Listening to Stanley Kubrick (36 page)

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.
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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.
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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 notes 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.”
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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.”

De Natura Sonoris No. 1
reappears as Wendy, who intends to escape with Danny on the Sno-cat, runs out to check on the machine. To her horror, she finds that the Sno-cat has been disabled. Here, Kubrick and Stainforth layered the excerpt from
De Natura Sonoris No. 1
—much of the cue used for Danny’s encounter with the twins in the hallway—with part of the prickly section of
Polymorphia.
The accents from
Sonoris
provide unexpected jolts (including percussive hits on timpani, drums, gong, and piano) while the pizzicato and discomfort of the high strings in
Polymorphia
perfectly mirror Wendy’s rising panic. The gong crash brings us to Jack who is sleeping in the walk-in pantry. The music fades away, and there is a knock at the door.

Penderecki’s
De Natura Sonoris No. 2
appears a few times in the film. The first time it fades in just as
The Awakening of Jacob
is fading out. Jack has just had a terrible nightmare at his desk, and Danny walks in, sucking his thumb. Wendy, seeing that the boy is injured, blames Jack, and the music grows more dissonant as she screams at him. Jack, who believes he is innocent, stalks to the Gold Room, muttering angrily to himself, his physical lashing out coinciding with one of the entrances in the piece. He looks for alcohol in the bar and when he realizes there is none he intones, “I’d give my goddamned soul for just a glass of beer.” High notes in the slide whistle (
Flauto a coulisse
) and musical saw (
Sega
), slide downward as they die away, and the cue ends.

In the second instance, the cue begins as Hallorann drives the Sno-cat to the Overlook. It begins with a percussive sting on the cymbals, followed by the high notes in the slide whistle and saw. The notes glissando downward and die away, as the violas enter with a long-held note. The string instruments enter and in some cases, the notes stay sustained, while in others the instruments split into tone clusters. The extended techniques on the instruments are unsettling to the ear, even startling, and add tension to the scene. The cue ends as we return to Hallorann in the Sno-cat.

The first time Penderecki’s
Polymorphia
is heard it plays once through entirely, then begins again immediately and fades into
De Natura Sonoris No. 1
. It is a very long cue and, like the two
De Natura Sonoris
pieces, experiments with sounds and extended techniques.
Polymorphia
was composed in 1961. Written for forty-eight string instruments, it is a continuation of the sound experiments with strings Penderecki had begun with
Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima
. Like the earlier piece, Penderecki used a system of graphic notation he devised to convey the extended techniques he desired. At one point in the middle of the piece, half of the violins and all of the violas are playing from wavy-line notation that could be an EKG or an EEG. In addition to glissandi, the sound landscape of the piece also includes tone clusters—often eight different notes played simultaneously—and percussive plucking or tapping of the strings. This particular piece has a section of prickly pizzicato sounds and sections played
legno battuto
(striking the string with the wood part of the bow) that are especially uncanny.

Wendy locks Danny in the apartment so she can go talk to Jack. When she tells Danny to stay put, Tony answers her. Walking down to the lounge where he has been writing, Wendy’s movements are accompanied by low, unrelenting notes in the strings. Going to his desk, she finds that Jack has typed “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again on what looks like hundreds of pieces of paper. This discovery is accompanied by a long-held high note in a dozen violins. The violas begin frantic glissandi, completely uncoordinated, and are soon joined by some of the violins. The glissandi grow in volume and intensity, until Jack shows up. Some of the players then use their fingertips to tap the strings behind the bridge, and some hit the strings with the wood of the bow rather than the hair. Kubrick cuts to Danny, who seems to be hearing what Jack is saying and who is experiencing the vision of the blood coming from the elevator. The prickly section ends, and the long-held clusters return, expanding and contracting as Jack backs Wendy up the stairs. He begins threatening her, and she swings a bat at him to keep him away. Long, wide tremolos are heard with accents as Jack reaches for her and she hits him in the hand and then in the head.
Polymorphia
begins again as she drags his semi-conscious body to the pantry, locking him in. It continues to play as they speak through the door to each other. He tries to bargain with her and play on her sympathies as the glissandi begin. She tells him she’s going to take Danny to Sidewinder (a nearby town) in the Sno-cat, but he informs her—as the prickly section begins again—that she’s “not going anywhere.” The piece fades into
De Natura Sonoris No. 1
as she runs out into the snow to check on the Sno-cat, which Jack has sabotaged. Part of the prickly section of this piece is layered with
De Natura Sonoris No. 1
as Wendy discovers the sabotage.