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Of all the movies that feature pre-existing musical works on their soundtrack, “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) may be the most famous — and had the greatest impact on multiple generations of filmgoers.
American-born, London-based filmmaker Stanley Kubrick spent four years imagining, researching and producing this landmark science-fiction film in collaboration with legendary sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke (whose 1951 short story “The Sentinel,” about an extraterrestrial artifact discovered on the Moon, was a starting point).
Together, they came up with a scenario in three parts: the “dawn of man,” as vegetarian apes in Africa evolve into meat-eating humans, with the help of a mysterious black monolith that appears in their midst one day; the year 2001, when space travel is commonplace, both Americans and Russians have established bases on the Moon, and an ancient monolith is found beneath the surface, and 18 months after that, when a pair of astronauts, traveling to Jupiter, find themselves at odds with the sophisticated computer that operates their spacecraft.
Kubrick, whose passion for accuracy bordered on mania, consulted with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and private corporations alike to project what the future might look like, and enlisted the help of cutting-edge visual-effects artists in order to portray interplanetary travel in the most realistic way possible.
Released in April 1968, “2001: A Space Odyssey” drew mixed reactions from critics and was not, at first, a commercial success. But it won an Oscar for its visual effects (and was nominated for three more, including the Clarke-Kubrick script and Kubrick’s direction) and a Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation. Today, despite directing equally illustrious classics including “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Spartacus” (1960), “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) and “The Shining” (1980), “2001” remains Kubrick’s best-known work. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus will perform a live-to-picture presentation of “2001: A Space Odyssey” on Jan. 9-10.
The director — a classical music aficionado — began thinking about music for his film in early 1966, playing pieces by Mendelssohn and Vaughan Williams against early cuts of scenes in the space station and the moonbus. He was already aware of the avant-garde music of Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti, and suggestions from colleagues led to other choices, including Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss Jr. for music in different parts of the film.
Pressure from MGM, which was distributing the film, caused Kubrick to briefly consider an original score. So he called Alex North, with whom he had collaborated on “Spartacus” eight years earlier, to come to London. In January 1968, North composed and recorded 40 minutes of music for the first hour of the film, in some cases modeled on what he was told was Kubrick’s “temporary” track of classical excerpts. Ultimately Kubrick rejected North’s efforts and returned to his original selections, forcing MGM to clear synchronization rights with music publishers and record labels.
As Kubrick said years later, in conversation with the French film critic Michel Ciment: "However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you’re editing a film, it’s very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene. With a little care and thought, these temporary music tracks can become the final score. When I had completed the editing of ’2001: A Space Odyssey,’ I had laid in temporary music tracks for almost all of the music which was eventually used in the film."
For his title sequence, depicting sunrise over the Earth and Moon in alignment, Kubrick chose the majestic opening fanfare of Also sprach Zarathustra, a tone poem written by German composer Richard Strauss in 1896. The music recurs twice more in the film, when Moonwatcher (the ape leader in the “Dawn of Man” sequence) discovers he can use a bone as a tool, a key step forward in mankind’s evolution; and during the final moments of the film, as the astronaut Dave Bowman is transformed into the Star Child and views the Earth, contemplating his, and our, future.
The appearance of the monolith in ancient Africa is accompanied by the “Kyrie” from György Ligeti’s Requiem (1965) for soprano, mezzo-soprano, two mixed choirs and orchestra. This music returns when a team of American astronauts visits the site near the moon’s Tycho crater, where another monolith was “deliberately buried,” as Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) puts it, some four million years ago, and when, in the film’s final act, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) encounters a giant monolith orbiting Jupiter and, as a result, enters the Stargate. Kubrick’s choice could not have been more brilliant; few listeners in 1968 had experienced the complex polyphony of the piece, and its clusters of converging vocal lines convey a mysterious and even frightening mood to those key moments.
The oldest music in “2001” is “The Blue Danube,” written in 1866 by Austrian composer Johann Strauss II and caused such a sensation that Strauss’ Viennese publisher was inundated with a million orders for the sheet music within its first year. Kubrick’s original choice for the Pan-Am space clipper and its docking with the space station was Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, but a last-minute change of mind was prompted by the director’s feeling that the inherent grace and elegance of the Strauss waltz was the perfect musical illustration for the weightlessness of zero gravity and the beauty of spaceflight. Kubrick reprises the piece during the film’s end titles.
Kubrick again turned to Ligeti for Heywood Floyd’s low-altitude moonbus trip from the Clavius base to the Tycho location of the newly discovered lunar monolith. Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, from 1966, was written for 16-voice mixed choir and again features the composer’s signature micropolyphony; its eerie, ethereal voices leave us wondering where we are heading and why.
As the film cuts to the Jupiter mission and the massive ship Discovery, we hear the “Adagio” from Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s Gayane ballet suite, written in 1939. We watch astronaut Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) jog along a circular pathway, see the reddish glow of the HAL 9000 computer’s camera “eye” for the first time and feel the loneliness of these men on their long voyage.
Ligeti pieces underscore the Stargate sequence, as Bowman — having witnessed Poole’s murder, shut down HAL and learned the truth about their mission — embarks on a journey he cannot imagine, into a colorful, time-and-space-bending “ultimate trip” (as the newly designed Star Child posters for the film’s 1970 re-release put it) into the unknown. Atmospheres, from 1961, with its tone clusters and sound masses, untethers us from reality, and a distorted excerpt from Aventures (1962), for three singers and seven instrumentalists, accompanies Bowman’s arrival at his unexpected destination.
"My music, in Kubrick’s selection, fits these fantasies of speed and space well," Ligeti said many years later. “The flight to Jupiter, wonderful, above all the end of the time travel. It was less wonderful that I was neither asked nor paid.” (Ligeti was ultimately compensated for the use of his works, although for far less than he initially asked.)
The “2001” soundtrack created a stir in both film and classical-music circles. The album reached No. 2 on Billboard’s Classical Albums chart and earned a gold record. More significantly, Kubrick’s bold musical choices opened the eyes and ears of filmmakers to the potential of concert music in new dramatic contexts — from George Gershwin in “Manhattan” (1979) to Carl Orff in “Excalibur” (1981) and Samuel Barber in “Platoon” (1986). Kubrick himself would, after “2001,” rarely use new music in his films: instead, there were Beethoven adaptations for “A Clockwork Orange,” Handel and Schubert for “Barry Lyndon” (1975). Bartók and Penderecki for “The Shining” and Shostakovich for “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999).
