Also Sprach Zarathustra

If you can watch 2001: A Space Odyssey 10 times for the story, you can watch it 100 times for the music and the complementing visuals (don't ask me how I came up with the numbers, you get the point!). The music selection is a mix of hopeful, happy pieces, and very dark, eerie, confusing and frightening pieces.
The choice of the music is great, both for augmenting the visuals, and for the philosophical reasons. It is intense and hopeful at the same time.

After watching the movie, the music gets fixated with a new imagination and mood that haunts you forever (in a good way!). It is almost as if the music was incidental composed just for 2001. Three of the songs that are used over and over are "Also Sprach Zarthustra" and "The Blue Danube Waltz" and "The Atmospheres".


Also Sprach Zarathustra is a piece by Richard Strauss. The choice of this piece is apt in the sense that the book "Thus Spake Zarathustra" by Neitsczhe discusses the concept of current man as a bridge between an ape and an "overman". The film in some sense depicts this connection between the ape in the beginning, and the "star-child" or the foetus like structure shown in the movie at the end, which is sybmolic of the overman (I think!).

The most striking part , and probably the part you identify the piece by, is a three pair progression you notice in the beginning of the piece. Strauss used a C Major followed by a C minor (a rarely used progression), which creates heavy tension filled atmosphere in the first two lines. In the third line however, he returns to a C Major followed by the F Major, which is a well-known "nice sounding" sequence, and you can feel the release in tension, albiet only for a short time, immediately after you listen to the F. The first two lines, although use similar chords, are subtly different as the second line uses the second inversion of Cm where as the first line uses the first inversion (this is my analysis from the piano solo score presented here, and when I say inversion, I ignored the bass note).

The Blue Danube, composed by Johann Strauss II, is the other song you can't miss. All the scientific moments, and the achievements in the movie, especially the space travel scenes. The music is a waltz, and we can feel man waltzing with success when he luxuriously basks in the technological advances he made right from using bone as a weapon to the construction of advanced space ships.

Most importantly, I have discovered a great musician after I watched this movie. Gyorgy Legeti. He is a revolutionary music composer, who has transcended the commonly observable regularities in music. His music is fresh and genius in terms of both ideas and execution. The two major tracks in the film composed by him can scare a person to death, even without visuals. The most scary piece is the Requiem. The other piece, Atmospheres, is not outright scary, but creates a very dark and eerie effect.

Gyorgy Ligeti is well known for his piece (not from the movie) Musica Ricercarta. This set of 12 pieces is composed such that the first piece uses only one note 'A' (of course, uses only one occurrence of 'D', at the end, just to mark the entrance in to part two may be?). The second piece uses 3 notes, and the third uses four, and so on, where the eleventh piece is composed in complete chromatic scale. Musica Ricercarta - I is the definition of a piece that can be both complex and simple at the same time. It is just a single pitch (A), played in different time intervals and octaves. It is however, so amazing that such a full scale piece can be created using just a single note!

The whole music selection in the movie is great. However, these are the must-listen-before-one-dies songs:

The Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss II
Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss

Here is a special section for Liegti:

Atmospheres by Gyorgy Ligeti
Requiem by Gyorgy Ligeti
Musica Ricercarta 1 by Gyorgy Ligeti. This song is composed using just one note all through - A - and only the last note is D.
Musica Ricercarta 11 by Gyorgy Ligeti. This song is composed using all the 11 notes in the chromatic scale. You are free to search and explore all the intermediate pieces (2 - 10).
Artikulation Just to sample his genius.