If you’re a Stanley Kubrick fan, you may already have experienced that tremendous link between space and music.
The opening scene of the film is visually exciting on its own, but when underscored by Richard Strauss’s beginning of his composition titled Also Sprach Zarathustra, it transforms the impact of the visuals. Its presence is as arresting as the sun bursting over the outline of the earth.
This is not the only music used by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, his choice of music was so keenly made that many people thought the soundtrack had been composed specifically for the film.
Gregory Ligeti’s music from four different scores, including Atmospheres and Adventures, enhances the outer space, otherworldliness, and fear of the scenes. Each of these pieces that Kubrick selected was part of a temp track that, in the end, he decided was better suited to the film than any new music.
Classical Music and Outer Space
1. Gustav Holst’s The Planets and Space
One of the greatest pieces of orchestral music is Gustav Holst’s The Planets Suite (Op.32). Holst composed the seven-section tone poem from 1914-16, right in the center of one of the world’s most horrific conflicts.
Each of the sections corresponds to a planet, beginning with Mars (The Bringer of War) and concluding with Neptune (The Mystic). Holst was adamant that there was no programmatic element to the music, but that the suite was inspired by astrology as opposed to astronomy.
What you hear in each of the planets is their personalities, not the Roman deities. Originally composed for piano, four hands, it was with the help of two long-standing colleagues from St. Paul’s Girls School, where Holst was the senior music master, that the suite was orchestrated.
It received its first, rather hurried premiere in the final weeks of World War One, with Sir Adrian Boult conducting.
2. Terry Riley’s Sun Rings and NASA Space Sounds
Terry Riley, an American composer and performer, has composed a bewildering array of music that always seems to offer a new perspective. In 2000, as part of the NASA Arts Programme, Riley was asked to compose a piece for the Kronos (String) Quartet.
What’s particularly interesting about this project that Riley titled Sun Rings is that it incorporates recordings of sounds from space that have been collected by NASA over forty years. It is scored for string quartet and chorus with visuals supplied by Willie Williams.
Sun Rings is perhaps best experienced either live or with headphones on. Its effect is absorbing as you feel as if you could be in space. Members of the quartet trigger the static radio emissions that originally emanate from the plasma that surrounds the planets.
Riley divides the work into ten sections that comprise a spacescape with a duration of around 73 minutes.
3. David Bedford’s Space-Inspired Work
A name you don’t encounter as readily as you used to is that of David Bedford. Born in Middlesex, England in 1947, Bedford ably combined teaching with composition, often working fluently across genres.
This included his work with Kevin Ayres’s rock group called The Whole World. Some of his compositions took inspiration from space and science fiction.
Nearly always, they brilliantly employed unconventional performance techniques, which occasionally caused controversy amongst some established composers of the day. One such piece from 1971 he called The Song of the White Horse; Star Clusters, Nebulae & Places in Devon.
The work is scored for Choir and Brass with text taken from astronomical sources as well as signposts from around Devon. Few recordings are currently available, but it is a powerful work that elegantly blends simplicity of style with a certain rural Englishness.
Other space-inspired works include Music For Albion Moonlight and Some Stars Above Magnitude 2.9.
4. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Sirius and Space Rhythms
German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen claimed more than a close association with the cosmos, stating on more than one occasion that he came from Sirius.
The piece Stockhausen called Sirius (1975-79) is typically unusual in its scoring, employing eight channels of electronic sound alongside a bass clarinet, trumpet, soprano, and bass.
Sirius isn’t quite an opera, but that’s as close as categorization will come. The plot is constructed around the arrival of four ambassadors from a planet that orbits Sirius to Earth. They bring with them an important message to humankind.
Stockhausen often gave somewhat cryptic responses when asked to detail his work. This composition fuses the natural rhythms of nature on earth with the rhythms of the stars.
5. Thomas Adès’s Polaris and the North Star
Polaris (2010), by Thomas Ades, was composed for the opening of the New World’s Symphony new hall at Miami Beach, Florida. The title comes from what we often refer to as the North Star or the Pole Star. This star has provided navigation for millennia for seafaring folk and explorers.
The score is for a large orchestra with a duration of 14 minutes. The material for the piece is described as magnetic, following each playing of the material, it returns to an anchoring pitch that it seems unable to escape from. There is an optional video that runs simultaneously with the score, devised by Tal Rosner.
6. Kelly-Marie Murphy’s Dark Energy and Einstein’s Theory
Dark Energy is a work from 2007 by Kelly Marie-Murphy. Murphy explains that the piece is inspired by Einstein’s theory from 1917 of dark energy. This theory was eventually confirmed many years later by theoretical physicists as a way of explaining why the universe doesn’t just collapse inwards on itself.
This single-movement composition is scored for a string quartet and uses a variety of contemporary string techniques. It is a virtuosic piece whose momentum leads to its own destruction.
7. Olivier Messiaen’s Des Canyons Aux Étoiles and Celestial Voices
Des Canyons Aux Étoiles (1974), by French composer Olivier Messiaen, encompasses his spirituality and wonderment at the universe. Commissioned in 1971 by Alice Tully to celebrate the US bicentennial in 1976.
It is the inspiration that Messiaen derives from the beauty of Utah, the bird calls, and the rock colours to the celestial voices of the stars and the cosmos. The work is divided into twelve titled sections, with the whole piece lasting somewhere in the region of 100 minutes.
In section three, we hear the stars themselves speak and utter the terrifying words sent to King Belshazzar in a disturbed dream telling him that the days of his kingdom were numbered.
The opening of Part II, section six is haunting. It is composed for a solo French Horn and is extremely difficult to play. Messiaen titled this section Interstellar Call. It is perhaps in this part of the work that we are reminded of the vastness of the universe as the horn call travels through unknown regions of space.
At the same time, there is a grain of hopefulness that resonates through the piece and places us as tiny beings amongst a cold, unforgiving universe.