In the previous post, we saw Kubrick place music against the image.
In A Clockwork Orange, beautiful music can accompany brutality. The resulting clash produces irony, estrangement and unease.
But 2001: A Space Odyssey takes us somewhere else.
Here music does not simply oppose the image.
It can appear to organise it.
The spacecraft seem to dance.
The opening planetary alignment acquires monumental rhythm.
The movement of machines through space becomes a kind of choreography.
The visual sequences seem to possess musical form.
We have therefore moved from a question about what music says about an image to a more radical question:
What happens when musical form becomes part of the organisation of visual form?
Music can structure movement
Consider the famous sequence in which spacecraft approach and dock with the enormous space station.
Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube plays.
The vehicles glide.
Rotate.
Approach.
Separate.
Turn.
The movements could be described mechanically.
But that is not how we experience them.
The waltz gives them another organisation.
A spacecraft seems to turn in time with the music.
An orbital manoeuvre becomes a dance.
A docking procedure becomes a graceful sequence of phrases.
The music has not simply made the scene more pleasant.
It has provided a form through which the movement can be construed.
The BFI has described 2001's space sequences as "majestic ballets" of sound and movement, while the contemporary Sight & Sound review singled out the Blue Danube as a leitmotif for the spacecraft gliding through space.
The machine becomes dancer
This is a striking transformation.
We know what the spacecraft are.
They are machines.
We know what they are doing.
They are manoeuvring.
Yet the music allows us to see another relation.
The machines appear graceful.
Their movements acquire rhythm.
Their trajectories seem choreographed.
The machinery becomes almost balletic.
The music has therefore introduced a form from one domain into another.
It does not tell us verbally that the spacecraft are dancers.
It makes dance-like organisation available as a way of construing their movement.
This is remarkably close to the principle we explored with metaphor.
One organised set of relations becomes a resource for construing another.
But this is not metaphor in the same sense
We should nevertheless be careful.
The Blue Danube sequence is not simply an example of lexical or grammatical metaphor.
The musical structure is not being used as a wording that simultaneously embodies congruent and metaphorical semantic categories.
Something different is happening.
A temporal and rhythmic organisation supplied by music is being brought into relation with visual movement.
The two modes remain distinct.
But the visual event becomes intelligible through a formal relation supplied by music.
This is multimodal construal, not simply metaphor.
The distinction matters because we are beginning to see several different mechanisms by which one resource can help organise another.
Music organises time
Music is particularly powerful here because it is fundamentally temporal.
A melody unfolds.
A rhythm establishes recurrence.
A phrase creates expectation.
A cadence creates closure.
A repetition establishes a larger structure.
When such an organisation is coupled with moving images, the visual sequence can become experienced through those temporal relations.
A movement can feel like the beginning of a phrase.
A turn can feel like a cadence.
A return can function like repetition.
A sequence can acquire something like musical architecture.
The music therefore contributes not just emotion but temporal organisation.
The visual sequence becomes rhythmic
This is why we can sometimes describe film editing in musical terms without merely using a decorative metaphor.
Images have duration.
Cuts have timing.
Movements have pace.
Sequences have repetition and variation.
Kubrick was unusually attentive to these relations. Martin Scorsese, discussing the relationship between music and cinema for Sight & Sound, specifically pointed to Kubrick's sensitivity to the rhythmic impact of images and to the tempo of scenes, citing the Blue Danube in 2001 as an especially powerful example.
The point is not that Kubrick makes films that resemble pieces of music in some vague sense.
It is that cinematic form itself can be organised temporally and relationally in ways that music makes especially perceptible.
The opening of 2001
The opening gives us a different scale of the same phenomenon.
A dark screen.
The emergence of the Sun.
The Earth.
The Moon.
Richard Strauss's opening to Also sprach Zarathustra.
The music does not simply make the scene grand.
Its structure establishes an enormous formal event.
The visual alignment of celestial bodies and the musical climax arrive as a single experience.
The music provides a sense of emergence, magnitude and culmination.
The image provides the cosmic scale.
Neither is simply illustrating the other.
The two together create something neither could create alone.
The Criterion Collection describes 2001 as structured more like a musical work than a conventional dramatic film, identifying three broad "movements" rather than a conventional three-act structure.
That is an unusually strong formulation.
It suggests that the musicality of 2001 is not confined to its soundtrack.
It may belong to the organisation of the film as a whole.
Three movements
The idea of movements is especially suggestive.
The film is divided into large sections separated by enormous changes in time, place and human condition.
The connections are not primarily those of conventional dramatic causality.
They are patterns of recurrence, transformation and contrast.
The monolith returns.
Human technology changes.
The scale of experience changes.
The meaning of earlier events is reframed by later ones.
The structure depends heavily upon relations across enormous temporal distances.
It therefore behaves less like a conventional plot than like a composition whose themes recur in transformed forms.
The bone and the spacecraft
The most famous example is not musical in itself.
The ape throws a bone into the air.
A match cut replaces it with a spacecraft.
The cut compresses an immense period of human history into a single visual correspondence. The BFI describes the edit as one of cinema's celebrated moments, leaping from the prehistoric bone to the spacecraft and thereby compressing millennia of technological development.
But the importance for our present investigation is formal.
The film does not explain the relationship.
It constructs it.
One object becomes visually related to another.
The relation is temporal, technological and symbolic.
The edit creates a kind of visual cadence across millennia.
Music is not responsible for the entire effect.
That is precisely the point.
The film's different modes can establish structural relations that interact rather than simply accumulate.
Music and visual recurrence
The music contributes to this larger organisation by establishing another kind of continuity.
A musical work belongs to a historical repertoire.
A visual image belongs to the film's own developing repertoire.
When these are brought together, they create multiple layers of recurrence.
The viewer hears a musical form that carries its own cultural history.
The viewer sees images that are acquiring a history within the film.
The two histories intersect.
This gives the film unusual depth.
We experience the present scene not simply as the present.
It arrives carrying the memory of earlier formal relations.
The music does not merely tell us how to feel
This returns us to an important distinction from our previous series.
The conventional view of film music often treats the score as affective guidance.
Music tells us:
this is frightening;
this is sad;
this is beautiful;
this is triumphant.
But 2001 frequently does something less directive.
The music can establish formal relations.
The Blue Danube does not tell us to feel happy while watching the spacecraft.
It makes their movement available as a waltz-like structure.
Also sprach Zarathustra does not simply tell us that the opening is majestic.
Its musical architecture participates in the organisation of emergence and scale.
Music is therefore doing something more fundamental than supplying an emotional label.
It is helping organise how the event unfolds as a form.
The visual becomes temporal through music
An image is often thought of as spatial.
A musical work is temporal.
Film already combines spatial and temporal organisation because moving images unfold in time.
But music can intensify this relationship.
It can make us experience spatial movement as temporal pattern.
A spacecraft's orbit becomes a phrase.
A camera movement becomes a sweep.
A sequence of images becomes a rhythm.
The visual is not transformed into music.
Rather, one mode provides formal resources through which the other can be construed.
This is a more precise way of describing what is happening.
The music also becomes visual
But the relation is reciprocal.
Once we see the spacecraft moving, we do not hear The Blue Danube as we might hear it in a concert hall.
The visual movement gives the waltz a new significance.
Its elegance becomes associated with orbital motion.
Its recurrence becomes associated with technological grace.
Its nineteenth-century social associations collide with a twentieth-century technological future.
The image has therefore changed the music too.
The formal relation works in both directions.
Pre-existing music matters
There is another reason 2001 is particularly interesting.
Much of its distinctive musical identity comes from pre-existing classical works rather than a conventional original film score.
The familiar pieces arrive with their own histories.
The audience may know them as concert music.
Kubrick places them in an entirely different context.
The result is not simply quotation.
It is recontextualisation.
A familiar musical form becomes part of an unfamiliar visual world.
The cultural repertoire of the music enters the film's repertoire.
The film in turn changes the way the music can be heard.
This is one of the things Kubrick has in common with A Clockwork Orange, even though the effects are very different.
The score that wasn't
There is an especially revealing historical fact here.
Alex North was originally commissioned to compose the music for 2001. Kubrick ultimately used the pre-existing classical works associated with the film instead. The surviving history of the production consequently presents an intriguing counterfactual: the film could have had a conventional original score, but the completed work has the musical identity we know precisely because Kubrick chose otherwise.
This matters conceptually.
The music we hear is not simply a finished composer's interpretation of a finished film.
It has become part of the film's identity because of the way Kubrick selected and positioned it.
The distinction between "score" and "film" is already beginning to weaken.
Music as architecture
We can now use the word architecture more confidently.
Architecture organises relations.
It determines how elements occupy space and how movement through that space becomes possible.
Music can do something analogous in time.
It establishes proportions.
Recurrences.
Contrasts.
Transitions.
Expectations.
It can therefore provide a temporal architecture within which images become organised.
2001 makes this especially visible because the imagery itself is so formal.
The spacecraft.
The stations.
The celestial bodies.
The monoliths.
The corridors.
The rooms.
Movement through these spaces is rarely incidental.
It is carefully organised.
Music helps turn that organisation into an experienced form.
The film becomes a composed object
At this point, the phrase "film score" begins to feel inadequate.
The music is not simply a layer applied to the film.
The film itself has become a composed multimodal object.
Visual movement has rhythm.
Music has visual consequences.
Editing has musical qualities.
Spatial design has temporal implications.
The different modes remain distinct, but their relations become constitutive.
The work is neither purely musical nor purely visual.
It is something that emerges through their combination.
Yet Kubrick does not always integrate
There is an important caution.
Kubrick's music is not always structurally integrated in this way.
Sometimes the very point is distance.
Sometimes a familiar piece is placed against an image precisely because the difference matters.
That is what we explored in A Clockwork Orange.
Kubrick therefore offers us both possibilities:
music against image
and:
music organising image.
The same filmmaker can move between them.
This tells us that we are not dealing with a single technique called "Kubrickian music".
We are dealing with a broader understanding of what music can do within cinematic form.
From opposition to structure
We can now see a progression across the two Kubrick posts.
In A Clockwork Orange:
difference between modes → irony, estrangement, moral tension
In 2001:
relation among modes → shared formal organisation
The modes do not necessarily become indistinguishable.
But their relationship becomes more deeply integrated.
The question is no longer only what one mode does to another.
It becomes:
What can the two modes make possible together?
That is the beginning of co-construction.
The larger implication
This gives us a new way to describe multimodal meaning.
A mode can contribute a semantic or affective resource.
But it can also contribute formal organisation.
Music can provide rhythm.
Image can provide spatial structure.
Editing can establish temporal relations.
The film can combine these organisations.
Meaning can then emerge not only from what each mode represents, but from how the forms themselves correspond.
The structure becomes meaningful.
Form can mean
This may be the deepest lesson of 2001.
Meaning need not always come from a symbol representing something else.
Sometimes meaning emerges from the organisation of relations themselves.
The graceful movement of the spacecraft means something.
The enormous silence around the machines means something.
The recurrence of the monolith means something.
The contrast between human scale and cosmic scale means something.
The music helps organise these relations.
Meaning is therefore not confined to representation.
It can emerge through form.
Towards Greenaway
And this brings us to the next stage of our investigation.
Kubrick has shown us two powerful possibilities.
Music can create productive difference against the image.
Music can also participate in the formal organisation of the image.
But what happens when a filmmaker deliberately treats music, image, movement, colour, space and text as parts of one architectural system from the beginning?
What happens when music is not simply selected to accompany the completed film, but becomes part of the film's design logic?
This is where Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman become particularly interesting.
Nyman's own account of their collaboration reveals working methods in which the conventional order between film and score could be reversed. For The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the climactic sequence was choreographed to the pre-existing Memorial.
The question now becomes more radical:
What happens when the film is organised around the music rather than the music being added to the film?
That is where music begins to look less like a score.
And more like architecture.
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