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
Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey machines". Kubrick was also confronted with the fact that, during the production of the film, the US and USSR had agreed not to put any nuclear weapons into outer space by signing the Outer Space Treaty. Alexander Walker in a book he wrote with Kubrick's assistance and authorisation, states that Kubrick eventually decided that as nuclear weapons the bombs had "no place at all in the film's thematic development", now being an "orbiting red herring" which would "merely have raised irrelevant questions to suggest this as a reality of the twenty-first century". In the Canadian TV documentary "2001 and Beyond",