Listening to Stanley Kubrick (25 page)

In
M
, the use of a familiar piece is particularly effective because there is no other music in the entire film; its starkness is ominous and its playfulness is a striking contrast to the character’s murderous activities. Incidentally, the film was later used by the Nazis in propaganda dealing with the evils of deviant sexual behaviors. Fritz Lang was half-Jewish and fled from the Nazis and his own wife—a devout follower of Hitler—in 1933.
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The Nazis’ use of music has been discussed above, and their connection to this repertoire has become something of a film cliché. Even films made when the Nazis were in power painted them as lovers of great music, and since then screenwriters and directors have portrayed the ironic combination of their musical knowledge and their violent actions. In the film
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
(1943), one character says of Germans: “They sink undefended ships, shoot innocent hostages, and bomb and destroy whole streets in London, killing little children. And then they sit down in the same butcher’s uniform and listen to Mendelssohn and Schubert. There’s something horrid about that.”
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The character is not referring to the Nazis since the comment is made during World War I, but the film itself was made during the Second World War, and the significance of the statement could hardly have been lost on the audience.

Even recently, a filmic depiction of Nazis is incomplete without some act of horror, torture, or violence accompanied by classical music that seems utterly indifferent to the cruelties on-screen. In
Schindler’s List
(1995), for example, in a scene with Nazi thugs clearing out a Jewish ghetto, one of them stops for a moment, amid the gunfire and screams, to play Bach’s English Suite on a piano.

Bach’s music as enjoyed by the well-ordered criminal mind is something of a cliché itself.
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In Thomas Harris’s best-selling book
The Silence of the Lambs,
serial killer Hannibal Lecter is a both a cannibal and classical music aficionado. He, like Alex before him, uses classical music as a backdrop to his violence. When director Jonathan Demme adapted the novel into an Oscar-winning film in 1991, he used the music Harris described in the novel—Bach’s Goldberg Variations—as a chilling counterpoint to a series of brutal murders.
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Classical music as the accompaniment to torture is an important aspect of Ariel Dorfman’s 1992 play
Death and the Maiden.
Both the play and its 1994 film adaptation tell the story of a woman, Paulina, who was tortured and sexually molested by a man who played Schubert’s
Death and the Maiden
quartet while he abused her. When Paulina’s husband brings a mysterious man home one evening—fifteen years after the torture—Paulina believes that the guest was her tormentor. The
Death and the Maiden
quartet forms part of the film’s score.
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Whether the connection between classical music and deviant behavior and violent characters is due to the coding of classical music in film from the age of silent films or if it is the influence of famous characters like Hans Beckert in
M
or Alex in
A Clockwork Orange,
the practice lives on in film. It should be noted that, according to filmic depictions, not all criminal minds are amenable to classical music. There are many film characters who commit crimes and listen to popular music or no music at all, but it seems that those criminals who love classical music are those either wholly committed to their life of crime and who do not see the immorality of their actions (through amoral behavior, compulsion, or by indulging in a completely divergent worldview), like Alex and Hans Beckert; or those whose minds are so meticulously well ordered that classical music is the only sufficiently complex diversion for them, like Hannibal Lecter. It is interesting to note that in the real world, classical music is often used as a deterrent for criminal behavior, effectively repelling muggers and drug dealers from public parks, train stations, and parking lots.
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The Struggles of Beethoven

Canonical music accompanies many of the scenes in
A Clockwork Orange
. Competing for the most screen time are Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Rossini’s overture to
La gazza ladra
. Beethoven’s music occupies a place of lesser importance in the novel than in the film, although admittedly, the Ninth is the only piece that Burgess mentions more than once. In Burgess’s stage version—written twenty-five years after the novel and fifteen years after the film—songs based on Beethoven’s work are featured in every part of the play.
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It seems odd that Burgess should place such great emphasis on Beethoven’s music; in the novel, the most significant pieces (i.e., the one that leads to the betrayal of friends or the one that drives him to suicide) are fictional compositions. Perhaps he did not want to assign “responsibility” to pieces that actually existed.

We can analyze the use of Beethoven’s music in the play as a reaction to Kubrick’s use or misuse of music in the film (in Burgess’s estimation). Burgess could also have seen the music of Beethoven, wrought through struggle and difficulty, as an analogy to the struggle of the main character.
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Beethoven is known for his progressive deafness, his staunch individuality as an artist, his personal problems (familial and romantic trouble), and his aggressive, overbearing nature; he is consistently associated with a narrative of overcoming.
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Beethoven, like Alex, was uncompromising, and in the music of Beethoven there seem to be more and greater personal struggles than there are in the music of the preceding classical period. Burgess has said this of Beethoven’s music:

The conflict is prolonged, and when resolution comes it is delayed and hard-won. Periods of peace balance phases of struggle, and slow movements are represented as visions of beatitude. The struggle is not physical . . . it can only be moral, an attempt to win through to the light of the good after wrestling with the forces of darkness. Beethoven’s private despairs and triumphs confirm this.
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Wendy Carlos, Switched on Beethoven

Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) is similar to Anthony Burgess in that her career has been a combination of two disciplines, in this case music and technology. Carlos composed her first piece at the age of ten and built her first computer at age fourteen. As a child, she won a scholarship at the Westinghouse Science Fair for a project she made involving computers. At sixteen, she was altering the tuning on the family piano.
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At seventeen, Carlos built a music studio of her own and recorded electronic compositions based on the fundamentals of
musique concrète,
using tape recorders to manipulate found sounds. At Brown University, where Carlos studied both music and physics, she ran small, informal workshops to teach the basics of electronic music to her fellow students and colleagues. As a student at Columbia, specifically the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, she continued composing and championing the work of other electronic composers. To that end, she helped Leonard Bernstein assemble a program of electronic music for a concert at Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center. During this period, Carlos had two of her electronic pieces recorded. In the late 1960s, Carlos began working with engineer Bob Moog and was introduced to, and developed significant modifications for, the Moog synthesizer.

The works of Beethoven, Purcell, and Rossini performed on a Moog synthesizer seemed to Stanley Kubrick to be suitable musical accompaniment to the action in
A Clockwork Orange
, although he hadn’t originally planned on using synthesized recordings. Carlos’s producer, Rachel Elkind, sent Kubrick a copy of
Switched on Bach
and
The
Well-Tempered Synthesizer
after photography on the film had largely been completed. Intrigued by the timbre of the synthesizer, Kubrick immediately sent for Elkind and Carlos. The Moog realizations in
A Clockwork Orange
had unforeseen implications due largely to the popularity of Wendy Carlos’s
Switched on Bach
album, which appeared three years before Kubrick’s film.
Switched on Bach
was the first classical album to sell more than a million copies. Its appeal was broad; it was a must-have album for fans of both classical and pop music. Its influence was far reaching, inspiring numerous electronic interpretations of preexistent music and worrying musicians who feared that the Moog synthesizer could jeopardize their careers.
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It drew rave reviews from many, including famed Bach-interpreter Glenn Gould, who called
Switched on Bach
“the record of the decade,”
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and began what can be termed the age of the synthesizer.

The album introduced many listeners to the sound possibilities of electronic instruments and did so with the lively and tonal music of the Baroque. Up until the late 1960s, the synthesizer was only used at institutions that could afford a studio and the electronic instruments. Those who experimented with synthesizers were considered a fringe group dealing in “weird space sounds.”
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Switched on Bach
made Wendy Carlos famous and, in a larger sense, brought the synthesizer to the general public and lent it a sense of legitimacy as an instrument for new music.
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With the success of
Switched on Bach
, Carlos was approached about possibly scoring science fiction films liked
Marooned
(which ended up with a soundtrack of computer sound effects and little to no ambient music) but had her first collaboration in film with Stanley Kubrick. Carlos has the distinction of being one of the few composers who worked with Kubrick on more than one film; in the 1980s, she and producer Rachel Elkind recorded tracks for Kubrick’s
The Shining
. The success of
Switched on Bach
inspired many imitations and created a cottage industry for Carlos and Elkind. To date, Carlos has recorded
Switched on Bach 2
,
Switched on Brandenburgs
,
The Well-Tempered Synthesizer
,
Wendy Carlos by Request
, and
Switched on Bach 2000
.

Like the soundtrack to
2001: A Space Odyssey
, the soundtrack to
A Clockwork Orange
was also quite successful, spending thirty-one weeks on the Billboard Top 100.
65
Three months after the soundtrack to
A Clockwork Orange
debuted, Carlos released
[Wendy] Carlos’ Clockwork Orange
, a collection of music that was intended for the film but which was not finished or had not been used by Kubrick (see the track list below). This album spent nine weeks on the Billboard chart.
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It includes the composition
Timesteps
in its entirety and the Moog version of the overture to
La gazza ladra
“as we would have done it, had there been time,” say Chris Nelson and Wendy Carlos in the liner notes. The album also features an original composition called “Country Lane.” Carlos meant for this music to accompany the scene in which Alex’s former droogs beat and nearly drown him. The music weaves in themes from
La gazza ladra
, the
Dies Irae
plainchant (which Carlos would use again in
The Shining
), the sounds of actual rain, and a synthesized voice performing a distorted version of “Singin’ in the Rain.”
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Track lists of
Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
(1972) and
[Wendy] Carlos’ Clockwork Orange
(1972)
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Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
: 1972

Side A

1. Title Music from A Clockwork Orange (from Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary)
   

Composer: [Wendy] Carlos and Rachel Elkind

Tempi Music BMI

Performed by: [Wendy] Carlos 2:21

1. The Thieving Magpie (Abridged)
   

Composer: Gioacchino Rossini

Performance: A Deutsche Grammophon recording 5:57

1. Theme from A Clockwork Orange (Beethoviana)
   

Composer: [Wendy] Carlos and Rachel Elkind

Tempi Music BMI

Performed by: [Wendy] Carlos 1:44

1. Ninth Symphony, Second Movement—Abridged
   

Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven

Performance: A Deutsche Grammophon Recording 3:48

1. March from A Clockwork Orange (Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement—Abridged)
   

Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven, Arr. [Wendy] Carlos

Tempi Music BMI

Performed by: [Wendy] Carlos, Articulations by Rachel Elkind 7:00

1. William Tell Overture—Abridged
   

Composer: Gioacchino Rossini

Performed by [Wendy] Carlos, 1:17

Side B

1. Pomp and Circumstance March No. I
   

Composer: Sir Edward Elgar 4:28

1. Pomp and Circumstance March No. IV—Abridged
   

Composer: Sir Edward Elgar 1:33

1. Timesteps (Excerpt)
   

Composer: [Wendy] Carlos, Tempi Music BMI

Performed by: [Wendy] Carlos 4:13

1. Overture to the Sun
   

Composer: Terry Tucker, Mills Music ASCAP 1:40

1. I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper
   

Composer: Erika Eigen, Mills Music ASCAP

Performed by: Erika Eigen [no timing]

1. William Tell Overture—Abridged
   

Composer: Gioacchino Rossini

Performance: A Deutsche Grammophon Recording 2:58

1. Suicide Scherzo (Ninth Symphony, Second Movement—Abridged)
   

Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven: Arr. [Wendy] Carlos, Tempi Music BMI

Performed by: [Wendy] Carlos 3:07

1. Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement—Abridged
   

Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven Performance: A Deutsche Grammophon Recording 1:34

1. Singin’ in the Rain