Voyager Golden Record: Top Ten

Track 1: “Wedding Song” – Peru
This song captures a human voice expressing a complex and fundamental human experience: the marriage. It is set apart because of its representation of a female voice in a way that, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t decided by a man the way Mozart’s “Queen of the night” is. I also chose it because it included no other instrumentation. Lastly, it represents part of a region of the world that otherwise risks being under-represented and not spoken for (Brown, 2017).

Track 2: “Mozart” – Queen of the night
While I’m not familiar with the whole opera, this piece in all its drama and emotion really stood out. It is dynamic and surprising as an opera piece—especially in the way it features the vocalist’s upper register. It makes the list because the occasion for its use is to facilitate dramatic storytelling in a highly coordinated way. It represents a time of empire, colonialism and decadence for a privileged culture. As a written score, it is also open to various interpretations that take creative license with the print text. This recording is but one that exists since the piece was originally performed.

Track 3: “Tchakrulo” – Choir – Georgia
This song is choral and contains many voices coming together in complimentary ways. The social nature of singing is demonstrated in this song—as is a sense of ceremony that doesn’t require the listener to understand the words sung. It also reveals the connection between instrument and voice because of the chanting voices in the background sustaining a consistent tone to accompany the melodic parts.

Track 4: “Morning Star and Devil Bird” – Australia
This speaks of something that spans human time and experience. I chose it because it reveals something with unique audio texture: the digeridoo as a wind instrument offers a hint of the very material is made from (a termite-eaten eucalyptus limb). As such, it offers an example of the diverse ways humans construct or transform materials into extensions of voice. I classify this recording as vulnerable to what Smith Rumsey refers to as “neglect” whereby it runs to risk of being disregarded for its apparent simplicity and regional qualities (Brown, 2017).

Track 5: “Navajo Night Chant” – America
A Knowledge Keeper from the community I live in explained how, for the Syilx people, songs were traditionally without words because, by chanting, they prompted the ancestors to sing words on their behalf. I found this track important as chant because its cyclical nature appears to allude to something meditative—though I don’t know if the song is purely chant or if it also contains words. Lastly, it stands as a fragment of a culture within a larger set of indigenous cultures that date back beyond ten thousand years. This oral form depends on those who have been taught to perform it to survive: it follows that there is urgency and value to capturing and storing it in an indelible way that resists being tampered with (Brown, 2017).

Track 6: “Dark was the Night” – Blind Willie Johnson
This song captures the opposite of Mozart’s piece. It transforms a conventional instrument into a transmitter of raw human emotion. The singer’s voice communicates human suffering and despair; the song as a whole represents how transformational forms of expression come from such experiences. It is only in hindsight that a recording like this is contextually important to the trajectory of popular music up to the present, considering how marginalized its community was (Brown, 2017).

Track 7 “Flowing Streams” – China
This piece captures the human-instrument interaction in a way that is almost visual. The demonstration of harmonics on the instrument contrast the bending and plucking of notes. It also captures a sound that emerges from another empire—that of China. Like “Dark Was the Night”, it displays innovation in the use of a stringed instrument by the user, but in a way that is starkly different both rhythmically and melodically.

Track 8 – “Kinds of Flowers”
This one was incredible to me because it has so much vocally going on. The different voices overlapping in a call and answer with the chimes accompanying reflect the importance of the music to its audience. I thought of the arrangement of vocals and instruments in terms of how many people are required to perform this piece—a great one to compare against the Mozart piece.

Track 9: “Tchenhoukoumen”, percussion Senegal
This track represents how percussion can establish a rhythm in complete contrast to the other songs on the album. It reinforces the repetitive yet dynamic nature of musical expression, along with the shared experience of creating it. It represents one small aspect of central African drumming that isn’t as time-bound as some of the other tracks on the original Voyager album.

Track 10: “Johnny B. Goode” – Chuck Berry
This piece is the only one that demonstrates amplified electrical music. I chose it more for this purpose than any other; that said, it also demonstrates a moment of shift in music where one set of musical traditions evolved into another. It also expresses joy and energy, which is somewhat missing in the other pieces. It represents a music for a broader audience than just an elite, while referencing “Dark was the Night” in its use of blues scale and guitar.

 

References

Brown University (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital memory: What can we afford to lose?”. Youtube. https://youtu.be/FBrahqg9ZMc

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/