ABSTRACT
Like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby of a few years before, and in keeping with a central lineage of horror films extending back through Psycho to the earliest contributions to the genre, Stanley Kubrick’s cult 1980 film The Shining is notable for a score that makes abundant use of radically dissonant, sonorously extreme modernist musical languages. In fact, with this film’s renowned selection of pre-existing compositions by Béla Bartók, György Ligeti, and Krzysztof Penderecki, it is tempting to say that this central musical convention of the horror genre reaches a kind of apogee, as measured in terms of pervasiveness and prominence. As Kevin Donnelly suggests in the most significant published study of the score, the importance of this whole array of avant-garde music to the overall experience of The Shining demands a change in the usual descriptions of film’s multi-media interactions. In this case, he rightly implies, any reference to “background music” falls so obviously short of the music’s presence and power, scene by harrowing scene, that we are forced to think, instead, in the exactly opposite terms of “foreground music.”1
