Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey” is famous for among other things, its innovative use of classical music. Traditionally, film scores had been composed of music written specifically for the film itself. But in an interview with writer Michel Ciment, Kubrick stated, “However good our best film composers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a multitude of great orchestral music available from the past and from our own time? When you are editing a film, it’s very helpful to be able to try out different pieces of music to see how they work with the scene. . . . Well, with a little more care and thought, these temporary tracks can become the final score.”

Well for my money there’s never been music by any classical music composer let alone any other film composer that matched the beauty of film composer John Barry’s score for “Out of Africa”. So take that Stanley Kubrick.  Nevertheless, here’s a quiz that celebrates the use of classical music in some classic movies.

Answers to this quiz will appear next Monday, but if you just can’t wait to find out the answers til then, you can go to this page: http://www.sploofus.com/triviaquiz/classic_cinema_that_uses_classical_music.html 

It’s a great trivia web site. If you sign up with them, don’t worry I’ve found that  I don’t get any spam as a result. But please tell them “billkozy” sent ya. That’s my user name there. That way I’ll get lots of points worth no cash value whatsoever. Now on to this week’s quiz:

1. In that score for “2001: A Space Odyssey” the music from composers such as Aram Khachaturian and Johann Strauss II (“The Blue Danube”) is used, but it is especially famous for “Also sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss, a musical piece now inexorably linked to the film’s depiction of the wonder and awe of space. Kubrick had at first hired a very well-respected film composer to write original music for the film, but wound up not using it at all and then sneakily not telling the composer. The composer only discovered this when he finally saw the movie. Who was this 15-time Oscar nominated composer whom Kubrick had actually worked with on a previous movie?

2. Stanley Kubrick’s next film, “A Clockwork Orange” also employed classical music. Coincidentally, composer Wendy Carlos had already been writing a score to the Anthony Burgess novel when a friend of hers alerted her to a London newspaper article mentioning that Kubrick had begun filming an adaptation. Wendy was already famous because of her electronic music album “Switched-On Bach” that adapted various famous classical music pieces, and when she learned after more time passed that Kubrick had  finished shooting, she contacted him and offered her work. They met and Kubrick liked the combination of a classical sound with a futuristic sound that the score suggested. What name was Wendy Carlos recognized as on the film credits?

3. Bach’s music is used again in the 1973 Ingmar Bergman film classic “Cries and Whispers”: “Suite No. 5 for solo Cello in C Minor, 4th mvt ‘Sarabande’”. One of the most cinematically influential scenes in the film occurs when two of the sisters in the story share the inner thoughts that they’d kept secret for so long, but without any dialogue, just the music “Mazurka in A minor, Op.17/4″. Who is the famous classical music composer of this piece?

4. Five years later, in 1978, Ingmar Bergman used the same two composers in his film “Autumn Sonata”: Bach’s “Suite Nr 4, Ess-dur” and “Préludium Nr 2a, a-moll” by Chopin.  Frédéric Chopin was played by actor Hugh Grant in what live action feature biographical film of Chopin’s life that naturally uses his music in the score?

5. Ludwig von Beethoven himself is portrayed in no less than two autobiographical films: by Gary Oldman in 1994’s “Immortal Beloved” and by Ian Hart in the 2003 TV movie “Eroica,” both films benefitting from a score of Beethoven’s fantastic music. All of the following films are biographies of classical music composers except for one. Which is the film that doesn’t exist?

A. Jim Broadbent as W. S. Gilbert and Allan Corduner as Sir Arthur Sullivan in “Topsy Turvy”
B. Richard Chamberlain as Pyotr Tchaikovsky in “The Music Lovers”
C. Robert Alda as George Gershwin and Darryl Hickman as Ira Gershwin in “I Got Rhythm”
D. Robert Powell as Gustav Mahler in “Mahler”
E. Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt in “Lisztomania”

6.  The Gershwin Brothers movie is the bogus film above, although Woody Allen’s classic film “Manhattan” makes exquisite use of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Coincidentally, director Ken Russell directed three of the films in the previous question, including “Mahler”. Gustav Mahler’s music (“Adagietto From Symphony No.5″ and “Sehr Langsam Misterioso From Symphony No.3″) provide the score to the classic Italian cinema adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel “Death in Venice” (1971). What famed Italian director helmed that movie?

7. We turn to another Italian artist, this time a composer instead of a filmmaker: Antonio Vivaldi’s “Mandolin Concerto”  provides the score for what classic French cinema film by classic film director Francois Truffaut?

8. Truffaut’s fellow Frenchman Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” features prominently in the Dudley Moore/Bo Derek comedy “10″ by Blake Edwards, but it provides the more prominent overal soundtrack to what worldwide classic film of the Japanese cinema?

9. Milos Forman’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture “Amadeus” is a biodrama featuring the music of its subject Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In 1984, when the great film composer Maurice Jarre accepted his Academy Award for “Best Original Score” he jokingly thanked the Academy for not nominating “Amadeus” in the category, which of course it couldn’t since none of the music in the film is original but is instead that of Mozart’s. For what film did Jarre win his Oscar for Best Original Score that year?

10. For many people, the first time they heard Johann Pachelbel’s “Canon in D major” was in this classic movie, an Academy Award winner for Best Picture featuring this hauntingly melancholy piece throughout.

11. An Academy Award winner for Best Actor was Geoffrey Rush in 1996’s “Shine”. Rachmaninoff’s Rachmaninoff piano concerto 2 was part of the soundtrack along with the well-known “Flight of the Bumblebee.”  We’re all familiar with “Flight of the Bumblebee” but who was its composer?

12.   Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor” plays eerily in the classic Billy Wilder film “Sunset Boulevard.”  That same famous musical piece is featured in the classic animated feature film “Fantasia.” That very entertaining film features a few other of the classical music genre finest and most well-known works. Which of the following pieces is NOT part of the “Fantasia” soundtrack?

A. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by Felix Mendelssohn
B. “A Night on Bald Mountain” by Modest Mussorgsky
C. “Ave Maria” by Franz Schubert
D. “Rite of Spring” by Igor Stravinsky
E. “The Nutcracker Suite” by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

ANSWERS TO LAST MONDAY’S QUIZ OF THE WEEK, “Tune a Fish on Wry”:
1. I Am The Walrus
2. Vanilla Sky
3. Creeque Alley
4. Dolly Parton
5. Honky Cat
6. Jimmy Webb
7. Irving Berlin
8. Tangled Up In Blue
9. Stone Cold Crazy
10. Led Zeppelin