AuteursCriticismGreat ArtMusicSome Came Running by Glenn Kenny

Kubrick's music

By February 14, 2014January 12th, 20264 Comments

Casio ritual

While I mull over wheth­er to com­pose and post an essay titled “The Woody Allen Plank” (it’s not likely, I gotta say), I ask you to check out the movie web­site To Be (Cont’d), wherein I am engaged in a sim­u­lated prose con­ver­sa­tion with Matthew Zurcher, a smart young crit­ic, about the use of music in the films of Stanley Kubrick. Matt’s first vol­ley is here, my response is here, and two more install­ments are in the pipeline. Enjoy, I hope. 

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4 Comments

  • Petey says:
    February 14, 2014 at 9:54 am

    Ugh. Is the ‘hos­tile’ use of Beethoven’s 9th dis­respect­ful to Beethoven as well?
    (I love Singin’ in the Rain too, but again, ugh.)

  • Petey says:
    February 14, 2014 at 9:56 am

    Also, you should indeed swal­low your (under­stand­able) trep­id­a­tion and put up a Woody Allen post. What’s the good of hav­ing a blog, if you can­’t do that?

  • Griff says:
    February 14, 2014 at 5:20 pm

    Glenn, this is from memory, but I believe Ligeti’s spe­cif­ic com­plaint that his music had been dis­tor­ted in 2001 was actu­ally tech­nic­ally val­id. Immediately fol­low­ing the pic­ture’s long “star­gate” sequence – scored with excerpts from the com­poser’s “Requiem” and “Atmospheres” – when Bowman finds his space pod parked in the mys­ter­i­ous hotel-like room, there are clumps of strange, impossible to inter­pret voices in the back­ground. This back­ground accom­pani­ment is made up of por­tions of Ligeti’s chor­al piece “Aventures,” altered elec­tron­ic­ally and appar­ently in oth­er ways (some of it might be played back­wards. The com­poser (already reportedly annoyed that he had received rel­at­ively little money for the use of this music in the film) took strong issue with this, and sued Kubrick and MGM. A set­tle­ment was even­tu­ally reached. Both the altered “Aventures” and at least a sample of the undis­tor­ted piece were included on the excel­lent Rhino 2001 CD.

  • Henry Holland says:
    February 17, 2014 at 11:05 pm

    There’s an error in your piece Glenn. I left this com­ment at To Be (Cont’d):
    “To get back to the ini­tial point, how do you UN-HEAR Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra” as horror-movie music”
    Since that piece is not used in Kubrick’s movie –Bartok’s fant­ast­ic “Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta” is– that’s a pretty easy thing to do!
    ****
    I’ll always be grate­ful to Kubrick for intro­du­cing me to the music of Penderecki, Bartok and Ligeti, espe­cially Penderecki’s early music before he turned to tonality.