2001: A Space Odyssey United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. A musical score was commissioned for the film and composed by Alex North, but Kubrick ultimately decided not to use it, in favour of the classical pieces he used as guides during shooting. These included Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra", Johann Strauss' "Blue Danube Waltz", and music by twentieth-century composers Aram Khachaturian and Gyorgy Ligeti. Toward the end of the sequence where the HAL 9000 computer is lobotomized, it begins to play the 1892 song "Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)" by Harry Dacre, which Clarke
2001: A Space Odyssey (soundtrack) It is subsequently heard when an ape first learns to use a tool, and when Bowman is transformed into the Star-Child at the end of the film. "Zarathustra" thus acts as a bookend for the beginning and end of the film, and as a motif signifying evolutionary transformations, first from ape to man, then from man to Star-Child. This piece was originally inspired by the philosopher Nietzsche's book of the same name which alludes briefly to the relationship of ape to man and man to Superman. "The Blue Danube" appears in two intricate and extended space travel sequences as well