Kubrick’s Unorthodox Music Method
To understand how the score for The Shining could have been so different, you first have to understand director Stanley Kubrick’s unique—and often frustrating—approach to film music. Unlike most directors who hire a composer to write a bespoke score,
Kubrick preferred to use pre-existing pieces of music. For his previous films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, he would edit scenes using classical music as a temporary placeholder, only to find he preferred the temp track to anything a composer could create. He famously argued, “However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms.” This philosophy created a challenging environment for any composer hired to work with him, as they were often competing with the ghosts of musical legends.
A Tale of Two Composers
The story of The Shining's score is really about two different composers and two radically different approaches. The first composer was a Hollywood legend, while the second was an electronic music pioneer. Kubrick’s final choice would define the film's terrifying atmosphere. Initially, some film historians and fans believed that a titan of the industry like Jerry Goldsmith was considered, a composer known for his powerful, traditional orchestral scores for films like Alien and The Omen. A Goldsmith score would have been masterful, but also more conventional. However, Kubrick’s process was far more complex. He didn’t just want a traditional score; he wanted a soundscape.
The Synthesizer Pioneers Who Got the Call
Instead, Kubrick turned to Wendy Carlos and her producer Rachel Elkind, with whom he had previously collaborated on A Clockwork Orange. Carlos was a trailblazer in the world of electronic music, known for her groundbreaking work with the Moog synthesizer. She and Elkind were tasked with creating a full electronic score for the film. They spent a great deal of time composing hours of original music, crafting unsettling electronic textures and even reinterpreting classical pieces, like Hector Berlioz's “Symphonie fantastique,” to create the main title theme. They were creating a truly novel sound for a horror film, blending synthesis with classical motifs to build a sense of otherworldly dread.
A Shock at the Premiere
Here's where Kubrick’s infamous method came into play. After Carlos and Elkind delivered their complete score, Kubrick did what he often did: he largely discarded it. He decided to use only a few of their original pieces, including the iconic main title and the atmospheric cue “Rocky Mountains.” The rest of the film was filled with the avant-garde classical music he had been using as a temp track, featuring jarring, dissonant pieces by composers like Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti. In a shocking turn, Carlos and Elkind only discovered that most of their work had been cut when they attended the film’s premiere in 1980. The majority of their meticulously crafted score went unheard by the public for decades, until Carlos released it in 2005 on a collection called Rediscovering Lost Scores.
