GOLDEN RECORD / WHATS ON THE RECORD
Music From Earth
My track list:
- Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48
- Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55
- New Guinea, men’s house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan. 1:20
- Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52
- “Melancholy Blues,” performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05
- “Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38
- Bulgaria, “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin,” sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59
- China, ch’in, “Flowing Streams,” performed by Kuan P’ing-hu. 7:37
- Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40
- Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20
Thinking of culture and identity and what represents this to me I kept coming back to the pandemic. Covid has changed the world, how countries are battling it, how its people are reacting. 2020 brought change whether we were ready for it or not. Our world is a beautiful place, and I am privileged to have been able to travel to different parts and experience different cultures. This led me to teaching internationally. Even though now I have not been able to go back home, my choice yes, but the lifestyle offered to me here is one I am not ready to leave behind just yet.
When listening to the music I kept thinking of how countries have reacted to the pandemic. Protests, free will taken away, dead by the millions, vaccinate or not to vaccinate, it is an ongoing battle no matter which side you are on. Being in China, a communist country, it has been a different experience for me than what my family and friends are experiencing in North America and Europe. So, if someone was to get a glimpse of earth right now from space these songs spoke to me through political unrest, rights, battling Covid, protests, quarantines, online living, simply what our new normal is because there is no more when we get back to normal. And yes, through a white perspective as I know this automatically comes with privilege.
Smith (1999) states, “Digital files can provide extraordinary access to information. They can make the remote accessible and the hard to see visible. Digital surrogates can bring together research materials that are widely scattered about the globe, allowing viewers to conflate collections and compare items that can be examined side by side solely by virtue of digital representation.” In a world that must go online, digitization is access for all of us, whether education, professional, social, the creation of a “virtual collection” through the flexible integration and synthesis of a variety of formats, or of related materials scattered among many locations Smith (1999), helps us navigate this new normal.
References:
NASA. (n.d.). Voyager – music on the Golden Record. NASA. Retrieved October 28, 2021, from https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/music/.
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/
