Review: 'Kubrick’s Music—Selections from the Films of Stanley Kubrick'

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.

Ten Genuinely Great Classic TV Themes

A TV theme has a job to do and that is to set the tone for the show that follows. Unfortunately, most twentieth-century TV shows were pretty goofy and got the catchy/crappy themes they deserved. Hey, I can remember all the words to the “Brady Bunch” theme song as well as the next asshole, but it isn’t exactly my idea of good music.

On occasion shows ended up with legitimately good themes, either because they were extraordinary pieces of television that deserved complimentary music or…err… by accident, I guess. I’m not talking about programs that cheated by using pre-composed music or classic pop songs as themes, otherwise the following list would be loaded with classics such as “Paint It Black” (“Tour of Duty”), “Reflections (“China Beach”), “Bad Reputation” (“Freaks and Geeks”), “Rock Around the Clock” (“Happy Days”), “Five O’ Clock World” (“The Drew Carey Show”), “Having an Average Weekend” (“The Kids in the Hall”), “And Your Bird Can Sing” (“The Beatles” Cartoon), “Falling” (“Twin Peaks”), and “For Pete’s Sake” (a way better song than the cutesy “Monkees Theme”). Instead I selected ten songs specifically created for specific programs that I wouldn’t feel ashamed to blast with the TV turned off.

1. “Twilight Zone Theme” by Bernard Herrmann

The discordant tune that instantly conjures memories of gremlins, murder dolls, and pig doctors is Marius Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”, a piece of music recorded for CBS’s library of stock cues but not necessarily “The Twilight Zone”. Eugene Feldman edited it with Constant’s “Milieu No. 2” to serve as the series’ theme in the second season, probably because the music that opened the show’s first one simply isn’t very catchy. It is, however, an eerie scene setter composed by perhaps the greatest composer of cinematic thriller scores, Bernard Herrmann. If Constant’s “Etrange No. 3”/“Milieu No. 2” delivers the skin-crawling shocks of “Eye of the Beholder” then Herrmann’s theme is more in line with the haunting subtlety of “Mirror Image”…

2. “Route 66 Theme” by Nelson Riddle

Review: Nelson Riddle's 'Batman: Exclusive Original Television Soundtrack Album'

Can't wait until November 11 for the landmark home video release of the classic "Batman" TV series? Well, Bat Fan, you can whet your Bat-ppetite further with Mercury/UMe's reissue of the show's Exclusive Original Television Soundtrack Album. Originally released by 20th Century Fox records in 1966, the year the series debuted, this record was both of its time and seemingly ahead of it, much like the series it advertised. Nelson Riddle's mix of lounge jazz, light Rock & Roll, and surf was very sixties soundtracky, while the presentation was much more forward thinking. The way the record folds dialogue from the series in with the music sounds like sampling twenty years ahead of schedule, especially the litany of Burt Ward's "Holy-This!" and "Holy-That!" littered through "Holy-Hole-in-the-Doughnut -or- (Robin, You've Done It Again)". There's also guest gabbing from Special Guest Villains Anne Baxter (as Zelda), Frank Gorshin (as The Riddler), Burgess Meredith (as The Penguin), and George Sanders (as Mr. Freeze).

That major baddies like The Joker and Cat Woman are absent is probably down to the fact that the Batman: Exclusive Original Television Soundtrack Album was released so early in the show's run, before viewers had a chance to really identify their favorite villains (Julie Newmar wouldn't regularly appear as Cat Woman until season two). This also means that a couple of favorite themes are absent, such as the Batgirl theme and the awesomely fuzzed-out variation on the main theme that played during fight scene's in the series' final season. Also, one should be warned that the "Batman Theme" on this album is not composer Neal Hefti's recording that kicked off the show but a remake by Riddle that works in a surprise lounge-jazz interlude. But, hey, that's how the album came out five decades ago. The re-release is available on both CD and vinyl, which is what I received to review. If you really want to recreate that Bat feeling of '66, the vinyl is the only way to go.