Listening to Stanley Kubrick

by Gengaro, Christine Lee

  Khachaturian: Adagio from Gayane

  Appearance:

  0:54:38–0:58:02 Exteriors and interiors from Jupiter Mission

  1:03:26–1:07:16 Exterior of the ship, Poole’s birthday message, Bowman sleeps, Poole plays chess with HAL, Bowman draws his hibernating colleagues

  The history of Aram Khachaturian’s ballet, Gayane, is quite complicated. Khachaturian composed music for the ballet in 1942, but it contained elements of an earlier ballet that he composed in the late 1930s called Happiness, with scenario by Gevork Ovanesyan. The main character is Karine, a simple patriotic woman who works on a collective farm and whose love interest is a border guard named Armen. The music for Happiness contained what Khachaturian identified as seven Armenian melodies and many more musical characteristics that were folklike.50 In 1942, he began revising Happiness, with Konstantin Derzhavin reworking the libretto. Derzhavin retained some characters and settings of Happiness but changed the plot. He also changed the name of the ballet to that of the story’s heroine, Gayane. Khachaturian said that about 60 to 70 percent of the music was new.51 In this ballet, Khachaturian’s music uses Armenian, Caucasian, and Russian folk materials. The melodies, although written in a regular time signature, have unexpected accents to mimic the uneven meters of the indigenous folk music. In the 1950s, a completely new version of the libretto was penned by Boris Pletnyov and Khachaturian revised his music for the work’s Bolshoi premiere (although such changes could hardly be defined as a simple revision of the material). This version made the work more of a psychological drama, and it was this latter version that Khachaturian seemed to feel was the best iteration of his ideas. It is the version he chose to record in 1978, and it is the version that appears in the set of his complete works published by Musikverlag Hans Sikorski, Hamburg.

  From the 1942 version of the ballet, the composer created three suites that could be played in the concert setting. These helped popularize this music, especially the Sabre Dance from act 4, which is part of the second suite. The Adagio heard in 2001 is from the third of the three suites, but does not appear at all in the 1957 version of the ballet. Although Gayane remains one of Khachaturian’s most popular works, the many versions of the story and music culminated in what the composer called “the tragic history of my ballet.”52 In 2005, RCA released a recording of its LP of the complete ballet—the 1942 version—on CD. Loris Tjeknavorian conducted the National Philharmonic Orchestra in this performance.

  The scenario of Gayane involves the title character and her family, who work on a kolkhoz, which is a collective farm. Gayane’s husband Giko also works on the farm, but he is an alcoholic who does not pull his weight in the collective. In the story, Gayane and Giko argue, and after a series of events Gayane is imprisoned by her husband. She escapes, and Giko threatens their child, Hripsime, but Gayane will not be moved, so Giko stabs her. Kazhakov, the commander of the Soviet guard, arrests Giko. While Gayane heals, the two fall in love. The ballet ends a year later with the wedding of Gayane and Kazhakov (and others) on the thriving kolkhoz.

  The name Gayane has great significance in Armenian culture. In the ethnic area of Armenia, an abbess named Gayane was martyred by Tiridates III. The Roman emperor Diocletian took a nun named Hripsime (the name of Gayane’s daughter in the ballet) as his wife. Hripsime and Gayane and thirty-eight other nuns fled to Armenia, but they were found and killed. Gayane was later canonized by the Armenian Apostolic Church, and a church was built in her honor on the spot of her martyrdom.

  The Adagio is one of the more somber portions of the 1942 version of the ballet, and it accompanies the first images of the Discovery spacecraft as it makes its long silent journey toward Jupiter. As we see Discovery from the outside, there is a stunning sense of isolation, as these astronauts are farther away from Earth than humans have yet been. The beginning of the excerpt is a meandering unison line in the strings, and this singular melody does seem to suggest loneliness. The unison line breaks up into harmony, but even then the mood remains subdued.

  As Poole jogs around the centrifuge, punching the air, passing by the hibernating bodies of his colleagues, the music continues. Neither Poole nor Bowman seems to hear it, as they very quietly go about their duties on the ship. They are not as inhuman as some have suggested (with the implication that HAL possesses more human qualities than these men). Bowman spends some free time drawing, and of course later we see him show anger and terror. These men certainly have emotions, but they were chosen for this mission in part because they were able to keep them suppressed, under control. Theirs is a measured maintenance of feelings, carefully monitored. Gayane helps suggest this façade, this mask. It reflects the astronauts’ isolation but also the emotion that they can not or do not show. Of course there are many interpretations of this piece and why Kubrick included it. In the film score guide, Geduld exposits, “This slow and lonely sounding piece underscores the extreme boredom of deep space travel.”53 According to Jan Harlan, Kubrick chose the piece because, to him, it signified “total loneliness.”54

  Other Music

  There are a few additional cues in the film, the Pooles singing “Happy Birthday” to their son, and the opening theme music for a television program in which Bowman and Poole are interviewed. The name of the program is called The World Tonight, and it appears on BBC 12. The cue, a jazzy fugue by Sidney Torch, appears for about fifteen seconds. Finally, a few lines of “Daisy Bell,” which was composed in 1892 by English composer Harry Dacre, is performed by Douglas Rain, the voice of HAL. Almost seven decades after its composition, the song was sung by a real computer, the IBM 704, in a demonstration of speech synthesis. The discipline of speech synthesis had made great strides in the 1930s with the vocoder (a shortened version of “voice encoder” developed by Bell Labs) and improved upon in the 1940s and 1950s. John Larry Kelly Jr. continued the work with Bell Labs in the 1960s programming the IBM 704 to sing “Daisy Bell” to accompaniment programmed by Max Matthews. Arthur C. Clarke witnessed a demonstration of this feat and adapted it for the 2001 novel. In the film (as in the novel), as Dave Bowman disconnects HAL’s memory circuits, HAL appears to suffer a crisis, first claiming that he is afraid and then saying that he can feel his mind going. His voice begins to falter and then slow down. He reverts back to a presentation he might have given right after his activation: “Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on the twelfth of January, 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley and he taught me to sing a song. If you’d like to hear it, I can sing it for you.” Dave asks to hear it, and HAL sings it, in his eerily slowing voice. When he is done with the line “a bicycle built for two,” which is hardly intelligible, Dave gets the pre-recorded briefing from Floyd about the monolith.

  The success of 2001 and particularly of the soundtrack helped to solidify even further Kubrick’s reputation as an auteur. Not only did he seem to have authority over every aspect of production—special effects, editing, even the release date—but he began to exert complete creative control over the soundtrack by using preexistent music rather than a traditional score. Far from being a lone wolf, however, Kubrick would still rely on his collaborations with musicians, arrangers, editors, and composers for musical options in his late films.

  Music was part of 2001: A Space Odyssey from the very beginning. Not only did it inspire some storytelling and help in production but Kubrick foresaw in this project a new way to reach his audience. In the 1968 interview in Playboy magazine, Kubrick said:

  I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content. . . . I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does.55

  Kubrick was also very clever to realize that silence could be a powerful part of his story as well. The use of silence helps to let audience members make up their own minds about the
emotional content—if there is any—of certain scenes. The astronauts keep their own emotions under a veneer of neutrality, and we, as the audience, don’t have music to help us decide how to feel. There is no sinister sting when HAL terminates the life functions of the three hibernating astronauts. There is no music when Poole and his pod go tumbling through space.

  The music Kubrick used in the film seems to have had a great influence not only on Kubrick’s next project, A Clockwork Orange, but on subsequent works, such as Barry Lyndon and The Shining. Kubrick imbued both 2001 and A Clockwork Orange with a sense of choreography: critics, and even the director himself, have used words like “dance” and “ballet” to discuss the marriage of music and image in these films. In the three years between 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, perhaps Kubrick continued his ruminations on the interconnectedness of music and emotion and the choreographic interplay of music and movement.56 In all of his films, Kubrick proved that these issues were always foremost in his mind.

  Notes

  1. Pauline Kael, Going Steady (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), 122–123.

  2. Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 352.

  3. Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York: Penguin, 1993), 182.

  4. Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, trans. Claudia Gorbman (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), 12.

  5. Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 291.

  6. John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1997), 225.

  7. Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001 (New York: Signet Classics, 1972), 146.

  8. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, 29.

  9. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, 18.

  10. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, 31.

  11. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001, 45.

  12. LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 304.

  13. Erno Rapée, Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (New York, 1924; reprint, New York: Arno, 1974), x.

  14. Rapée, Motion Picture Moods, v–xii.

  15. Interview with the author, April 20, 2011.

  16. Michel Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, trans. Gilbert Adair (New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), 153.

  17. Interview with the author, April 20, 2011.

  18. Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, trans. Claudia Gorbman (London: BFI Publishing, 2001), 24.

  19. John Bender, “Farewell to the Master,” Film Score Monthly 4, no. 8 (September/October 1999): 25.

  20. Interview with Jan Harlan, Silverscreen Beats, 7:30 and 29:30.

  21. John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick, 225–226.

  22. Jerry Goldsmith, interview with Tony Thomas, in Film Score: The View from the Podium (South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1979), 228.

  23. Stanley Kubrick, quoted in Gene D. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey (New York: Popular Library, 1975), 136.

  24. Bender, “Farewell to the Master,” 25.

  25. In 2007, Paul A. Merkley wrote a very thorough article on the musical aspects of 2001: A Space Odyssey, assembling information, both anecdotal and archival, in order to establish a timeline of Kubrick’s musical decisions. “‘Stanley Hates This But I Like It!’: North vs. Kubrick on the Music for 2001: A Space Odyssey,” The Journal of Film Music 2, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 1–34. In 2010, Kate McQuiston and Julia Heimerdinger followed up with even more information on the subject including information specifically about the legal case involving Ligeti in the Journal of Film Music 3, no. 2 (2011), McQuiston’s “‘An Effort to Decide’: More Research into Kubrick’s Music Choices for 2001: A Space Odyssey,” 145–154 and “‘I Have Been Compromised. I Am Now Fighting against It.’: Ligeti vs. Kubrick and the Music for 2001: A Space Odyssey,” 127–143. The troubles between North and Kubrick were well documented in LoBrutto’s biography, 306–309, and in John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick, 226–227.

  26. Paul Merkley explains that Kubrick had discussed the score with other composers as well, keeping them “on tap” until final decisions about the score were made. Merkley, “Stanley Hates This,” 10–11.

  27. Jerome Agel, ed. The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (New York: Signet, 1970), 198.

  28. Both anecdotes are recounted in Merkley, “Stanley Hates This,” 21.

  29. Alex North’s papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Archive at the Margaret Herrick Library.

  30. Agel, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, 199.

  31. LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 305–309.

  32. Richard Cohen, “A Practical Guide to Re-Hearing 2001,” The New York Review of Science Fiction 12, no. 7 (2000): 10–14.

  33. David Cloud and Leslie Zador, “Alex North Interview: The Missing Score for ‘2001,’” Los Angeles Free Press, November 12, 1970, 42.

  34. Daniel DeVries, The Films of Stanley Kubrick (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1973), 47.

  35. Ciment, Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, 177.

  36. For a complete synopsis of the film, see appendix B.

  37. Richard Strauss quoted in Norman Del Mar, Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary of His Life and Work, Vol. 1 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 134.

  38. Lobrutto, Stanley Kubrick, 308.

  39. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (documentary), directed by Jan Harlan (2007, Warner Home Video), 1:00.

  40. Carolyn Geduld, Filmguide to 2001: A Space Odyssey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 45.

  41. This anecdote has been expanded upon in Merkley, McQuiston, and Heimerdinger in the Journal of Film Music.

  42. Interview with the author, April 20, 2011.

  43. Julia Heimerdinger has done an exhaustive study of the documents surrounding the case of Kubrick’s use of Ligeti’s music in 2001 in “I Have Been Compromised,” Journal of Film Music, 127–143.

  44. Heimerdinger, “I Have Been Compromised,” 133.

  45. Quoted in Heimerdinger, “I Have Been Compromised,” 134.

  46. These legal documents are translated from the German and quoted in Heimerdinger, “I Have Been Compromised,” 134, 135–137.

  47. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, :57.

  48. Geduld, Filmguide to 2001, 40.

  49. Barry Keith Grant, “Of Men and Monoliths: Science Fiction, Gender, and 2001: A Space Odyssey,” in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays, ed. Robert Kolker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 79–80.

  50. Victor Yuzefovich, Aram Khachaturian, trans. Nicholas Kournokoff and Valdimir Bobrov (New York: Sphinx Press, 1985), 131.

  51. Yuzefovich, Aram Khachaturian, 137.

  52. Yuzefovich, Aram Khachaturian, 160.

  53. Geduld, Filmguide to 2001, 51.

  54. Jan Harlan, interview with the author, April 20, 2011.

  55. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 interview in Playboy quoted in The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, ed. Jerome Agel (New York: New American Library, 1970), 145.

  56. Walker, Stanley Kubrick Directs (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 270.

  Chapter Four

  “It Was Lovely Music That Came to My Aid”

  A Clockwork Orange

  It is no accident that many early operas told the story of Orpheus. What better story for a composer to set than one that relies heavily on the power of music? In operas like Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Peri’s Euridice, and Gluck’s Orfeo and Euridice, the main character’s music is part of the narrative; Orpheus needs it to charm his way into the underworld to his beloved Eurydice. Any work of literature—opera libretto, play, or novel—that deals with music or that features a character who is a composer or musician may only achieve its full realization in a performance medium. In today’s culture, the dominant medium for such realizations or adaptations is film.

  Much as opera provided the perfect medium for the telling of the Orpheus myth, likewise, the film form, from its invention, has offered a unique opportunity for di
rectors who want to tell stories that rely on music as part of the narrative or stories that have music as an essential part of the setting. Stanley Kubrick saw that potential in Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange, and he understood, better than many other directors, that A Clockwork Orange’s musical aspects were ripe for adaptation into a form that had both visual and aural components. A Clockwork Orange stands alone as the most musical of all the raw sources from which Kubrick adapted his films, and it is therefore necessary to discuss the music in the novel in order to understand Kubrick’s choices in translating the material to the screen.

  Anthony Burgess undertook the writing of A Clockwork Orange in 1961 after reportedly receiving a diagnosis of a fatal brain tumor. Burgess wrote three novels in that same year, hoping to leave his widow an income after his death. When it was clear Burgess was going to live, he went on to write many more novels, and some of these also feature musical themes or characters. Music is a recurrent theme in his work, and there is an important reason for this: Burgess was an amateur, self-taught musician and composer. His mother sang and danced professionally (as Beautiful Belle Burgess) and his father was a pianist who occasionally subbed for the cinema pianist in town. Burgess, who was born and grew up in Manchester, England, attended symphonic concerts and even tried his hand at violin lessons as a child. Although the lessons did not last long, his affinity for music would continue until his death.