Various Artists – Clockwork Orange Sountrack (1972)

Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange made a huge impression on me when I first saw it years ago. The film was full of extreme violence that I'm really not a fan of, but at the same time, the film had been made in such an absurd way that I could only adore the audiovisual aesthetics of the film. The film is based on Anthony Burgess' book with the same name. I read the book for a school project when I was about 16 years old and the book even intensified my fascination with the story. The story takes place in a slightly dystopian future where violent street gangs are conducting their bad deeds around town after which the main character Alex is arrested and conditioned to feel sick every time he tries to be involved in any violent activities. The unfortunate side-effect is that he's also conditioned to feel sick when he hears his favourite artist, Ludwig van Beethoven's music.



The soundtrack picks up the themes of the film perfectly by including lots of classical music, but many of the songs are played by a synthesiser pioneer Wendy Carlos and thus the classical songs get ominous futuristic sound. Also, the visual world of the film is filled with futuristic and brutalist architecture of the 1960's. I'm really into brutalist architecture myself, and I've visited Thamesmead in London to see the council estates where the movie was filmed. What makes Clockwork Orange such a great film is the fact that it resembles exactly the kind of future you could predict at the beginning of 1970's based on the things around you. One big part of it is the music. I really love this album!

The album starts with Clockwork Orange theme, which is Carlos' version of Henry Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary. The buzzing synthesisers are a perfect background for the dystopian future where the movie takes place. It's scary, yet hauntingly beautiful. This song is followed by the a passage of The Thieving Magpie, Rossini's classical song. Then we hear some more of Carlos' excellent film score in Beethoviana. The electronic instruments heard in this song really sound like they're from the future. I can really see that in the 70's especially they were something that not many people had ever heard before. Next up, is some actual Beethoven. The second part of his 9th symphony is gloriously grandiloquent. After seeing the film, I've been a huge fan of good old Ludwig Van. This is followed by a passage of Beethoven's Ode to Joy sung through an electronic vocoder. This kind of robot singing must've been unheard of at the time of this film. Then we hear the amazing William Tell Overture with synthesisers. The song appears in the film in a sex scene that is fast forwarded along with the pacing of the song. The second half starts with a passage from The Land of Hope and Glory, which has become somewhat of a second national anthem of England. This is followed by some more Sir Edward Elgar before we move on to some more amazing Wendy Carlos. It's only after this song that the soundworld changes completely. Overture to the Sun sounds like medieval piper music, but it also has these modern style sounds. Then we get on to showtunes such as I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper by Erika Eigen. After some more Beethoven and Carlos, the album ends with the beautifully lighthearted song Singin' in the Rain, which in the film is used in a particularly violent scene to create a fantastic contrast of moods.

Kubrick had originally asked if he could use parts of Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother in the film, but Roger Waters denied cutting his song in pieces. You can see the album with the cow cover in the record shop scene of the film. Carlos wasn't too pleased with Kubrick leaving out parts of her music and she refused to work with Kubrick until The Shining many years later. I can only wonder how beautiful scores we could've heard in some other Kubrick films if this hadn't been the case.

Even though you can argue that Clockwork Orange is a story about future, dystopia, violence, conditioning, and gangs, it is also a story about music. Both the book and the film make a big deal out of music and in a very intriguing way. I can't think of any better solution for the soundtrack than Wendy Carlos' synthesiser classical and therefore I claim that this is one of the greatest film soundtracks of all times.

Listen to the album on Youtube.