The rejected score for Stanley Kubrick movie ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
As one of the greatest movies ever made that may well be the magnum opus of an altogether legendary directorial career, it’s difficult to look at Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey and state with any reasonable amount of certainty that it fell short in any department.
The filmmaker spent years crafting the narrative and the visuals, with cutting-edge visual effects winning Kubrick the one and only Academy Award of his career. There’s no score to speak of, either, with the meticulous auteur instead incorporating established pieces of classical music that inspired him, which left Alex North feeling understandably miffed.
Having worked together previously on Spartacus, Kubrick commissioned North – one of the industry’s most prominent composers who’d scored A Streetcar Named Desire, Cleopatra, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? among others – to create the musical accompaniment to his existential sci-fi epic.
However, when 2001 was eventually released in the spring of 1968, the soundtrack featured precisely zero original compositions by North. Instead, it carried pre-existing works from Richard Strauss, György Ligeti, and Aram Khachaturian, to name but three, which had all served as Kubrick’s self-proclaimed “guide pieces” during the development process to help steer him in the direction of the aesthetic he wanted to create.
It wasn’t until post-production that the director made the call to forego North’s recordings in favour of hand-picking pieces from the exhaustive back catalogue of classical pieces, while North himself didn’t discover that fact for himself until after he attended the first screening of 2001 and found out all of his time and effort had proved to be for absolutely nothing.
Music is such a key part of 2001 that it’s impossible to imagine it being soundtracked to anything other than Kubrick’s carefully chosen pieces, but North’s abandoned score ended up entering Hollywood folklore simply because it was decided so late in the day that it wasn’t quite in perfect synchronicity with the singular mind of A Space Odyssey‘s creator.
It wasn’t until 1993 that snippets of North’s score first emerged before Jerry Goldsmith and the National Philharmonic Orchestra recorded the entire thing and made it available for release. In an interview with Michel Ciment, Kubrick explained why he thought the best course of action was to stick to what he already knew.
“However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms,” he said. “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?” That’s pretty harsh on North, but Kubrick couldn’t separate himself from the increasing belief “these temporary tracks can become the final score,” which they did.
As for North, he called it “a great, frustrating experience,” but ended up repurposing his title theme in several of his own scores in later years, refusing to let his ultimately futile attempt to soundtrack 2001 go completely to waste.
