The work of a film composer is not always a smooth road to recognition and fame. The conversations with the director who tries to explain to you with homemade and erratic terminology the style he wants for the music of the film, the hard hours of invocation to the muses after watching one and a hundred times the same scene, the feverish work against the clock so that the production is finished; all this is often spoiled by an incomprehensible editing session in which the audio tracks come and go, fighting with each other in a chaotic and irrational way to find a place in the sound spectrum of the muddled tapes.
And that’s not the worst of it. Famous was the trick that the genius Kubrick perpetrated on poor Alex North on the day of the premiere of “2oo1”. I don’t even want to imagine the tormenting emotions he felt when he saw with his own ears that the images of the film were not accompanied by his excellent music composed with all his illusions and efforts. The great genius had not even bothered to phone him to tell him that he preferred the music of other composers (let’s not give too much thought to the fact that one of them had even flirted with the Nazi regime -a certain Richard who is always confused with the family of waltz makers whose second member is also present in the work- because the artistic work is independent of the moral values of the artist).
If by default North suffered, by excess did the great master György Ligeti, who also knew nothing of Stanley’s shenanigans before hearing his “Atmospheres” and “Lux Aeterna” on the big screen. The displeasure earned him several days in bed. In all this Kubrick felt no remorse. On the contrary, he thought he was doing him a favor by making him known in the USA. (¿?)
Saving the distances and without wanting to compare myself with these two towering composers, I leave you to listen to a fragment composed for a film and rejected for not fitting in the line that the director had in mind. It is not critical. The film composer has to be willing to work as a team and in favor of the story that the film is telling. Anyway, I was very satisfied after composing and producing. A certain phrase dictated to me by one of my composition teachers, the absent master Román Alís, I still remember and confirm it as a great truth: “one of the essential qualities of the composer is to know how to erase”.
Here I leave the file for you to judge for yourselves.
