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 success of this is clear, in scenes with no dialogue the music is much clearer, and at times it is more like watching a ballet than a film.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. The music in 2001 was intended to be an integral part of the story from the very beginning, as Kubrick did not want to tell a traditional science fiction story. Finally, when encountering the Monoliths, there is Gyorgy Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, a hauntingly beautiful piece. During the long, beautiful scenes of spacecraft in flight we are treated to Johann Strauss’ “The Blue Danube,” possibly the most famous waltz there is. But there is much more to the film’s music that just the opening. Even for those who have never seen the film, the pounding drums of Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra instantly bring to mind images of monoliths and apes clubbing each other with bones. The film featured incredible realism in it’s special effects and designs, and most importantly for us, featured an incredible and memorable score. His terrifying encounter with the Monolith known as Big Brother sends him on am impossible journey.Ībout The 2001: A Space Odyssey Movie Theme Song He is almost successful, but the sole survivor, Dave Bowman disconnects HAL and continues the mission alone. When the astronauts discuss what to do about HAL, he decides to eliminate them. The two awake members of the crew slowly begin to distrust their computer, HAL, who begins to sabotage the mission. The spacecraft Discovery is sent to investigate, a mission that will take many years. After the Tycho Monolith is excavated, it sends a powerful radio message out towards Jupiter. Produced in conjunction with the novel in 1968, 2001 tells the story of Man’s dealings with the mysterious Monolith, from it’s influences on our ancestors at the Dawn of Man, to it’s secretive presence beneath the lunar crater Tycho and ultimately to it’s final resting place in orbit of Io. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a seminal work of science fiction cinema, created by Stanley Kubrick in conjunction with the famous author Arthur C Clarke (who also wrote the novel).
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