2001: A Space Odyssey (film) had earlier chosen as temporary music for the film. North did not learn that his score had been abandoned until he saw the film's premiere. The initial MGM soundtrack album release contained none of the material from the altered and uncredited rendition of Ligeti's "Aventures", used a different recording of "Also sprach Zarathustra" (performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm) from that heard in the film, and a longer excerpt of "Lux aeterna" than that in the film. In 1996, Turner Entertainment/Rhino Records released a new soundtrack on CD that included the material from "Aventures" and restored the
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