2001: A Space Odyssey (soundtrack) Like North's score, Cordell's work was recorded at the now demolished Anvil, Denham studios. "2001" is particularly remembered for using pieces of Johann Strauss II's best-known waltz, "The Blue Danube", during the extended space-station docking and Lunar landing sequences. This is the result of the association that Kubrick made between the spinning motion of the satellites and the dancers of waltzes. It also makes use of the opening from the Richard Strauss tone poem "Also sprach Zarathustra" performed by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Herbert von Karajan. The use of Strauss's "Zarathustra" may be a reference to the theme of
2001: A Space Odyssey (film) level of being that represents the next stage of human evolution. The film also conveys what some viewers have described as a sense of the sublime and numinous. Ebert writes in his essay on "2001" in "The Great Movies": In a book on architecture, Gregory Caicco writes that "Space Odyssey" illustrates how our quest for space is motivated by two contradictory desires, a "desire for the sublime" characterized by a need to encounter something totally other than ourselves—"something numinous"—and the conflicting desire for a beauty that makes us feel no longer "lost in space," but at home. Similarly, an article