The following tracks represent a shortened list of 10 tracks that I felt were most vital to include on the Golden Record:
Track 3: Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08
Track 4: Zaire, Pygmy girls’ initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56
Track 7: “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
Track 11: Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
Track 12: Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo,” collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18
Track 22: Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
Track 24: Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57
Track 27: Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38
Track 28: China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37
Track 29: India, raga, “Jaat Kahan Ho,” sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30
My first thought when trying to choose 10 songs to represent humanity out of the songs currently on the Golden Record was that some of these songs were very jarring and I didn’t feel like I would have any trouble getting rid of some of them. As with many first impressions this turned out to be wholly incorrect, and some of the songs that had originally fallen on my mental trash heap ended up feeling so essential that they dethroned favourite musical pieces from my final list. As Abby Smith Rumsey said “imagination really is about memory in the future tense” (Brown University, 2017) and ultimately my imagination of what would listen to this record, when or how they would interpret it is entirely based on my own experience and memory. I would hardly know the right way to go about choosing from this list of music for a life form I am familiar with like a dog or a fish, much less an entity that I can’t even conceive of. The idea proposed by Timothy Farris that these songs could be interpreted mathematically was key to making me rethink my approach to this task and move beyond just which songs I found to be the most recognizable or enjoyable. While I don’t have a strong enough grasp of the precise mechanics of music, much less the mathematics that may go into it, I did try to narrow down goals to guide my approach.
My goals ended up being the following:
- One song from every inhabited continent
- Prioritize songs that include human voice
- Pieces that I find have the most global influence
I wanted the songs to be representative of many cultures, not exclusively my own. If the record is truly to represent humanity in 10 songs it needs to represent a diverse range of musical traditions, even with the understanding that most cultures will still be excluded with a list so short. I thought that this would be the easiest goal to prioritize but I ended up failing to meet it because I had to make a decision between representation and which songs I felt had the most global influence on humanity’s musical traditions.
I chose to prioritize songs that included human voices because I feel that it created an intimacy and connection that purely instrumental pieces do not. Granted, this was a risk as it is entirely possible that whatever creature would be interpreting this record would not have the ability to hear the human vocal range. Most of the vocal tracks are also paired with instruments in the event that this is the case and I felt like it was a risk that I was willing to take because of the impact that the human voice could have on the listener on the off-chance that it is within their hearing range. I originally found the Peruvian Wedding Song to be extremely unpleasant and was more than happy to cut it from the record, but eventually determined that it was essential because of the combination of its continent of origin and vocals. It was the only song on the record that had only one singer that was completely unaccompanied way and instrumentation, which provides a unique and insightful example of the human voice. “Tchakrulo” also made my list because it was the only choral piece on the record, which I felt presented a different dimension to the impact of many voices singing together.
I feel that I can best justify the pieces I kept by discussing a few of the tracks that it was hardest for me to eliminate. “Morning star” and “Devil Bird” was a particularly hard track to remove from the list because this went against my primary goal of having one song from the musical tradition of every continent. Ultimately, I removed it to prioritize the inclusion of both “Jaat Kahan Ho” and “Flowing Streams,” which I felt were both essential in showing incredibly influential musical traditions from the continent of Asia. Although “Morning star” and “Devil Bird” were the only examples of indigenous Australian music, I didn’t feel that it had the same global influence as the other two tracks previously mentioned. “Melancholy blues” was also a painful one to take off the list because of my own admiration for Louis Armstrong and the emotional connection I feel to his music. Ultimately, I ended up removing that track because I felt that some small parts of the jazz tradition he represents were also present in the building blocks of rock and roll. That tradition is well represented by “Johnny B. Goode”, which also had the added benefit of having a vocal element. Removing Bach entirely felt like one of the biggest decisions but I decided that European baroque musical tradition was in some way represented by Mozart as this style served as the foundation for his classical music. I ended up choosing Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria because it displayed a vocal experience not found in any of the other tracks, while representing European classical music along with Beethoven’s 5th symphony.
Another consideration in choosing the final 10 was the idea of redundancy. Once I had at least one song to represent each continent it became important to decide what other songs could be added without fulfilling a similar function to a song that was already on the list. I debated about keeping both the Pygmy girls’ initiation song and Senegal, percussion but eventually decided that they represented two vastly different elements of African musical tradition. In this case a purely vocal piece could not be representative of a continent like Africa with its strong and meaningful drumming tradition. Although more recent musical traditions in North America were well represented by ”Johnny B. Goode,” I felt like the “Night Chant” was necessary to provide an example of music that exists on the continent outside of the European and African traditions that came together to create rock and roll.
References:
Brown University. (2017). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital Memory: What Can We Afford to Lose?”