VLVL2 (9.5): "The Tune of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)"

[Dave Monroe]

   "'Raight on!'  They ran through a Vietnam-style
handclasp set to the tune of 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), going 'Dum, dum, dum,' in harmony,
'DAHdahhhh!' slapping a high five, 'Dum, dum, dum,
daDAHH!' spinning around, slapping palms behind their
backs and so forth while Takeshi and DL leaned against
the front fenders of the truck, looking on." (VL, Ch.
9, p. 178)


"a Vietnam-style handclasp"

Cf. ...

   "Isaiah, in their greeting, wanted to slap and dap,
having always somehow believed that Zoyd had seen
combat in Vietnam.  Some of this was bush-vet and
jailyard moves Zoyd recognized, some was private
choreography he couldn't keep up with ...." (VL, Ch.
2, p. 18)


"the tune of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)"

http://movies.warnerbros.com/2001/

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/

MAIN TITLE: ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA (THUS SPAKE
ZARATHUSTRA) (1:41)
(Richard Strauss)
Herbert Von Karajan Conducting The Vienna Philharmonic

http://www.rhino.com/features/tracks/72562trx.html

To compose the music for 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Stanley Kubrick called upon Alex North, who had
written the score for Spartacus (the film that had
made Kubrick bankable, after Paths Of Glory had earned
him his art-film credentials). North was mostly a
composer of jazz-based music for "small subject" films
-- A Streetcar Named Desire; Death Of A Salesman;
Unchained; The Rainmaker; The Long, Hot Summer; The
Children's Hour; The Misfits; Who's Afraid Of Virginia
Woolf? Composing the music for the epic Spartacus led
to more "spectacular" scores, such as Cleopatra, The
Agony And The Ecstasy, and Shoes Of The Fisherman. 

But from the very beginning of the 2001 project,
something was wrong. Kubrick "was direct and honest
with me concerning his desire to retain some of the
'temporary' music tracks which he had been using,"
North would later recall. "Somehow I had the hunch,"
he said, "that whatever I wrote to supplant Strauss's
Zarathustra would not satisfy Kubrick." He was right.
Neither the director nor the composer could finally
live with a score that was part North's original work
and part excerpts from classical pieces. The
"temporary" tracks were what Kubrick used in the
completed film. 

Whatever the motivation behind it, Kubrick's decision
to use preexisting classical music -- like everything
else about 2001 -- went against the grain of the
science fiction film genre....

[...]

But unquestionably the most famous and most
emphatically right musical choice in 2001: A Space
Odyssey was the selection of the stirring introduction
to Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra to
accompany the film's key moments of planetary
alignment and intellectual propulsion.  Johann
Strauss's "Blue Danube" was already a widely popular
piece before 2001; not so Also Sprach Zarathustra, nor
even Richard Strauss himself, both of only
second-echelon importance even in narrow classical and
operatic circles. The opening to Also Sprach
Zarathustra is but the brief introduction to a
sweeping full-length orchestral tone poem celebrating
Nietzsche's ambitious philosophical parable of the
superman. But by the time Kubrick had done with it,
that fanfare was thoroughly and irrevocably associated
in the popular mind with stellar spectacle. The news
media and NASA picked up on it; so did television
commercials and the satirical impulses of comic
filmmakers. But even though widely quoted and
parodied, nothing has shaken loose the power and
appropriateness of Kubrick's choice, which not only
embodied a philosophical and musical rightness but
also introduced the music of Strauss to a far wider
audience than it had enjoyed before.

Becoming in the film a sort of musical emblem of the
Nietzschean philosophical theme on which Strauss's
tone poem was based, the fanfare from Also Sprach
Zarathustra accompanies an alignment of astral bodies
at the film's opening; the man-ape leader's triumph at
discovering the power of the bone as tool and weapon;
and the unforgettable finale, when the fetal
Star-Child joins a new celestial confluence -- and,
turning gently, weightlessly, floats into film
history.

http://www.rhino.com/features/liners/72562lin.html

http://www.rhino.com/store/productdetail.lasso?number=72562&

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