Zwischen Heroismus und Antiheroismus Ligetis Mikropolyphonie in 2001 revisited

This article re-investigates the use of Ligeti’s second movement of his Requiem “Kyrie” (1963/1965) in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 — A Space Odyssey (1968). It does so in light of allusions to heroic models and the – obviously – heroic Zarathustra fanfare, both of which are pervasive in Kubrick’s film. The article aims at determining compositional means that refer to heroic ideas in avant-garde music of the 1960s, a time period in which radically new and skeptical views of heroism came to the fore that also affected the articulation of the heroic in music