![]() ![]() ![]() The brooding strings of Atmospheres (1961) heighten the insecurity of the apes awakening at the dawn of history out on the veldt. Some of the music does surface in the cinema, though: North reused his 'Space Station Docking' theme as the main theme for Dragonslayer (1981)!Įschewing the exotic effects favoured by much SF film music of the period, Kubrick used Ligeti's atonal, disquieting pieces to convey menace and alienation, from prehistoric Africa to Jupiter and beyond. In contrast to some of his other work, it has a harsh, contemporary sound, not dissimilar to Ligeti's dissonant soundscapes. North's unfinished soundtrack, forty minutes long, is now available on CD, and has received favourable reviews. "I had the hunch," North noted wryly, "that whatever I wrote to supplant Strauss' Zarathustra would not satisfy Kubrick, even though I used the same structure but brought it up to date in idiom and dramatic punch." According to Clarke, the composer never really got over the disappointment. Eventually, though, both composer and director felt that the classical pieces - divorced from whatever context or meaning they'd originally had - worked best without the distraction of a score more dutifully attentive to each minute of the action. Kubrick initially suggested to North that the soundtrack he'd composed could be combined with some of these 'temporary' tracks. Instead, he turned to lesser-known works by contemporary composers, though he never relinquished Zarathustra or The Blue Danube. Perhaps Kubrick felt that, as existing 'soundtracks' - the Mendelssohn piece was written as incidental music to Shakespeare's play, and Vaughan Williams based his Seventh, 'Antarctic' Symphony on the film score he produced for Scott of the Antarctic (1948) - they were too directly evocative of other scenes. Clarke writes of seeing some initial edits: "Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream (1826) for the weightless scenes, and Vaughan Williams' Antarctic Symphony (1953) for the lunar sequence and the Star Gate special effects, with stunning results." Neither of these pieces made it through to the final cut. By 1967, when Kubrick approached North with the first hour of 2001 and his ideas for the atmosphere he wanted to convey, North had composed soundtracks for a clutch of successful films, including Cleopatra (1963), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), and Shoes of the Fisherman (1968).Įven before North began working on a score fitted to the script, however, Kubrick had been editing key scenes in the film using classical music as a temporary track. Kubrick originally commissioned a score from film composer Alex North: they'd worked together before, on Spartacus (1960), for which North had produced a suitably epic score. This is not background music, in any sense of the word, but another element of the whole.Ģ001 may have only narrowly escaped the typical expansive, space-age soundtrack. Music and dialogue are contrasted, rather than conflated. There are three audio layers of sound in the film - dialogue (a mere 40 minutes in a film that's 139 minutes long), music, and environmental sound. On the whole, when something's happening, the soundtrack consists simply of the sound - or, during the space scenes, the absence of sound - of what's on screen. The soundtrack of 2001, in common with other 'arthouse' films of the period, doesn't feature much music at all. Hollywood, always trying to improve on reality, substituted Norman Greenbaum's hit 'Spirit in the Sky' in the film Apollo 13 (1995) - the 'wrong tape' being just another glitch on the doomed mission.įamiliar though the awe-inspiring combination of Strauss and sunrise is, it's atypical. Minutes later, the world heard Lovell say, "Houston, we've had a problem". "This little tape recorder has been a big benefit to us in passing the time away on our transit out to the Moon, and it's rather odd to see it floating like this in Odyssey, while it's playing the theme from 2001," said Swigert during the second of the crew's telecasts. Two years after the release of 2001, on the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, astronaut Jack Swigert played Also Sprach Zarathustra to his listeners from the aptly-named command module, Odyssey. But the realism of that sunrise, combined with Strauss' dramatic music, evokes a powerful response that has nothing to do with flashy graphics or pulse-stirring marches. In 1968, real life, with its mundane soundtrack of control-room procedures, hadn't yet produced live footage of a moon landing. The opening titles of 2001: A Space Odyssey forge an iconic bond between the simple, dignified fanfare that introduces Richard Strauss' tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) and the astounding beauty of sunrise in space. ![]()
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