The 19th-century track Cat Stevens called the greatest: “Number one pop song of all time”
Beauty and brutality – those were the two opposites that Stanley Kubrick needed to balance when he was making A Clockwork Orange.
The filmmaker has always preferred to work from books, but he really set a challenge for himself when he decided to bring A Clockwork Orange to the big screen…the story is a pretty horrific one, with scenes of violence and harrowing themes running throughout, but Kubrick did a pretty good job, as A Clockwork Orange is considered a classic by many and will make its way into a lot of movie-goers’ best films of all time.
So, how did he do it? Well, this isn’t a dissection of the entire movie, but something which certainly did heighten the adaptation was the soundtrack. A song which is referenced frequently throughout the book is Beethoven’s ‘Ninth Symphony’, which the character Alex is wholeheartedly obsessed with. He calls it “the glorious ninth”, and it represents beauty to him, which in itself is a juxtaposition given his character specialises in brutality.
So, how does Kubrick reflect both of those feelings in his film? He could just use the original, after all, it stands alone as a pretty stunning piece of music, but in order to give the classical composition a bit more edge, he reached out to musical innovator Wendy Carlos and asked her to recreate the composition using synthesisers.
Her rendition was pretty astonishing, adding layers upon layers to the movie. Cat Stevens, a prolific songwriter, credited the track as being one of the greatest pop songs ever recorded, saying that when he heard it come up in A Clockwork Orange, it made him want to listen to more classical pieces.
“I discovered this via Wendy Carlos, and it was her version in A Clockwork Orange that just woke me up to that sort of music ever since,” he said.
“It’s just the most amazing song. This is the one perfect pop song and a brilliant piece of music. This is probably my number one pop song of all-time as far as I’m concerned.”
Cat Stevens
Carlos’s rendition of the track is impressive, but it’s made even more so when you consider just how early the synthesiser was in its development. It wasn’t an instrument capable of producing a great deal of emotion, and so the fact that she managed to balance two completely contrasting feelings with her reimagination of Beethoven is basically a miracle.
She had practice, of course, as prior to the film she had released the album Switched-On Bach, which was her covering Bach pieces using the synth. Once again, she had to overcome the issues that the lack of emotional depth within the synthesiser presented. Her struggles with this album would eventually lead to her developing the iconic soundtrack for Kubrick’s film.
“Bob Moog helped me come up with the tools,” she said. “At that time, it was kind of a seller’s market. There weren’t a lot of electronic instruments that were around, and so, with no disrespect to Bob… I found that the instrument I used was merely the best one that I could find at that time.”
Concluding, “It was such a limited device… It wasn’t much of a musical instrument. It was very lacking in any form of expression, and the proof of this is that there were very few people who used the instrument who did anything interesting with it.”
