If there were one word you could use to describe David Schroeder, it would have to be multifaceted. A Professor of Music at Dalhousie University, Schroeder is a musician, author, avid film buff and, in what little spare time he has, an Alfred Hitchcock aficionado. In conjunction with a new lecture series to honour the inauguration of a new graduate studies program in Musicology at Dalhousie, he’s finally going to make a place for his love of Hitchcock in his professional life.
Schroeder, a classically-trained musician, has taught music at Dalhousie for 28 years, offering classes ranging from musicology and musical history to opera and music in film. Though music is central to his occupation and dear to his heart, he also possesses an undying love for the marriage of film and music. After a long and successful run at Dalhousie, Schroeder is finally ready to step down, remarking slyly how it’s “best to leave on your own terms.”
Having just completed a book on Hitchcock, his second about film, Schroeder saw the new lecture series as the perfect way to celebrate his retirement. Being the Hitchcock fan he is, he chose to lecture on a topic that has captivated him for years to finally bridge the gap between Hitchcock and his teaching.
“Hitchcock was very into classical music,” says Schroeder. “Composers and especially pianos.”
The main focus of the lecture centres on Hitchcock’s use of the piano as a seductive form of imagery.
“Hitchcock used the image and the idea of the piano to imply a raw, seductive power in his films,” Schroeder remarks.
He explains that originally, the piano was a very gender specific instrument, tailored to women.
“It was part of their studies in finishing school,” he adds. “The only men who played piano were professionals.”
Over the years, authors picked up on this notion and the piano developed as a sensual, almost erotic image. Schroeder thinks Hitchcock, along with the likes of Jane Austen and Jane Campion, also picked up on this.
“There are 53 Hitchcock films,” says Schroeder. “Fifty-two that we know about … and about half of them feature the piano prominently.”
Schroeder’s love of Hitchcock films is deeply rooted in the silent era. He says silent films were heavily reliant on a sense of rhythm and sense music, even if it wasn’t there. He points to a quote from Hitchcock to illustrate just how intimately these things are connected.
“I was playing the audience as I play the organ,” Schroeder says. “The director himself had to think in musical terms, to transfer the music into visual images.”
He thinks the most beautiful Hitchcock scenes have no dialogue.
So what does Schroeder do with his time when he’s not waxing intellectually about films and music to a new generation of Hitchcock hopefuls? He’s just recently penned a new book on Franz Schubert and has been invited by the BBC Logos Journal to do a piece for the 200th anniversary of the death of composer Joseph Haydn.
He also admits he spends a lot of time in the Hitchcock archives in L.A. and London, sifting through early and variant scripts. He’s read over 20 different scripts to Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” – admittedly his favorite Hitchcock film – including one with a dramatic and lavish opera scene that was cut from the final version of the film.
You were woefully unlucky enough to miss Schroeder’s “Pianos in Hitchcock’s Films: Instruments of Seduction?” Check out some of the other lectures the music department is holding this year and maybe even drop in to pick Schroeder’s brain and have a chat about the poetic piano scene in Hitchcock’s “The Ring.” He definitely won’t disappoint.
Visit http://music.dal.ca/ to keep update to many more talks in the music departments lecture series this winter.
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