If silence is more powerful or symbolic, then your job as a composer is to exercise some restraint.” Kubrick knew that if there wasn’t a piece of music that could match the pure spectacle on the screen then it was best to leave things silent, which is probably why so much of 2001 is in silence and based around the white noise of space. “It’s a film I owe a lot to, it taught me the power of matching incredible images with incredible pieces of music. “I was already studying the piano but watching 2001 really consolidated my love for classical music,” says Richter. But even though the film’s highly subjective plot, which is centred around a mysterious monolith guiding humanity through pivotal moments on its evolutionary path, leaves more questions than answers, the German-born British composer was certain that director Stanley Kubrick’s use of classical music was groundbreaking. It's an interesting discussion that I'd love to hear your opinions about.Is it cinema? Or is it supposed to be like an art installation? Why is a giant baby floating through space? These were some of the questions flying through Max Richter’s head when he first watched 2001: A Space Odyssey as a teenager. It's difficult for a director to let someone else influence how you movie sounds, but if a talented composer with a cinematic mind is on your side, your leap of faith may very likely be rewarded by a sound totally unique to your film. He also got kicked out of a couple of projects, too, with people later saying that his successor did not do the film justice as Goldsmiths score would have done: Compare his score for Ridley Scott's "Legend" with the one they actually used in the American version, or his music for "Timeline" with what Brian Tyler composed. He managed to take huge avangardistic steps away from the main theme's sophisticated viennese waltz in "Boys from Brazil" and connected purely electronic sounds with impressionistic orchestral music in "Logan's Run" and he did so by sophisticated us of leitmotifs - or simply his skill as a musician, one could say. And Goldsmith was actually a master in doing so. Among others, one primary goal of an effective original score is to give musical cohesion even if the styles it needs to employ vary greatly throughout the film. If you take the art of scoring a film seriously, you see an argument or two in here. Even if one likes some of the choices Kubrick made for certain individual scenes, the eclectic group of classical composers employed by the director resulted in a disturbing melange of sounds and styles overall." (Jerry Goldsmith) "here is no doubt that 2001 would have been better if Kubrick had used North's music. It's tremendously haunting and beautiful, and it's easy to imagine some of these illustrative musical cues in another film - just not in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Luckily, North's original score for the film is available in multiple places and is actually a really fantastic listen for lovers of classical film scores. Although he and I went over the picture very carefully, and he listened to these temporary tracks (Strauss, Ligeti, Khatchaturian) and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musical objectives of each sequence he, nevertheless, wrote and recorded a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had listened to, and much more serious than that, a score which, in my opinion, was completely inadequate for the film. Then, in the normal way, I engaged the services of a distinguished film composer to write the score. When I had completed the editing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, I had laid in temporary music tracks for almost all of the music which was eventually used in the film. Well, with a little more care and thought, these temporary music tracks can become the final score. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you're editing a film, it's very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene. As for how Kubrick ended up with the musical choices that we've all come to know and love (well, most of us anyway), here's what he had to say about the process in an old interview with Michel Ciment.
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