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.55
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.�
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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).56 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.57 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.58
Penderecki’s status as a witness to the Second World War, and commentator on its human toll, is a central issue of Geoffrey Cocks’s assessment of hidden themes in The Shining. In an article from 2006, Cocks makes explicit the connection between Penderecki’s music as a reaction to the war and Kubrick’s placement of the music in the film:
Penderecki’s music accompanies the actual horrors of the Overlook Hotel past and present. This is significant, for Penderecki’s own father was a lawyer during World War II when the Nazis killed 70 percent of the lawyers in Poland. Born in 1933, Penderecki watched Jews being taken away by the Germans and devoted his musical career to the exploration of tolerance and intolerance. . . . As Danny envisions the elevator gushing blood and Jack dreams of murder, on the soundtrack is Penderecki’s The Awakening of Jacob (1974). Jacob, aside from being the name of Kubrick’s father, is he in the Bible who is renamed Israel and whose sons are the ancestors of the twelve tribes. The text is Genesis 28:16. . . . Kubrick similarly utilizes Penderecki’s Utrenja (“Morning Prayer,” 1969–70) from the Eastern Orthodox liturgy for Christ’s entombment and resurrection to underscore savagely the hotel’s final manifestations of its accumulated horrors. 59
There is no arguing that Penderecki’s discovery of new sounds through the use of extended techniques helped to convey the sublime at the Overlook Hotel, but it is unclear whether Kubrick had any idea—or even wanted to know—of Penderecki’s proximity to the war. What concerned him, of course, were specific qualities of the pieces and how well they served the narrative. We may assume then that Penderecki’s sound resources must have been intriguing to Kubrick, since so many of his pieces form part of the score. It contributes to the viewer’s sense of unease, as the sounds are sometimes unfamiliar and form a middle ground between music and sound effect.
One of the most challenging things about analyzing the soundtrack to The Shining is one of the very things that makes the soundtrack particularly effective: the freedom and flexibility with which Kubrick and Gordon Stainforth used the music of Penderecki. From about an hour and forty minutes into the film until the end of the film, many of the musical cues are layered one on top of another. It is exceedingly difficult to parse out the different cues in some instances, but where it is possible, I have made a note of the places where there is layering. Because Stainforth often offered many choices to Kubrick, the labeling of these multiple cues was not always meticulously done.60
In table 6.1, I have attempted to account for all the cues used from 1:41:15 to 2:19:26. Where the layering made identification of a work uncertain, I marked the most likely piece with an asterisk (*). There are three places (about a minute and a half in total) of unidentified music, labeled “unknown.” For the places where Kubrick and Stainforth used excerpts from Utrenja II, I simply used the name of the movement in question, either Kanon Paschy or Ewangelica.
Appearances of De Natura Sonoris No. 1
0:49:13–0:51:11 Danny rides through the hotel and sees the twins in the hallway
1:53:20–1:54:26 Wendy realizes that Jack has sabotaged the Sno-cat (layered with Polymorphia)
Appearances of De Natura Sonoris No. 2
1:01:09–1:04:06 Danny walks in, injured; Wendy blames Jack; Jack walks to the Gold Room
2:17:30–2:18:00 Wendy runs out of the hotel and finds Danny coming out of the maze; they get into the Sno-cat; Jack calls out for them (layered with Kanon for Orchestra and Tape)
Appearances of The Awakening of Jacob
0:10:32–0:12:09 Danny talks to Tony while brushing his teeth; he blacks out
0:57:05–1:01:05 Jack has a nightmare; he tells Wendy about it
1:11:46–1:16:07 Jack goes to room 237 and sees the woman in the bathtub (layered with “Shining/Heartbeat” cue)
Appearances of Polymorphia
1:41:20–1:53:21 Wendy finds Jack’s writing; they argue (layered with Utrenja II—Kanon Paschy); Wendy drags Jack into the pantry
1:53:46–1:54:20 Wendy realizes that Jack has sabotaged the Sno-cat (layered with De Natura Sonoris No. 1)
Appearances of Kanon for Orchestra and Tape
2:01:04–2:04:32 Jack is using the axe to break down the door to the apartment and the bathroom (layered with Utrenja II—Kanon Paschy)
2:10:52–2:12:02 Jack chases Danny into the maze
2:12:54–2:14:43 Jack and Danny in the maze (layered with Utrenja II—Ewangelica and Utrenja II—Kanon Paschy)
Appearances of Utrenja II: Ewangelica
2:00:55–2:01:03 Jack puts an ax through the apartment door
2:08:30–2:10:22 Jack kills Hallorann; Danny runs from Jack; Wendy sees a man in a bear suit
2:12:24–2:13:24 Wendy finds Hallorann’s dead body; she runs into the injured guest
Appearances of Utrenja II: Kanon Paschy
1:49:10–1:49:25 Wendy hits Jack with the bat; Jack falls down the stairs
2:04:12–2:04:32 Jack breaks through the bathroom door with an axe
2:14:36–2:15:44 Wendy sees blood coming from the elevator; Jack loses Danny in the maze
The Awakening of Jacob appears early in the film, as Danny converses with “imaginary friend” Tony and while Jack talks to Wendy on the phone. Tony at first refuses to tell Danny why he doesn’t want to go to the Overlook, but then Danny has a vision. Blood spills out of the elevator at the hotel, rushing up to the camera and moving the furniture in the flow. Danny also sees the twins, and the camera briefly shows Danny’s horrified face. The blood covers the camera and fades the scene to black. The sounds are low, intermittent chords in the orchestra, each one getting louder and more dissonant. The cue fades out as the doctor checks on Danny. It’s ironic that this piece accompanies Danny’s loss of consciousness and his vision of something horrible, as the biblical text that inspired the piece is about Jacob waking up and being assured of God’s presence. (“When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it’” Genesis 28:16.)
The second appearance of the piece occurs when Danny is playing in the hallway by room 237. Again, we hear the intermittent chords. Danny finds the room open, but we don’t see him enter as the scene fades to Wendy checking on the boiler. She hears Jack yelling and runs upstairs to find him having a nightmare. As he screams, the high notes in the strings sound, but then the low dissonant chords return. As he explains that he dreamed he killed Wendy and Danny, the lines in the strings glissando upward, and tone clusters cover a large range. Danny walks in to the lounge and there’s a percussive sound followed by sustained notes played on the musical saw and slide whistle. Those sustained not
es are the beginning of De Natura Sonoris No. 2, which continues as Jack heads for the ballroom.
The Awakening of Jacob returns as Jack goes to check on room 237. As he walks there, Wendy Carlos’s “Shining/Heartbeat” cue plays, mirroring perhaps Jack’s nervously beating heart. The high-pitched sound fades into the low intermittent chords as Jack finally sees what’s in the room: a beautiful naked woman, who wordlessly kisses Jack. This is the same music that accompanied his nightmare a few scenes ago, and indeed this fantasy turns into a nightmare, as the beautiful woman transforms into a decomposing crone who laughs at Jack as he backs away from her in terror. The music ends as Jack leaves room 237 and locks the door behind him.
As their titles suggest, De Natura Sonoris Nos. 1 and 2 explore the nature of sounds, something of a preoccupation for Penderecki. On his profile page for the Schott Publishing Company, he is quoted as saying, “I have spent decades searching for and discovering new sounds.”61 Composed in 1966 and 1971, respectively, De Natura Sonoris Nos. 1 and 2 use unusual sound resources including rare instruments and extended techniques. Penderecki’s De Natura Sonoris No. 1 accompanies Danny’s surprise encounter with the twins in the hallway. He is riding his tricycle and turns a corner to find the twins standing there, hand in hand. They ask him to come and play, but he sees visions of them dead, covered in blood. He tells Tony he is scared, and Tony reminds him that Hallorann said the visions were like “pictures in a book.” The cue is tense, almost from the beginning, which fades in a few measures into the piece as the woodwinds and strings are sustaining very high notes. The horns and trumpets provide accents in their high registers. A percussive crash coincides with Danny seeing the twins. Low woodwinds accompany the twins’ request for Danny to come play. Clatters in the gong, tam-tam, and bells follow. Then there are instrumental surges upward, first in the woodwinds, then in the brass, and finally in both groups. Danny claps his hands over his eyes just at the end of the second one, and after the third one he looks again, and the twins are gone. The music becomes quieter once more, as Danny talks to Tony, fading out for the next title card, “Monday.”
Listening to Stanley Kubrick Page 27
