There is almost always a pattern of overtones, half-subconscious notes above the ones being played. Most instruments, when they play, produce more than just the notes you hear. It’s built on a phenomenon called the overtone series. There aren’t many openings in music more famous than this one.
2001 overture and intermission music full#
This concept of the development of the human into a being that has achieved its full potential is particularly resonant in the narrative of 2001… Kubrick was not much concerned with the story, but… it fit rather well. humans are the link between apes and a new type of being, what Nietzsche calls the Übermensch, or superman.
Christine Lee Gengaro explains the connection, in her book Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films: It comes from Friedrich Nietzsche’s novel, also called Thus Spake Zarathustra, which Strauss used for inspiration. But there’s a philosophical connection between the film and the music. It’s order from chaos from Atmosphères, the prelude of Richard Strauss’ half-hour tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra.Īccording to Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s brother-in-law and sometimes producer, the director chose Thus Spake Zarathustra simply because it was big and had an ending. From its midst, as the screen changes from black to MGM-blue, we hear a rich, still, simple C. Kate McQuiston, author of We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick, notes the similarity to impressionist painting, “whose component parts cohere only when the viewer stands at some distance.” You don’t hear the individual melodies, like you don’t see the individual brush strokes, unless you look very closely. The tones and melodies pile onto one another to make dissonant, densely clustered chords, kind of like when you rest your arm on a piano keyboard. Instead of playing together, every musician in the orchestra gets a tiny, fragmentary melody or a long tone. In the early ’60s, the composer was developing a technique he called micropolyphony. But Ligeti chose his notes as carefully as Kubrick chose his shots. Atmosphères is like a gentle orchestral chaos. Very few Hollywood blockbusters are brave enough to open with music so insistently dissonant. It would just be that, if it weren’t also setting up for a big musical payoff much later. You could unkindly call it a “noise killer”, urging the audience to silence. It’s not an introduction, but an overture. In blackness, his orchestral work Atmosphères plays over the first three minutes of the film, before even the studio logo appears. The Strausses’ memorable hooks are probably what most people think of when they think of the music in the film, but Ligeti’s music is more than half the score.Ģ001 starts with Ligeti.
2001 overture and intermission music movie#
There are four composers on the score: the Viennese Romantics Johann Strauss Jr and Richard Strauss (no relation), Aram Khachaturian, a Soviet Armenian whose music probably comes closest to sounding like a traditional movie soundtrack, and the avant-garde Hungarian composer Györgi Ligeti. Instead, he used orchestral and choral works that already existed, and sculpted film and music so it fit as well as any original score could. Stanley Kubrick chose-to the enduring shock of film composers and students of film music-to entirely ditch an original score. Every note on screen, from the weirdly shifting overture to the jazzy future news theme, was written not for a film, but for the concert hall or the theatre or the radio.
There isn’t a note of original music in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “I don’t have the slightest doubt that to tell a story like this, you couldn’t do it with words.”
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