The Two Sound Worlds of The Shining
Although there are many musical cues in The Shining, they seem to fit into one of two categories. On one hand there are the avant garde, possibly atonal, amelodic cues that are extra-diegetic, that is, accompanying the narrative but assumed not to be heard by the characters within the narrative. On the other hand, the other music is diegetic—heard by the characters within the film’s world—and tonal, tuneful, and pleasant. As Mainar explains:
In The Shining extradiegetic music is ominous and lacks melody, matching the horror story, whereas the diegetic music heard at the ball is melodic, soft, and friendly. Music helps to contrast the two worlds, to indicate the passage from one to the other, and to suggest the ambiguous attraction of the world of the past (of mental disturbance) has not only for Jack but also for the audience.29
One moment in the film that is devoid of any music, and in the hands of another director might have called for a dissonant sting, is Ullman’s admission that the hotel is built on an Indian burial ground. Ironically, though, the ghosts in the hotel are not Native Americans. Instead, as James Naremore points out, they are “descendents of the white barbarians who destroyed the Indian culture—in particular by jazz-age sophisticates.”30 Donnelly echoes this, explaining that the atonal, amelodic music of Bartók, Penderecki, and Ligeti is not part of the music of the haunting, but is simply music to accompany the sublime elements,31 which happen to be horrific. The big band music is part of the nostalgic lure that pulls in Jack, perhaps attempting to absorb his soul. The music represents a time and place that Jack seems to become somewhat nostalgic about, yet it is not his own past he is nostalgic for, but an idealized past where everything is genteel and beautiful. The past has an ugly underside, not available at first glance. The songs aren’t exactly correct for the time period represented by the activities in the Gold Room. The songs are from the 1930s, about a decade off. Kubrick—a stickler for detail—made allowances for musical choices if they were particularly effective for the film. We saw a similar thing in Barry Lyndon, in Kubrick’s choice of Schubert, an anachronistic composer for the eighteenth century. Donnelly explains such fuzzy timelines as part of Jack’s false nostalgia:
The songs appear as an embodiment of memory—not necessarily our personal memory but more a collective memory of some sort. Indeed, pop songs often serve this function. . . . It may be that when music or song articulates memory, particularly a collective memory as an aesthetic repository, it might possess the power to unearth bad things from the past that we would rather forget, like slavery, starvation or mass murder, more than some individual sexual repression or personal neurosis.32
Since the release of the film, the two sound worlds of the film have occupied scholars, especially since Kubrick chose not to name all of the specific pieces in the credits of the film. There is a card that says “Music By,” followed by a credit for Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. After that, there is a card that says Krzysztof Penderecki, followed by one that says “György Ligeti.” This seems like an odd choice, especially from a legal standpoint, but the need for it might have been very practical. Gordon Stainforth, whose contribution to The Shining will be described in the next section, explained that it was very difficult to keep track of all of the clips he had used, since there were multiple versions of scenes and the different clips were sometimes layered together. Add to that the naturally hectic atmosphere of film completion and Kubrick’s penchant to change things until the very last second, and it is easy to see how these details slipped through the cracks.33 Donnelly argues that the choice was intentional by Kubrick to convey the sense that these works formed “an indistinct sonic backdrop.”34
The Contribution of Gordon Stainforth
Instead of using the services of an arranger, as he had on Barry Lyndon, or one composer as he had done on A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick’s main musical collaboration would be with music editor, Gordon Stainforth.35 Stainforth’s work on the music of The Shining, which has been detailed by Jeremy Barham in an article from 2009, shows that what Kubrick wanted were options. Early in the scoring process, Kubrick was already showing a preference for the music of Penderecki and Bartók, and he “gave Stainforth large amounts of recorded examples to sift through.”36 As he had done with Alex North on Spartacus, Kubrick gave Stainforth a list of places where he wanted music, and like the list he had given to North for the earlier film, he made brief descriptions of what he wanted. Stainforth then went ahead and cut music to scenes, often giving Kubrick a few musical options for each scene. Barham is careful to point out that Kubrick didn’t give much thought to the history of the repertoire under consideration, nor did he particularly worry about a critical analysis of the pieces. Instead, he told Stainforth what he wanted of the music in a practical, functional sense. And unlike many of the other aspects of filmmaking, Kubrick allowed Stainforth to “score” different versions of the scenes without his immediate supervision. When it came time to choose the appropriate version to cut into the film, however, the decision lay entirely with Kubrick.37
In his work creating options for Kubrick, Stainforth was sometimes aided by film editor Ray Lovejoy, who could shave off extraneous frames or perhaps add some to scenes if the musical cue called for such alterations. This technique was particularly useful when Stainforth wanted to cut to structural points in the music—as Kubrick preferred. Of this process Stainforth says there was a lot of “trial and error on my part.”38 The collaboration went smoothly, without prolonged discussions, and Stainforth believes that he and Kubrick shared a fundamental understanding of how best to use the chosen music in the film. Of the process of cutting the chosen music to the scenes, Stainforth has said: “[Kubrick] quite definitely entrusted it to me.”39
Wendy Carlos: “The Shining (featuring the Dies Irae melody)”40
Appearance:
0:00:00–0:03:03 Jack drives to the Overlook Hotel for his interview
At one point in pre-production, Kubrick asked Wendy Carlos about appropriate music for graves and death, and she suggested the chant commonly known from the Roman Catholic Requiem mass, the Dies Irae. One of the chant’s most famous appearances is in the final movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique from 1830, a piece that Carlos recommended to Kubrick. In typical Kubrick fashion, it had a strong effect on him, and like Prokofiev’s score to Alexander Nevsky that he owned as a child, he played it, Carlos estimates, more than a hundred times. In that time, he forged a deep connection to the music.41
The Dies Irae is arguably the most famous excerpt from the canon of chant for the Roman Catholic Church, and it is one with a very interesting history. The text is ascribed to Thomas of Celano, a Franciscan monk, and dates from the mid-thirteenth century. (An earlier version of the poem exists from the previous century, and Thomas’s status as possible originator of the poem has been called into question.)42 The poem was set to a chant and became an addition to the liturgy called a Sequence. The Sequence began as a prose form before 1000, but in later years began to take on the qualities of poetry.43 Although there was no one set form for the Sequence, many were constructed with rhyming couplets. The text and music of the Sequence changed from day to day, hence part of the “Proper” of the mass—as opposed to the “Ordinary” chant texts that remained unchanged through the year—and was usually placed after the Alleluia. It became part of the Requiem mass, the mass for the dead, sometime during the fourteenth century in Italy.44 When the Catholic Church reflected on its practices in the mid-sixteenth century at the Council of Trent (1543–1563), one of the many aspects under discussion was the proliferation of nonliturgical additions to the mass. The Council decided to excise the vast repertoire of more than four thousand Sequences with the exception of just four, one of which was the Dies Irae (a fifth was reintroduced in the eighteenth century).
The Dies Irae poem has eighteen stanzas (and a nineteenth added by an anonymous author) with the lines of text written in trochaic meter (each foot
is made of one stressed syllable and one unstressed syllable), and there are four trochees per line. The melody for each of the four opening stanzas repeats twice more in the course of the chant, and the repetition, unusual in Sequences, gives the music an overall sense of unity. (See the musical excerpt of the Dies Irae in chapter 4.)
Since the Middle Ages, the Dies Irae text has appeared in many settings of the Requiem mass, from Mozart, Verdi, Britten, and others. Some composers have set the text as a stand-alone piece.45 The Dies Irae melody has made appearances in compositions from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is so well known that even the inclusion of a few notes of the opening melody suggests the symbolism of the Day of Wrath (a literal translation of “Dies Irae”), the final judgment, and of course death in general. Franz Liszt explored the melody in variations in his Totentanz of 1848. Sergei Rachmaninoff, who seemed particularly fond of the theme, used fragments of the melody in pieces like his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934) and his Symphonic Dances for Orchestra (1940). Ildebrando Pizzetti, who used the melody in his own a cappella Requiem setting of 1922, revisited the chant tune in his 1958 opera Assassini Nella Catedrale (Murder in the Cathedral). In the 1970s George Crumb quoted the melody in his work for electric string quartet, Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Land, a meditation on the Vietnam War.46 French composer Camille Saint-Saëns used a pleasant, major-key, waltz-like version of the chant in his charming Danse Macabre (1874), a joyous, playful dance of the dead. The Dies Irae has also been quoted in film scores. Film music scholar William Rosar has discussed the Dies Irae in Citizen Kane, as a melodic quote of the chant by film composer Bernard Herrmann via Rachmaninoff’s symphonic poem Isle of the Dead (1945).47 And of course, Wendy Carlos quoted the Dies Irae in her setting of Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary in A Clockwork Orange, a direct musical connection between the two films that Donnelly refers to as a “worm-hole.”48
Carlos’s cue “The Shining” plays as the film begins. A helicopter is moving along the water in a valley between two mountains. The seemingly effortless gliding of the helicopter prefigures the swift, smooth movement of the Steadicam in the hotel. The image of the valley dissolves to a shot over land (with some water still visible on the left side of the screen) as a small yellow car is driving up a winding road. The camera approaches the car, as if chasing it, but finally passes it and heads out over the water again. The camera cuts to the car again—which we momentarily lose in a tunnel, but find again on the other side of it. The camera continues to follow the car at a distance until the camera focuses on the Overlook Hotel itself.
Carlos begins the cue with the first two phrases of the Dies Irae chant, holding the last note of the second phrase for a moment before moving on. This music would coincide with the text that can be translated, “Day of wrath, day that will dissolve the world into ashes.” Skipping the music for third phrase of the stanza—“as David testifies with Sybill,” Carlos sets the opening phrase of the music that would accompany the third stanza (the first two stanzas share the same music). The text set to this music would be “Tuba mirum, spargens sonum,” or “The trumpet sounding a wondrous sound.”49 At the end of this phrase, the vocal embellishments of Rachel Elkind begin, and other sounds, like those of the autoharp strings, begin to dominate. Carlos returns in a moment to the opening phrase of the chant, this time accompanied by Elkind’s vocals, and the cue ends with a repeat of “Tuba mirum” phrase. The vocal flourish at the end, somewhere between a cry and a moan, echoes just for a moment after the synthesizer line ends, providing an eerie effect that is undercut by the lack of music and the “normal” atmosphere of the scene Kubrick titles “The Interview.”
Wendy Carlos: “Rocky Mountains”
Appearance:
0:17:41–0:19:48 The Torrances drive the mountain road to the Overlook Hotel
This atmospheric cue plays as the Torrance family drives the road up to the Overlook Hotel, echoing the drive Jack took at the beginning of the film. The mood in the car is subdued, but grows a bit tenser as the family shares some small talk about the Donner Party and cannibalism. The cue begins with a low note that moves down by fifths as the shot from the helicopter comes over the woods and finds the small yellow Volkswagon on the road. The cue becomes quieter as Kubrick cuts to the interior of the car, and the conversation becomes the focal point of the scene. When the conversation ends, and the helicopter shot continues through the mist, the music becomes prominent again, with Carlos adding voices to the mix, forming a dissonant cluster of sound. The pitches rise up briefly, glissing from note to note, until the music takes a downturn, and the notes slide further and further down as the Overlook comes into view. The sinking chords at the beginning of the cue infuse the scene with a sense of foreboding.
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.”50 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.51 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.52
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.53 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.54
Listening to Stanley Kubrick Page 26
