Stanley Kubrick's 2001 is another unique event: a spacey, psychedelic essay on the rise of artificial intelligence, and the strange encounters between space explorers and ancient black monoliths – objects that appear to embody some strange universal intelligence that has affected human evolution. We re-grouped, fixed the film – and finished triumphantly to the sound of a resonant Scottish "Brahhvoooh!" from 007 in the stalls. The score's debut at the Edinburgh Film Festival back in the 1990s (this was pre-digital) was a rocky one: the old acetate catching fire in the projection room mid-performance, with festival president Sean Connery sitting in the house. It's an interesting discussion that I'd love to hear your opinions about.Live film and music performances have become increasingly popular since Adelaide festival director David Sefton and I first collaborated in the 1990s, on a new score for Hitchcock's early silent hit The Lodger by composer Joby Talbot. 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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