Who composed the musical score for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver?

Bernard Herrmann composed the musical score for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

Taxi Driver was released in 1976 and stars Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a lonely New York City taxi driver. Herrmann’s score combines dark orchestral writing with jazz-inflected passages, creating a sound world that shifts between romantic surface impressions and psychological unease.

The film was Herrmann’s final scoring project. He completed the recording shortly before his death in December 1975, and the film was dedicated to his memory. His work became one of the defining elements of Taxi Driver, alongside Paul Schrader’s screenplay and Scorsese’s direction.

Herrmann had already written celebrated scores for films including Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and Psycho. Taxi Driver is sometimes confused with scores by other major Hollywood composers, but its composer was the veteran musician whose long collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock had made him famous.