This might have amused Kubrick,given how he used some of these pieces. InA Clockwork Orange,Rossini'sWilliam Tell Overture accompanies a scene in which Alex (Malcolm McDowell) has sex with two young women picked up in a record store. Context is everything.
Without his images,these pieces lose the power that came from his extraordinary talent for juxtaposition. At the start of2001,Johann Strauss'sBlue Danube Waltzcomes in over the first view of the spaceships floating benignly in the deep black pool of space. The scene seems to express man's supreme technological and artistic sophistication - a waltz of the machines - except that it comes straight after the bone-cracking monkeys. There's a whiff of irony.
Kubrick gave us what Arthur C. Clarke,his script collaborator,called the biggest flash forward in the history of cinema,across 3 million years,with a match cut from the bone thrown into the sky to a spaceship shaped like a bone. These spaceships were to be orbiting nuclear weapons. Kubrick pulled back from that,because he didn't want to evokeDr Strangelove (1963).
Kubrick starts us thinking instead about whether we have evolved,become civilised. The waltz suggests manners,rather than civilisation. Before that Kubrick gives us three minutes of blackness in the overture,accompanied by the searing,dystopian hum of Gyorgy Ligeti'sAtmospheres. This serves as a warning:abandon hope,all ye who enter.
All of these pieces were taken from existing recordings. Kubrick didn't bother to re-record them. With the Ligeti,he didn't even get permission,so the Hungarian composer sued him. After a settlement,Kubrick also used Ligeti in later films.
Beginning with2001 in 1968,on throughA Clockwork Orange (1971),Barry Lyndon (1975) andThe Shining (1980),Kubrick's use of music had a big impact on the way later generations thought about film music,and not always in a benevolent way.