A Youtube playlist (ordered in a that I felt best connects them) of the ten pieces I have selected from the Voyager Golden Record can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwcY6qJPmEMFq9yH1e-aPFd-cDwb1qal5
- Wedding Song – Peru
- Kinds of Flowers
- Jaat Kahan Ho – India – Surshri
- Morning Star and Devil Bird – Australia
- Iziel je Delyo Hagdutin – Bulgaria
- Pygmy Girls Initiation Song Zaire
- String Quartet No. 13 in B Flat, Opus 130, Cavatina
- Mozart – Queen of the Night – Eda Moser
- Johnny B Goode – Chuck Berry
- El Cascabel – Lorenzo Barcelata & the Mari
My approach began with thinking about the purpose of the Voyager (and the Golden Record) of giving any alien species that came across the Voyager and its contents an introduction of Earth and its inhabitants. For this purpose I selected mostly pieces that have vocals so that these aliens would have a better understanding of the capabilities of human physiology, though four vocal pieces such as Melancholy Blues, Dark was the Night, Navajo Night Chant, and Tchakrulo were cut from my list due to various reasons such as overlapping too much with other music pieces (rock music represented by Johnny B Goode evolved from blues), me not personally enjoying the piece (Dark was the Night), and a song about war which may send the wrong message (Tchakrulo). The Navajo Night Chant was the most difficult for me to justify cutting, but in the end I decided to replace it with String Quartet No. 13 as the only representative of purely instrumental music. The latter was selected due to a personal enjoyment of the piece (this was the first time I heard it), and it beat out the other pieces of western classical music, especially the most iconic piece of music on the Voyager Golden Record: Beethoven’s Fifth (which has the same composer as String Quartet No. 13), which was first written in dedication to Napoleon but that dedication was later rescinded due to Napoleon’s tyranny, which again makes it not the ideal piece to use in a message of peace for aliens. My personal knowledge of Beethoven’s Fifth resulting in it not being selected (and I suspect it’ll be selected in many others’), as well as the fact that I focused on vocal pieces, illustrates Smith Rumsey’s points in both the 1999 article and the Youtube video about how everyone, including the scholars, make selections about what should be preserved due to their upbringing, education, background information, and thought processes.
References
Brown University. (2017, July 11). Abby Smith Rumsey: “Digital memory: What can we afford to lose?” [Video]. YouTube.
Smith Rumsey, A. (1999, February). Why digitize? Council on Library and Information Resources.