Listening to Stanley Kubrick (35 page)

Wendy Carlos: “Shining/Heartbeat”

Appearances:

1:10:53–1:12:05 Danny “shines” to Hallorann that there is trouble at the Overlook (layered, near the end of the cue, with Penderecki’s
The Awakening of Jacob
)

1:19:05–1:20:30 Wendy and Jack talk while Danny has visions

1:31:39–1:36:28 Wendy devises a plan for escape; Danny screams “Redrum”; Jack disables the radio; Hallorann flies to Colorado

This cue features a high-pitched sound, almost like the high buzzing of a dentist’s drill. The sound is meant to be jarring, even unpleasant, like the “Thought Transfer” cues from the albums. It is accompanied by a heartbeat sound and intermittent vocal effects that are similar to those heard in the
Dies Irae
cue. The high-pitched sound seems to be what “shining” sounds like. All three appearances of the cue occur within about twenty minutes of the film in which things start to go downhill very quickly, as Danny’s visions send him into a trance, Jack becomes agitated, and Wendy is beginning to grasp the family’s isolation.

György Ligeti:
Lontano

Appearances:

0:21:21–0:22:17 Danny turns to see the twins in the game room; they smile and walk away

0:27:19–0:28:01 Danny hears Dick ask him if he wants ice cream

0:46:10–0:47:57 Danny and Wendy play in the snow; Jack writes; Wendy discovers the phones are dead

The music of György Ligeti provides a connection among
2001
,
The Shining
, and
Eyes Wide Shut
—not bad for a composer who began his “collaboration” with Kubrick against his will and without proper notification or compensation. In addition to the music that appeared in
2001
, Ligeti’s
Lontano
appeared on MGM’s album of music
Inspired by 2001
. Ligeti composed
Lontano
in 1967, a year after his a cappella
Lux Aeterna
, which appeared in
2001.
In contrast to that piece,
Lontano
(the Italian word meaning “far”) is entirely instrumental, scored in fact for “large orchestra,” but the use of “micropolyphony” and tone-clusters suggests a very strong connection between them, and in fact, Ligeti scholar Michael D. Searby calls them “sister works.”
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Lontano
is also a departure from the works immediately previous to it because it has a semblance of a tonal center, although it is not by any means a tonal piece in the traditional sense. The pitch center lends a structural element and allows the micropolyphony to have a feeling of focus and drive.
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Because of the focus given to texture and timbre, the presence of melodies or individual lines within the texture escapes many listeners; but in
Lontano
, the construction of texture out of melodic elaboration seems to be Ligeti’s intent. Nevertheless, it is the overall effect of the sound that is most compelling about
Lontano
, and it has been described thus:

Lontano
is a study in opalescence, in slowly evolving timbral and harmonic transformation heard through polychromatic mists of sound. Within these vaporous textures, timbres and harmonies ebb and flow. Sometimes the sonic mists almost clear, to reveal for a moment tangible chordal shapes, before slowly enveloping them again as other shapes coalesce in sharper focus, before they too recede.
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The excerpt from
Lontano
is taken from the middle of a movement, something unusual for Kubrick, although this is a single-movement work with continuous sound. The piece is written in traditional notation, with a meter and bar lines, although as the notes in the score explain, “The bar lines serve only as a means of synchronization; bar lines and beats never mean an accentuation; the music must flow smoothly, and accents (with a very few, precisely indicated exceptions) are foreign to the piece.” The notes go on to explain that all instruments should enter with as quiet and unnoticeable attacks as possible and that changes in bow direction for the strings should be staggered among the players so they are not noticeable.
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Kubrick and Gordon Stainforth simply needed to find the timbre they wanted to use and then fade into a particular measure and fade out when the scene ended. The nature of the piece makes such excerpting easy and unobtrusive. The style of writing also unintentionally mimics typical suspense music from film scores, in which the strings hang on a single pitch to create tension. Ligeti’s choice to construct
Lontano
in a single movement proved to be something of a challenge in this style. It is difficult to sustain sound masses over time, especially in large-scale pieces. He got around this in
Lux Aeterna
by having smaller movements and different syllables for the singers. Ligeti worked through the challenge with
Lontano
, attempting to use pitch references as a way to articulate a musical structure.
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The excerpt from Ligeti’s
Lontano
seems to be another sonic signal for “shining,” as it appears first when Danny sees the twins in the game room. He is playing darts alone, but suddenly turns around to see the twins in their blue dresses, holding hands and staring at him. Danny and the twins stare at each other for a moment, before the twins look at each other and walk out. The sounds in this section of
Lontano
, from around measure fifty, feature a sustained high harmonic in the strings and low notes in the contrabass clarinet (a rare instrument for orchestras, sometimes used in bands) and the contrabassoon. The brass instruments enter as well, until finally the string harmonic sound gives way to a more traditional string sound, and the brass drop out. The music fades out at the beginning of the next scene, as Ullman shows Wendy and Jack their apartment for the winter.

In the next appearance, Dick Hallorann is giving Wendy and Danny a tour of the kitchen. As the three of them step into the walk-in pantry, the high whistle sound of the string harmonic is clearly heard, and the low woodwind sound emerges underneath. What Hallorann is saying to Wendy fades into a distant echo, and Hallorann “shines” to Danny, “How’d you like some ice cream, Doc?” This time the cue fades out while the strings are still sustaining the harmonic.

The third time the cue appears, winter has definitely arrived. Wendy and Danny play in the snow while Jack appears to watch them with an odd look on his face. The music continues through the next title card, “Saturday,” as Jack types in the lounge and Wendy discovers the phones are dead. This excerpt in the music is longer and continues into a section with a thicker texture. Oddly, this appearance of the cue does not accompany “shining” per se, but it does seem to suggest that there is something encroaching into the lives of the Torrances, like the snow covering the grounds. After this point, music for “shining” seems to be accompanied by Wendy Carlos’s “Shining/Heartbeat cue,” which did not appear on the soundtrack album.

Bartók: Music for Strings Percussion and Celesta

Appearances:

0:38:09–0:40:26 Danny and Wendy enter the hedge maze; Jack bounces a ball in his writing room

0:41:18–0:43:48 Danny rides around on his tricycle and ends up in front of room 237; Jack writes at the typewriter; cue stops when Jack pulls out paper

0:52:36–0:56:59 Danny asks Jack if he likes the hotel and if he would ever hurt him or Wendy

Béla Bartók was a Hungarian composer who, in addition to writing and teaching music, also collected folk music from Eastern Europe. His studies of the peasant music of Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania made him one of the first important ethnomusicologists, a group that included fellow composer and pedagogue Zoltán Kodály. Bartók drew upon many influences in his writing, including the art music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the music of Debussy and Richard Strauss was particularly important—and his own encounters with folk music from various peasant cultures. Antifascist in his beliefs, Bartók emigrated to the U.S. after the Nazi Party came to power and Hungary came under its influence.

Bartók composed
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
in 1936 for the tenth anniversary of the Basel Chamber Orchestra, and the piece was premiered by that group in January of 1937. There are four movements, but Kubrick used music only from the Adagio third movement. This movement is an illustration of a type of music Bartók referred to as “Night Music.” In his mature style, it was common for Bartók to write slow movements in this idiom, and there are, perhaps, more than a dozen pieces with movements in the “Night Music” style. Bartók used the term without defining it specifically, but it is generally seen as an evocation of the sounds of nature at night in the same vague way that Chopin’s piano nocturnes painted pictures of the night. One of the most explicit evocations of “Night Music” happens in the fourth movement of Bartók’s
Out of Doors
suite, which he dedicated to his second wife, Ditta.
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In
The Shining
, the first appearance of the piece occurs as Wendy and Danny enter the hedge maze. At this point, the weather is still mild, and there is no snow on the ground. As they reach the mouth of the maze, the cue begins at m. 20 in the score. A dissonant chord in the muted strings—held with tremolos—adds to a feeling of suspense. Ascending and descending glissandi in the second violins and the meandering line in the solo violin and the celesta add to the eerie feeling. The chromatic line that seems to wander, echoes the movements of Wendy and Danny in the maze who wander through, making wrong turns, and eventually finding the center. Jack, who is inside the hotel, has been throwing a ball against a wall instead of writing, and when the scene cuts to him, the ball hits the wall right at m. 31 in the score, just when the piano, celesta, and solo violin reach a chord together. The xylophone enters, as does the timpani, which plays ascending and descending glissandi. Jack walks over to a model of the hedge maze, and music suddenly changes character just as the camera angle changes. We appear to be seeing the maze model from Jack’s point of view, but a closer look (and a closer listen, as we can hear them talking) shows that Wendy and Danny are in the center of the maze. The part of Bartók’s piece that accompanies this camera trick features flowing arpeggios in the piano, harp, and celesta, with an underpinning of tremolos in the strings. Kubrick cuts back to Wendy and Danny, and the music seems to grow in intensity (Bartók has marked a crescendo in the strings, and the arpeggios drop out for the last two measures) as Wendy asks Danny, “You didn’t think it was gonna be this big, did you?” To which he replies, “Nope.” The tremolos in the strings continue to grow louder until the scene ends abruptly with a fortissimo strike on a cymbal. The strike matches perfectly with the next title card, which reads “Tuesday.” The movement goes on after this, but Gordon Stainforth made a cut right after the cymbal hit, quickly fading out the chords that would have continued.

In the second appearance, just a minute or so later, the music begins a few measures earlier than it did in the previous cue. We hear a couple of hits of the xylophone, a short, five-note phrase in the cellos, and then the same dissonant chord we heard at the hedge maze. The glissandi in the second violins begin just as Danny rides his tricycle past room 237, finally realizing where he is. He gets up and tries the knob of the door—just as the string glissandi stop and the xylophone enters—but finds it locked. He sees a vision of the twins as the timpani glissandi start, and he looks up at the door as he gets back on the tricycle to ride away. The arpeggios begin as we see Jack from the back. He is sitting in the lounge, typing, and the camera gradually moves toward him. Kubrick reverses the angle, and we see Jack’s face, intently look at the page in his typewriter. As we switch again to the angle looking at Jack from behind, Wendy enters the lounge where her husband writes, and when she reaches him and asks him how it’s going, he pulls the paper out of the typewriter just as the cymbal crashes again. The music stops as Jack and Wendy have a conversation that ends with Jack angrily telling her she is not to disturb him when he is writing.

The last time it appears, Danny goes to his room to get a fire engine toy and is instructed by Wendy not to wake Jack. Jack, however, is awake, sitting up on his bed. This time the cue begins at the start of the third movement, with the xylophone plinking with increasing intensity. The timpani adds accents and then the violas enter with a mournful line. Danny asks permission to get his fire engine, but Jack wants to talk to him first. As Danny goes to Jack, the second violins begin a line of their own, the two lines—violin and viola—winding around each other. Soon chromatic gestures are heard here and there in many of the string parts, staggered, as if they are passing the gestures around. As the music moves toward the section with the string glissandi, Danny asks Jack if he likes the hotel. The music continues, and as the timpani glissandi enter, Danny asks Jack if he would ever hurt him or Wendy. Jack assures him that he would not, and the arpeggios begin, although there is a slight alteration to make the cue fit. Stainforth cut a few measures of the arpeggios so that the scene could end with the cymbal hit and a title card that says “Wednesday.”

The Music of Krzysztof Penderecki

Born in 1933 in Debica, Poland, Penderecki experienced the Second World War as a child. Although little is written about his early life, there is no doubt that the cataclysm of the war had a great impact on Penderecki, both as an artist and as a person. In the 1950s and 1960s his reputation as an innovator grew; he experimented with extended techniques for instruments and graphic notation (to better convey his musical ideas).
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He gained popularity with his
St. Luke’s Passion
, a retelling of Christ’s crucifixion that is grand in scale and very dramatic
.
Despite living in postwar communist Poland under Stalinist policies, Penderecki continued to produce many forward-looking pieces. He was helped in great measure by the death of Stalin and the subsequent abandonment of Stalinism after Khrushchev came to power. One of Penderecki’s most famous works is one associated with the end of World War II. Originally called
8’ 37’’
, the later renamed
Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima
(1960) reflected the composer’s thoughts about history and about human suffering.
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Like the music of Ligeti,
Threnody
—which predates Ligeti’s
Lux Aeterna
and
Requiem
—also deals with texture and sound masses as a unifying paradigm. Penderecki’s pieces in
The Shining
date from 1961 to 1974, and the later pieces seem to focus more on melodic elements and lyricism, although they are still unmistakably driven by sound rather than tonal or melodic organization.
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