Midweek music break: The music of "The Shining"
Last night was our monthly film club at the library. For spooky season, I screened the Stanley Kubrick classic, The Shining . Like many people, I have seen all the iconic scenes. But I'd never watched the entire film. Well. Now I know why there are obsessives about this movie. In literary terms, the film is as dense with meaning and allusion as is James Joyce's Ulysses . Kubrick was a master of using music to not only serve as background music, but as propelling the narrative. In The Shining , the majority of the music he used was the jarring and atonal music composed after the Second World War. Such music arose as a reaction to the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, to a world laid waste by genocide. It is not easy music. It is disjointed, jarring, with nothing to hold onto. No tonality, no melody, no hummable choruses. One listens to this music and is exposed to a raw intensity which mirrored the disjointed times. It is not my favorite type of music, but there are pie...
