Kubrick

* Re “Kubrick Confronted Holocaust--Indirectly,” Commentary, March 12: The absurdity of the current academic fad of deconstructionism is exposed in Geoffrey Cocks’ homage to Stanley Kubrick, in which Cocks maintains that Bela Bartok’s “Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste” (composed in 1936, not 1937) was written as a protest to Nazism. If Cocks has proof, he is sitting on a musicological discovery of major importance. It is so very easy to ascribe anti-Nazi sentiments to virtually anything composed by a refugee, if indeed Bartok was one, during those horrible years.

In “The Shining,” Kubrick used Bartok’s adagio movement (which the composer never labeled “night music” as Cocks alleges) for the same reason he used pieces by the brilliant Krzysztof Penderecki, because they served the mood and atmosphere of his narrative.

JEROME KLEINSASSER

Professor of Music

Cal State Bakersfield