György Ligeti and 2001: A Space Odyssey

Source: The Guardian.

Kubrick famously didn’t get Ligeti’s permission to use his music. After initial rancour and threats of litigation, composer and film director eventually reached an uneasy accommodation. Each admired the other’s work and, perhaps, recognised their shared brand of near pathological perfectionism. As well as the Requiem, Kubrick also uses Ligeti’s cloudy orchestral masterpiece Atmosphères as the overture to 2001 and in the trippy Stargate sequence, the ethereal a cappella choral textures of Lux Aeterna to portray the emptiness of space, and an electronically altered version of his mini-opera Aventures/Nouvelles Aventures in the final scene.