Thanks in particular to its use in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the “sunrise” fanfare from Also sprach Zarathustra became a self-contained piece of music, in Kubrick’s film heralding The Dawn of Man, and widely used in popular culture as a signifier of impending glories.

Strauss wrote Also sprach Zarathustra (“Thus Spake Zarathustra”) in 1896, a musical response to the philosophical treatise of the same title by Friedrich Nietzsche, which was in turn a response to a crisis in European thought — the rise of science, the demise of religion. Strauss’s work is not an attempt to trace the narrative of Nietzsche’s work, rather to reflect its competing forces — nature, mankind, chaos, life, joy.

The piece was hugely influential, including such works as Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, which uses the same triad of notes, as well as in the film music of John Williams, especially — and appropriately — his Superman fanfare.