Stanley Kubrick’s work is often more like world’s you visit
than movies you watch. The galactic emptiness of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The grimy yet candy-colored near-future
dystopia of A Clockwork Orange. The
cavernous, ice-encrusted hotel of The
Shining. The opulent dream vision of NYC in Eyes Wide Shut. The oil painting landscapes and chiaroscuro
interiors of Barry Lyndon. Even the
desolate suburbs of Lolita are
inhabitable environments that engulf you, shutting out any trace of our real
world for two or three hours. Kubrick put an absurd amount of thought into how
to best create these fully dimensional worlds visually, but he put a great deal
of thought into the sounds swirling between their borders as well. He’d spend
hour upon hour researching music, and the fruits of his labors are clear to
anyone who cannot separate the visuals of great spacecraft tumbling through the
cosmos without hearing “The Blue Danube Waltz” or a tiny car traversing a
treacherous path swarmed by foreboding forests without hearing Wendy Carlos and
Rachel Elkind’s “Dies Irae”.
Much of the music to which Kubrick bestowed additional
dimensions can be heard on El Records’ Kubrick’s
Music—Selections from the Films of Stanley Kubrick. This set is both
fascinating and frustrating. It is frustrating because so many essentials are
not present. The Shining’s sprawling
soundtrack is largely reduced to the jazz-age tracks Kubrick used to stir the
ghosts of the Overlook’s bloody past. “Dies Irae” only appears within Berlioz’s
“Symphonie Fantastique”, a stirring piece of bombast far removed from The Shining’s brooding tone. Carlos and
Elkind’s chilling synth production is not present. The same is true of the
synthesized music from A Clockwork Orange:
the pieces only appear in traditionally orchestrated versions. While we get an
eerie prelude by Ralph Vaughan Williams that Kubrick considered using in the
stargate sequence of 2001, we do not
get the more transformative and disturbing Ligeti piece he ultimately used in
the film. While pop songs are present in the use of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet
Again” (Dr. Strangelove), Gene
Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” (A
Clockwork Orange), and a non-soundtrack song Sue Lyon sang on the B-side of
the “Lolita Ya-Ya” single, none of the great pop songs used in Full Metal Jacket appear. In fact, that
film, as well as Killer’s Kiss and The Killing, is completely
unrepresented.
However, some of these issues also point to one of the more
fascinating aspects of Kubrick’s Music
since we get to hear much of what inspired Kubrick to use the music he
ultimately used, and the inclusion of discarded ideas such as the Ralph Vaughan
Williams prelude makes Kubrick’s Music
a sort of enlightening look at Kubrick’s musical sketchpad. So while this is
hardly a definitive collection of Kubrick soundtracks, it is an educational
one, and with such great pieces as John Coltrane’s “Greensleeves”, Nelson
Riddle’s “Lolita Ya Ya”,
Rimskey-Korsokav’s “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship” (incidentally, a piece
shut out of the original Clockwork Orange
soundtrack), and several movements from Ludwig Van’s glorious “Ninth”, there is
quite a lot of gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh to slooshy, o my
brothers.
