- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- The 2001 film opens and closes with the dramatic tone poem written by Richard Strauss called “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (“Thus Spake Zarathustra”).
2001: A Space Odyssey / Music from the Motion Picture Soundtrack (1968): 2001: A Space Odyssey is a landmark science fiction movie that is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. As a collaboration between British filmmaker Stanley Kubrick and legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, the plot grew out of a short story by Clarke called The Sentinel (1951), also known as Sentinel of Eternity. Kubrick’s intention in making 2001 was to make, as he put it, “the proverbial good science fiction movie”, avoiding fanciful portrayals and themes and striving for more accurate and realistic depictions of space travel – what is often referred to in the field as “hard science fiction”. Thus, the rocket engines make no noise, as they wouldn’t in the vacuum of space, and there is little or no exhaust either. Arthur C. Clarke began working on a novelization separate from the film’s screenplay; as it happened, the screenplay and the novel – also called 2001: A Space Odyssey and released soon after the film opened in theatres – were written in parallel, creating some differences in the two storylines. Most notably, the climactic scenes in the film take place near Jupiter, while they are set around Saturn in the novel.
The most memorable character in the film is the computer named HAL – the name inadvertently uses the letters directly before IBM, whose logo is also shown in the film. HAL is one of the earliest depictions of artificial intelligence in film as, in essence, a malicious computer. The completed 2001 film is abstract in many ways; there are long periods in the movie with only music in the soundtrack, and dialogue is minimal. In fact, the first 20 minutes and the last 20 minutes of 2001 have no dialogue at all. The climactic Star Gate sequence uses mystifying color photography in a mind-boggling manner. Reading the 2001: A Space Odyssey novel helped give me a greater understanding of the meaning of the film. Beyond its inherent worth as a monumental work of filmmaking, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a major demarcation among science fiction movies, demonstrating that professionally made and expensive science fiction films could be financially successful. With only a handful of exceptions – such as one of my favorite movies to this day, Forbidden Planet (1956) that made a deep impression on me as a pre-teen – science fiction movies before 2001 were mostly low-budget affairs that were cheaply made and indifferently marketed. A half-century later, most of the big-budget blockbusters are now firmly within the science fiction genre, and that has been the case for many years. Of the 10 highest grossing films of all time, just three – Titanic, The Lion King, and Furious 7 – are not science fiction movies. In 1991, 2001: A Space Odyssey was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. The Motion Picture Soundtrack for 2001: A Space Odyssey collects previously recorded pieces of classical music that were used in the movie; by contrast, most movies utilize music that is specifically written and performed for the film. In that respect, the 2001 soundtrack is analogous to that of the film The Graduate (1967) that relies on songs by Simon and Garfunkel rather than original music. The 2001 film opens and closes with the dramatic tone poem written by Richard Strauss called “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (“Thus Spake Zarathustra”) – specifically, as noted in Wikipedia: “the initial fanfare – titled ‘Sunrise’ in the composer’s program notes”; the tone poem is used two more times within the film. The initial tone is a sustained, very low note (double low C) that might not come through on all sound systems. A vibrant performance of the well-known waltz “The Blue Danube”, written by Johann Strauss II (these two German composers are not related), also appears several times during the film; excerpts of “The Blue Danube” are on both sides of the soundtrack album 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are three modernistic pieces by the avant garde Hungarian-Austrian classical composer György Ligeti: “Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, 2 Mixed Choirs, and Orchestra”, “Lux Aeterna” (“Eternal Light”), and “Atmosphères”, with the latter being the only composition used in its entirety. The final selection is “Gayane Ballet Suite (Adagio)” by Aram Khachaturian. The music works better in the film than on record, although 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of my favorite classical music albums. My recollection is that the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack is the first album to be released only in stereo, with no monaural edition.