My wife and I were trying to decide which movie from the Criterion Channel to watch while we dined in anticipation of the new year. “Why don’t you pick The Shining”, she told me. “It’s kind of a New Year’s movie”. (She had in mind the crowd photo at the end of the film — which is dated July 4.)
For some reason it was only during this viewing that I took notice of the music, despite having seen the film several times at home and in theatres. “Oh, it’s Bartók”, I blurted out as Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd first wandered through the Overlook Hotel’s vertiginous garden maze.
When The Shining was released in 1980, the postwar avant-garde was already in retreat; various tonal restorationist sub-genres, with East Coast minimalism at the forefront, on the other hand, were all in the ascendant. That reminded me of an epiphany I had over a decade ago, during Southwest Chamber Music’s three-year John Cage retrospective: what the postwar avant-garde had sought was not to alienate listeners, but to forge a new world wherein a composer from anywhere could communicate to any listener in a musical Esperanto that would be immediately intelligible and unimpeded by barriers, physical and cultural. No longer would music be associated with the by-products of suspect ideologies that had led to the most destructive war in European history. In the new, rational Atomic Age, music could indeed be a universal language.
These ambitions were never achieved, particularly because of animosity from the cultural establishments of the United States and the Soviet Union, which is somewhat ironic given that both nations espoused beliefs that on the surface seemed sympathetic to this sort of utopianism. Ultimately the music of the postwar avant-garde did attain a kind of universality: as part of the musical grammar of filmic horror. William Bolcom once wrote in the New York Review of Books that Boulez — and by extension the music he represented — had “terrorized” the musical establishment of the mid-20th century. According to Bolcom’s way of thinking, the excerpts from works by Bartók, Ligeti, and Penderecki that magnify the horror of The Shining are probably especially fitting.