Score
Bernard Hermann's soundtrack, which he wrote shortly before
his death, turns Travis's ordinary life into what is sometimes a
heroic epic, sometimes a horror film, and other times no more than
just another New York story. Two major themes dominate the score
of Taxi Driver. The first features an eight-bar
melodic sighing of a solo saxophone. The theme evokes the lonely
melancholy of an individual alienated from his environment. The
smooth, jazzy tones of the saxophone also complement New York's
urban terrain, which we see as Travis passes through the various
neighborhoods of the city in his taxi. The theme varies somewhat,
particularly in tempo, but it follows Travis in his taxi as he drives
his often sordid passengers around the city.
Travis's psychotic tendencies shine through in a second
theme, characterized by an unresolved, dissonant chord played by
trumpets over rhythmic snare drums. At various points in the movie,
a harp joins the trumpets and snare. At the beginning of the movie,
the trumpets punctuate moments that augur Travis's instability,
such as when he hits Iris with his car. While Travis descends gradually
into psychosis, this theme becomes dominant in the score. The unresolved
chords of the blaring trumpets echo Travis's feelings of discord
with the city, and the snare drums propel him to action. The unresolved
quality of this theme is characteristic of several Hitchcock movie
scores, particularly that of Vertigo, which Hermann also
composed.
These two themes clash with one another in the climactic
shootout at the end of the movie, which is originally dominated
by the discord of the trumpets playing over an arpeggio in the harp,
evoking an atmosphere of surreality around the nightmarish scene.
As the camera pans from above across the carnage of the shootout,
the trumpets continue to blare, bearing witness to the horror of
Travis's actions. They pierce the silence like an alarm, which segues
nicely to the imagined sirens of the police cars outside. When the
camera pulls away from the upstairs room with the corpses and descends the
staircase, the saxophone theme blends with the trumpets, slowed
down and played rhythmically out of joint, to emphasize Travis's
transformation from a lonely taxi driver into a murderer. This theme
serves as a lyric contemplation of Travis's deranged story.
