanera rhythm, which links the music to the Hispanic culture of Carlotta.”

The success of the new introduction to the timetable means it is now set to become an annual event at the school.

“The film students knew the sequences well, as we had been studying them all term, so this masterclass meant that they were adding an extremely high-level music knowledge to their film knowledge already in place – and sound is a key aspect of writing well about films,” added Mrs Perry.

“The students loved the practical nature of the lesson, and watching the music literally coming alive in front of them – being able to put precise musical terms to the moments in the film that we had already analysed.”