10 Song Choices

Please note, I have specified which tracks do and do not contain vocals.

1. 1. 1. Azerbaijian Bagpipes (Ugam) (instrumental)
      2. Men’s House Song – Papua New Guinea (instrumental)
      3. Navajo Night Chant – America (with vocals)
      4. Panpipes and Drum Song – Peru (instrumental)
      5. Sacrificial Dance (Igor Stravinsky) – Russia (instrumental)
      6. Johnny B. Goode (Chuck Berry) – America (with vocals)
      7. Jaat Kahan Ho (Surshri) – India (with vocals)
      8. Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin – Hungary (with vocals)
      9. Gavotte en Rondo (Bach) – Germany (instrumental)
      10. Cranes in Their Nest (Shakuhachi) – Japan (instrumental)

Reducing the list of 27 tracks down to 10 was considerably challenging, as I had strenuous criteria that I was employing. In my selection, I wanted to showcase tracks that are exclusively instrumental and those that include vocals as well to highlight the variations in human creativity and self-expression. Additionally, I wanted my list to truly span across different continents, countries, cultures, genres, moods, tones and even types of “stories” that were told through music. Although most of these tracks do not exceed three minutes, ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better’ for a musical time capsule in my view. As articulated by Smith (1999), digital technology affords us the opportunity to access resources that we otherwise would not have had access to; listening to the tracks and even reading the comments on YouTube enabled me to not only have direct and convenient access to them, but also to explore other people’s perspectives that I would not have met or interacted with otherwise.

References

Smith, A. (1999). Why digitize? Retrieved June 15, 2019, from Council on Library and Information Resources website: https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub80-smith/pub80-2/