Read Listening to Stanley Kubrick Online
Authors: Christine Lee Gengaro
Although Kubrick was known as something of a recluse, he did grant quite a few interviews over the course of his career, and in none of those did he confirm any of these theories. In an interview with Michel Ciment about
The Shining
, Kubrick did say this: “People can misinterpret almost anything so that it coincides with views they already hold. They take from art what they already believe.”
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Pre-Production for the Film
Kubrick spent some time after completing
Barry Lyndon
looking for a new project. He was briefly considered to direct Paddy Chayefsky’s film
Network
, but Chayefsky— interested in being an auteur like Kubrick—ended up directing the film himself. Kubrick searched novels for ideas, and an executive at Warner Bros. sent a copy of Stephen King’s novel to Kubrick. Unlike the vast majority of things sent to the director,
The Shining
caught his attention right away. It had elements of the supernatural and psychological, and the filming of it would put forth cinematic challenges that must have intrigued Kubrick.
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On any Kubrick film, factual details about settings are very important, and
The Shining
is no exception. In the archives at University of the Arts London, there are a dozen or so letters written to hotels that could possibly stand in for the Overlook Hotel. In addition, there are letters about locations, props, information on the snowfall in Colorado, requests for pictures of Sno-Cats, and correspondence with the Denver airport (for the brief scene that takes place there). The decoration of the Overlook Hotel, an establishment that has hosted “all the best people,” in the words of the manager, Mr. Ullman,
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required the use of many photographs. Instead of providing new staged photographs, Kubrick borrowed prints from Warner Bros.’s considerable photograph archive to hang on the walls of the Overlook Hotel. Every possible detail of pre-production was scrutinized, and every effort was made to prepare a physical set that would serve the narrative and accommodate the use of the Steadicam. The lighting design, for example—wiring the set of the hotel with all of the necessary lights including lights to simulate natural light—took four months.
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Once again, the choice of appropriate music occupied the production team, and once again, there was correspondence with various entities suggesting possible tunes for the film. Jan Harlan wrote to Rudi Fehr, an executive at Warner Bros., to ask for a list of popular songs from 1920 to 1935. In response, Fehr provided a comprehensive list of more than 150 songs. In his letter of 23 December 1977, he offers to make tapes of songs for Harlan, but explains that time is a factor as he is about to start work supervising the dubbing of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
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For the years 1930 and 1931, for example, Fehr provided the following titles:
1930—“Beyond the Blue Horizon,” “Bidin’ My Time,” “Body and Soul,” “But Not for Me,” “Bye Bye Blues,” “A Cottage for Sale,” “Cryin’ for the Carolinas,” “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes,” “Embraceable You,” “Exactly Like You,” “Fine and Dandy,” “I Got Rhythm,” “I’m Confessin’ That I Love You,” “It Happened in Monterey,” “Just a Gigolo,” “Little White Lies,” “Love for Sale,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street,” “Rockin’ Chair,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” “Three Little Words,” “Time on My Hands,” “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me,” “You’re Driving Me Crazy.”
1931—“All of Me,” “As Time Goes By,” “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,” “Cuban Love Song,” “Dancing in the Dark,” “Good Night, Sweetheart,” “Got a Date with an Angel,” “Heartaches,” “I Found a Million Dollar Baby,” “I Surrender, Dear,” “I’ve Got Five Dollars,” “Just One More Chance,” “Lazy River,” “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” “Minnie the Moocher,” “Mood Indigo,” “Nevertheless,” “Out of Nowhere,” “Paradise,” “Peanut Vendor,” “Soft Lights and Sweet Music,” “Sweet and Lovely,” “When I Take My Sugar to Tea,” “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” “Where the Clue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day,” “Yours Is My Heart Alone,” “You’re My Everything.”
The archive also contains a handwritten list of popular songs from the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the list, the unknown author states that the criteria for popularity was sheet music sales, gramophone record sales, or “consistent performances of stage and radio.” A memo from Jan Harlan to Kubrick, Douglas Twiddy, and Brian Cook dated 12 April 1978, suggests “The Strolling Vagabond” for the film, while another letter provides a list of Scott Joplin records, as recorded by pianist Joshua Rifkin. There are documents listing albums ordered by Harlan from the record store Imhofs, for review by Kubrick. One from 26 January 1978 lists the following recordings of opera and their price:
Gianni Schicchi
no. 76563 £3.79;
Faniculla del West
SLS.5079 £8.95;
Tosca
5BB123-4 £6.95. He also ordered the following from Imhofs:
Madam Butterfly
SET584-6;
Manon Lescaut
SLS962;
Rondine
DPS 2055;
Turandot
GOS 622-4. Kubrick ended up including no music from opera in
The Shining
, none of Joplin’s works, and just four popular songs from the 1930s.
The Work of Wendy Carlos
Despite all of the research into preexistent music, Kubrick was still willing to entertain the possibility of working with Wendy Carlos on the score to
The Shining
. Kubrick and Carlos had, of course, shared a very successful and fruitful collaboration on
A Clockwork Orange.
In fact, Kubrick began working with Carlos and producer Rachel Elkind before any footage was shot, asking them to read the novel and come up with musical ideas. To help get into Kubrick’s mind-set, they asked if Kubrick was listening to anything specific, and Kubrick mentioned a Sibelius piece,
Valse Triste
.
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They recorded many cues before the film was shot, and once they saw footage, they scored scenes that would never make it into the final cut of the film. In addition, they made multiple albums of sound effects, some of which ended up being used in conjunction with Kubrick’s final musical choices. In discussing the unused sounds and music, Carlos stated the following in Jan Harlan’s documentary,
Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
:
We were working with the material that was in the book, and trying to make music that fit the mood of a sort of updated gothic horror story, which is what
The Shining
is, really, I mean, as a novel, in any case. And of course the stylization that came out from the filming was not present in the book. And so we failed in our attempt. Which is why there is a great deal of other music put into the movie.
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Copies of the albums produced by Carlos and Elkind can be found at the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London. The following are track lists as they appear on the album covers that Carlos and Elkind sent to Kubrick for review.
The Shining
—Album—Music by W. Carlos and R. Elkind
Side A
Side B
Although there are many tracks on this album, the one that intrigued Kubrick the most was the opening track “Title Music.” The cue incorporated the
Dies Irae
chant, and in further explorations it would continue to return, eventually ending up as the opening cue for the film. Carlos and Elkind continued offering Kubrick choices for the film, and producing other albums, the next one with an emphasis on vocal effects provided by Elkind.
Disc 2,
The Shining
: Music by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind
Side A
Side B
The first three tracks on this disc feature a buzzing sound that suggests insects. Perhaps Carlos and Elkind were inspired by Stephen King’s scene (unused in the film) about a wasp nest. Jack removes a wasp nest from the roof of the Overlook and gives the empty nest to Danny. In the middle of the night, however, the nest is somehow once again infested with the stinging insects. The buzz of “Low and High” seems to approach the unpleasant buzzing of a dentist’s drill. The track “DC-10 @ 8AM” has a low sustained dissonant chord that sounds like it’s played low on an organ. Carlos and Elkind revisited the
Dies Irae
of “Title Music,” adding twangs and buzzes and lip trills. “Winter Maze” suggests iciness and cold with the addition of heartbeat and percussion effects. This long cue features vocal sounds both high and low, and moans and wails that sound almost inhuman. There is a bell sound now and then throughout the track, with more buzzing appearing. Some of the sounds of these tracks hearken back to a seminal piece of electronic music called
Poème Electronique
by Edgard Varèse. The last two tracks are tunes that Carlos and Elkind might have recorded for the 1920s party scene. “Dream Man” is a piano tune with male vocals, almost bluesy in character. The piano is out of tune, giving it an eerie sound. The final song is a version of the Thomas “Fats” Waller song, “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now.”
The next disc continues with the vocal experiments of Elkind and dispensed with clever titles, describing each track with phrases like “Low groaning moans” and “Small high shrieks.”
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Once again, the album begins with a version of the
Dies Irae
. In this case it’s a wordless vocalization, very free in performance. There is a note on the album indicating that the track “Vocal Glissandi” was intended for Jack’s entrance into room 237. The same scene would also use the track “Whisperings,” which features unintelligible voices that suggest auditory hallucinations. The low groaning moans are mixed so that they are heard out of phase from both the left and right speakers. On this album, there are some sound experiments with traditional instruments such as a cue of piano strings being rubbed by soft mallets, recalling composer Henry Cowell’s innovative pieces
Aeolian Harp
(1923) and
The Banshee
(1925), in which the piano strings are swept or plucked from inside the piano. On side B of this disc, Carlos and Elkind recorded another sound experiment with the autoharp, this time adding a boinging sound to the
Dies Irae
chant. This combination of elements was well on its way to becoming what would be the opening track of the film.
What followed were more recordings with even more descriptive titles. The album Carlos and Elkind called
Two Track #2 “Loops”
had ten tracks, many of which featured an eerie sound element they called “Ghosties.” For one of the tracks, a handwritten note describes the cue as “Ligeti like.” The tracks also feature moans, sighs, and screams. Someone has noted on the album that the first three cues—including one called “Rocky Mountains”—resemble “Apocalypse Now helicopters” (which suggests that someone was still listening to these cues and making notes after
Apocalypse Now
premiered in August of 1979). Carlos and Elkind’s album
Two Track #5 Wind and Textures
had mostly atmospheric cues with wind and other effects. The
Dies Irae
appears here as well, in a cue they called “The Snow.” Their recording
Two Track #6 Piano and Autoharp Efx and Synth
has just seven tracks, mostly sound effects. The first side ends with a cue played on the Polymoog
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called “Blood Bath.” This track was ostensibly conceived as the accompaniment to the elevator bloodbath Kubrick invented for the film. On side B of the album, there are both Polymoog and piano versions of the
Dies Irae
chant. Next to the listing of the tracks on the B side, someone has written in marker: “Shrieks and hums v. sustained suspense redrum pre-walking around the room.”
In the end, Kubrick chose just a few of the cues and effects Carlos and Rachel Elkind produced for
The Shining.
The opening of the film is their version of the
Dies Irae
, complete with vocal effects and the autoharp boinging sounds heard on the third album Carlos and Elkind presented to Kubrick. The only other cues of theirs that appear in the film are “Rocky Mountains,” an atmospheric piece that accompanies the Torrances’ drive to the Overlook Hotel on closing day, and a cue I call “Shining/Heartbeat,” which accompanies the scene where Hallorann receives a “shine,” alerting him to problems at the Overlook, and the scene in which Jack sees the woman in room 237. Two of these cues, the final version of the
Dies Irae
(just called “The Shining” on the soundtrack) and “Rocky Mountains,” appeared on the original soundtrack album for
The Shining
, an album that was pulled because of problems with the licensing of the music. It has never been re-released, and original vinyl copies of the soundtrack are rare and expensive. One scholar who has written about the film, K. J. Donnelly, referred to the “the unheard, imagined missing score” of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind as another “ghostly aspect” of the film.
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A few years ago Carlos mentioned that she and Elkind recorded what she described as “a ton of electronic and orchestral music . . . that has never seen the light of day.”
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That music, however, eventually came to light. Carlos released many of the cues on two albums she recorded in 2005 called
Rediscovering Lost Scores, Volumes I and II.
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In total, Carlos included thirty-one previously unheard tracks from
The Shining
(see appendix C for a complete listing of the tracks of these recordings).
Rediscovering Lost Scores, Volumes I and II
include the lion’s share of the work Carlos and Elkind did for the film, although copies of these two albums are also quite rare.