2001: A Space Odyssey
It’s been 50 years since 2001: A Space Odyssey launched into cinemas worldwide. %ULDQB:LVH explores how its unique classical soundtrack changed the face of film music forever
Brian Wise on the groundbreaking film soundtrack
In the late 1960s and early ’70s, even the most casual film-goers knew that the triumphant opening fanfare for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. If they didn’t know its name, its sound soon became unmistakable: the BBC adapted it as the introductory theme for its TV coverage of the Apollo space missions, and Elvis Presley played it as stage-entrance music. A pop-funk knock-off peaked at number two on the US Billboard chart in 1973.
The film’s other musical selections gathered a cultural cachet of their own, some quite recently. At a 2015 screening with live orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl, the loudest applause during the end credits was for György Ligeti, whose music has long been the least recognised in the film. Kubrick used four recently minted Ligeti scores – Atmosphères (1961), Requiem (1965), Aventures (1966) and Lux aeterna (1966) – as well as Johann Strauss II’S Blue Danube waltz and an Adagio from Khachaturian’s ballet Gayane.
Kubrick’s musical mosaic is nothing like conventional science-fiction soundtracks of that era, which were dominated by synthesizers and ‘bloop bleep’ sound effects. It also differs because the pieces are presented ‘in the open’: there is no overlap between the scenes with music and those with dialogue or silence, and the music is often dazzlingly interlaced with the film’s visual effects (which earned Kubrick his sole Academy Award).
Kate Mcquiston, the editor of We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick believes the disparate pieces serve to orient the viewer as the story travels across a vast galaxy and millions of years. ‘Pieces like the Blue Danube waltz, or even the music by Khachaturian, come from a familiar language for most film-goers,’ she notes. ‘But the pieces by Ligeti pull you into literally unknown territory. Kubrick wanted to make sure the music was driving that contrast.’
As 2001 marks its 50th anniversary this year, the film’s cultural legacy includes a generation
of space-themed pops concerts, homages by composers such as Thomas Adès and James Horner, and musical parodies on The Simpsons. An ‘orchestral karaoke’ production of the film with live accompaniment has appeared in more than 25 cities worldwide. The production returns to London’s Southbank, where it originated, on 25 April, with the Philharmonia.
‘Kubrick’s choice of music is so sophisticated, so part of the fabric of the film,’ says conductor Alan Gilbert, ‘that it seems that the music drove the film-making, rather than the other way round.’ In 2013, Gilbert led the New
York Philharmonic in a live-with-orchestra screening. ‘When I started to work on that I truly came to appreciate what Kubrick did.’
Although Kubrick left few clues about the precise meanings of the music in 2001, scholars have uncovered production notes and correspondence indicating the extent of how the soundtrack was chosen. The director employed a large team of musical consultants, including producer Jan Harlan, who in December 1967 helped find the opening ‘Sunrise’ of Strauss’s
Also sprach Zarathustra. Kubrick was searching for something epic but brief, suitable for the two-minute opening credits. A 1959 recording by Herbert von Karajan and the Vienna Philharmonic did the trick.
But the opening credits were one thing. Kubrick brought Zarathustra back twice more in the film, the second appearance when the apemen learn to use tools and conquer their enemies. Here, it’s more likely that the film is directly alluding to Nietzsche’s philosophical novel which lies at the Strauss tone poem’s core. Specifically, Strauss said he wanted ‘to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development’. The fanfare’s final appearance comes as Dr Bowman is transformed, enigmatically, into a foetus, floating in a transparent orb of light.
The Zarathustra fanfare is a collection of ascending perfect fifths (C to G), which spell out the overtone series, with its infinite range.
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Kubrick’s choice of music for 2001: A Space Odyssey is so sophisticated, so part of the fabric RI WKH ĞOP
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‘There is something about big intervals that in the Western imagination that has to do with exploration,’ offers Mcquiston, ‘and maybe, by extension, with film stories about space’. Indeed, open fourth and fifth intervals are at the heart of Bernard Herrmann’s score for the The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Stu Phillips’s theme to the 1978 TV series Battlestar Galactica and John Williams’s main Star Wars theme.
Gilbert recalls Zarathustra’s effect on Lincoln Center patrons during the concert’s film screening. ‘The audience started screaming with the final C major chord,’ he says. ‘That I will never forget.’ But Gilbert is even more taken with the way Kubrick uses Ligeti’s modernist music. ‘It was a perfect choice. It’s very weird, dense music. It created this otherworldly, timeless atmosphere and it takes on a new dimension in the film.’
Kubrick discovered Ligeti through his wife, Christiane, who by chance heard the Hungarian composer’s Requiem on a BBC radio broadcast on 18 August 1967. The film-maker had his producers track down a recording, then other Ligeti works. He opens the film with Ligeti’s Atmosphères, a giant slab of dissonant, shifting orchestral textures that serve as a kind of unearthly overture over a black screen.
Ligeti returns during encounters with the unknown, from the ancient monolith stationed on the moon to the Star Gate sequence, in which Dr David Bowman’s spaceship is sucked into a psychedelic portal as he travels to Jupiter. We hear Atmosphères, a portion of the Requiem, and then Aventures, where three singers unleash a creepy mayhem of vocal sounds.
‘It’s kind of a clichéd thing to say but Ligeti is pure outer-space music,’ says Brad Lubman, conductor and artistic director of Ensemble Signal and a frequent interpreter of Ligeti’s scores. ‘It really was the ideal type of music to portray the unknown. Every time the monolith appears, that excerpt from Ligeti’s Requiem is perfect because it’s so chilling and disturbing.’
Lubman, who conducted the aforementioned Hollywood Bowl performance, remembers his parents taking him to see 2001, aged six, in 1968. ‘I remember my Dad bought the soundtrack record,’ he recalls. ‘I loved Zarathustra and Blue Danube. When it came to Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna I would take the record off because I was so scared.’
Since the release of 2001, much debate has centered on whether Ligeti had been treated fairly. One account holds that his works were used without permission and that he was paid only $3,000. But research by Mcquiston and fellow musicologist Julia Heimerdinger indicates that the film’s producers did secure permissions to use the composer’s music and recordings. And if Ligeti expressed some initial gruffness about the way Kubrick had used his music, the rift blew over and he was tapped for two more Kubrick films, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut. As author Jan Swafford writes, ‘2001 did for Ligeti what The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper did for Stockhausen – helped make him famous beyond the esoteric circles of the European new-music scene.’
Another key figure in the 2001 saga is Alex North, the film composer whom Kubrick hired in 1967 to write an original, full-length score.
The two men worked together on Spartacus
and Dr Strangelove, and North was apparently so enthused by the prospect that he completed some 48 minutes of music in under a month.
Meanwhile, Kubrick was becoming enamoured of the ‘temp’ tracks, the pre-existing pieces used as placeholders for the eventual score. Among those that didn’t make the final cut were Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (for scenes of weightlessness) and Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica (for the ‘Star Gate’ sequence). Kubrick also approached Carl Orff, who politely declined, saying he was too old.
Ultimately the ‘temp’ music won out, a fact that North would later say he discovered when attending the film’s New York premiere (a commercial recording of North’s score was finally released in 1993, produced by Jerry Goldsmith). ‘Well, what can I say?’ North admitted. ‘It was a great, frustrating experience. I think the Victorian approach with mideuropean overtones was just not in keeping with the brilliant concept of Clarke and Kubrick.’
By Victorian, North presumably alluded to Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz, first introduced as the space plane carrying Dr Heywood Floyd pulls up to the space station orbiting Earth. The waltz is the furthest departure from 1960s-era space music and yet it encapsulates the elegance of the universe: instead of waltzing couples in Habsburg Vienna there is a spinning, wheel-shaped station and passengers padding about in zero gravity.
The British film composer Rolfe Kent admits that this sequence was in his mind when composing his score for the 2017 science fiction film Downsizing. ‘The director, Alexander Payne, asked for beautiful classical music, and the more the score developed, the more I realised that some of the photography looked very Kubrickian,’ he says, referring to symmetrical shots and white, antiseptic environments. Kent decided his music would ‘juxtapose something old, from a classical era, against something science-fiction modern.’ His score includes two waltzes, including one that references The Blue Danube. ‘I can’t honestly separate The Blue Danube from 2001,’ Kent adds. ‘They’ve been together for most of my life.’
Other musical homages to 2001 include Horner’s music for Aliens (1986), which suggests the Khachaturian Adagio (though lacking some of the original’s melancholy). More broadly, 2001 eased the way for avant-garde sounds in widerelease films, notably in psychological thrillers like The Exorcist (including Crumb’s Black Angels) and Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (containing works by Penderecki, Scelsi and Schnittke).
Film historian William H Rosar suggested that ‘Kubrick may have turned to compilation scores because, with a composer, music was the one element of a film that he could not micromanage.’ If we may never know exactly why Kubrick chose a Viennese waltz, a towering symphonic poem, or a handful of avant-garde pieces, it’s clear he didn’t just borrow music but layered on new meanings. This created a popculture feedback loop in which Strauss and Ligeti provided free publicity for the film, and in turn, Kubrick exposed them to new audiences. It’s a testimony to the pliability of the classics. 2001: A Space Odyssey is being shown with a live soundtrack at London’s Southbank on 28 April
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I can’t separate The Blue Danube waltz from 2001 – they’ve been together for most of my life
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