Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films by Christine Lee Gengaro (review)

Christine Gengaro’s book is a comprehensive overview and analysis of American film director Stanley Kubrick’s musical practices. A notable extension of her dissertation research on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (“‘It Was Lovely Music That Came to My Aid’: Music’s Contribution to the Narrative of the Novel, Film and Play, A Clockwork Orange” [Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2005]), it fills an important gap in the bibliography of film studies, Kubrick studies, and film score studies, locating important sources for research on Kubrick’s soundtracks and highlighting some of the major scholarly arguments and concerns surrounding his work. This book is a compendium, pulling together diverse materials on the director’s approach to film scoring: Kubrick biographies, commentaries on his craft, articles on the effects of his musical choices, and analyses of the scores themselves, including composition and reception histories for the many pre-existing pieces he used. In short, Listening to Stanley Kubrick should be any scholar’s first stop when embarking upon a study of the auteur’s musical choices.

Gengaro begins with a chapter on Kubrick’s first projects (Day of the Fight [1951], The Flying Padre [1951], Fear and Desire [1953], The Seafarers [1953], Killer’s Kiss [1955], The Killing [1956], and Paths of Glory [1957]), most of the music for which was a result of collaboration with film and television composer Gerald Fried. (Nathaniel Shilkret composed the music for The Flying Padre, and the score for The Seafarers was drawn from a library of prerecorded stock cues.) Fried’s compositions were highly thematic and leitmotivic, and while he and Kubrick worked well together at the start, their philosophies regarding the merits of original scores versus compilation scores diverged greatly over time; by Paths of Glory, Fried felt he had to “justify every note” of his work to Kubrick. The book’s second chapter covers the projects that occurred after his collaboration with Fried, through which Kubrick became adept at employing pre-existing tunes in his soundtracks—Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Gengaro also includes Full Metal Jacket (1987) in this chapter, reserving the remaining bulk of her book for dedicated chapters on Kubrick’s five best known works. In following her treatment of Dr. Strangelove directly with Full Metal Jacket, she draws an equivalency between Kubrick’s intentional use of pre-existing popular music as a cultural reference in both, particularly because the director abandons his well-known preference for classical or art music in this later film.

In the final five chapters, which cover, individually, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Gengaro structures her report to thoroughly explore several important categories of information on each film. These include: an overview of the film’s conception, creative process, and plot; a summary of Kubrick’s approach to the soundtrack, identifying both successful and strained lines of communication between himself and his musical collaborators; an analysis and history of each major musical piece—pre-existing or newly composed—with indications of when each is heard within the film; and a consideration of the cultural meanings attached to the music he chose. By approaching each chapter in this way, Gengaro provides the reader with not only the particularities of Kubrick’s soundtracks, but also with the story of how his approach to scoring, preferring compilation scores over traditionally- and originally-composed scores, developed over the years.

Kubrick has enjoyed a storied reputation as an auteur with singular creative proclivities. In no hurry to bring his major projects to completion, he had his hands firmly embedded in every aspect of the production process. When it came to crafting a film’s soundtrack, he had especially high standards. Even...