Silences in 2001: A Space Odyssey (25 Years Later!)

 What I remember most from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 is either music or silence. Nothing else much. But its music haunts me. It was all by design. Brilliance of Stanley Kubrick.

"...Silence was also a vital component of the film’s soundtrack. Back in 1960, Kubrick had told Charles Reynolds, ‘It is almost as important to decide where there will be no music, for the constant use of a film score generally deadens the ear, lessening the effectiveness of music when it will be most wanted.’ Kubrick was sensitive to the audience’s capacity for sound, and their threshold of fatigue – factors that demand the director’s attention to the entire disposition and composition of the soundtrack. Kubrick knew that silence when well placed – perhaps akin to the negative space in visual compositions, or the vastness of space in this film – could affect the audience as greatly as music.

Kubrick’s decision not to use an original score for 2001 – a film he must have recognized as a new height of technical and artistic achievement and innovation – marked an aesthetic advance in his use of music. The result was what one critic called a ‘modernist musical’. Another hailed it as ‘less a dramatic narrative than a concerto for film images and orchestra’..."