YT/loomyaire: "Stanley Kubrick originally intended composer Alex North to score 2001. North had written a main title theme similar to Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra." Had Kubrick decided to stay with North, this is what you would've seen and heard."

wiki: "Stanley Kubrick commissioned North to write the score for his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but decided not to use it in favor of previously recorded classical music. It is divided into two movements, corresponding to the first and second chapters of the film.

North, unaware that Kubrick had decided not to use the score in his film, was "devastated" at the 1968 New York City premiere screening of 2001 not to hear his work, and later offered this account of his experience: "Well, what can I say? It was a great, frustrating experience, and despite the mixed reaction to the music, I think the Victorian approach with mid-European overtones was just not in keeping with the brilliant concept of Clarke and Kubrick."

On hearing the score as it might have been in the film, film scholar Gene Phillips argued that "it is difficult to see how North's music would have been an improvement on the background music that Kubrick finally chose for the film." In his notes for the Jerry Goldsmith recording (see below), however, Kevin Mulhall argues that "there is no doubt that 2001 would have been better if Kubrick had used North's music. Even if one likes some of the choices Kubrick made for certain individual scenes, the eclectic group of classical composers employed by the director... resulted in a disturbing melange of sounds and styles overall.

Alex North's main title theme has a striking resemblance to the "Also sprach Zarathustra" piece that would eventually be used in the final film. The original theme was listed on North's original score sheet as "Bones". It would have been used three times in the film, once as the main title music, and again during the opening "Dawn of Man" sequence as an ape smashes skeletal remains (hence the score sheet's title), and finally at the end of the film during the "Starchild" scene. This theme music made its public debut in early 1993 as part of the Telarc compilation CD Hollywood's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2, by Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra, and there it was titled "Fanfare for 2001". It would eventually be recycled by North for his later score to The Shoes of the Fisherman."