Subject-Position and Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) in Stanley Kubrick’sThe Shining (1980) (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Twentieth-century art music composed by Bartók, Ligeti, and Penderecki constitutes a large portion of the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s novel The Shining. This music was not written for the film, and the use of these pieces might leave listeners doubtful as to the legitimacy of a connection between them and the scenes in the movie they were used to enhance. However, in the case of the Bartók work excerpted in the film—Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936)—an analysis of the subject-position of the music allows for another interpretation. Eric Clarke identifies subject-position in music as “the way in which characteristics of the musical material shape the general character of a listener’s response or engagement,” a definition based on earlier explorations of subject-position in film studies. My analysis of the subject-position of Bartók’s piece and the scenes in which excerpts of the work appear in The Shining reveals similarities in their potential effect on an audience member. In this paper I show that the first, second, and fourth movements of the piece place the listener outside the music as an observer, while the third movement—the only one used in The Shining—pulls the listener inward, due in part to its unique form and elements of “night music.” The paper further explores the relationship between the subject-position of this movement and the subject-position of the scenes in The Shining accompanied by excerpts from it.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Sarah Lucas completed her PhD in musicology at the University of Iowa in 2018. Her dissertation, “Fritz Reiner and the Legacy of Béla Bartók’s Orchestral Music in the United States,” is based on archival research carried out in the U.S. and Hungary, where she conducted research with the support of a Fulbright Award. Her master’s work at the University of Missouri culminated in her thesis “Béla Bartók and the Pro-Musica Society: A Chronicle of Piano Recitals in Eleven American Cities during his 1927-1928 Tour.”