#1 Wedding song – Peru
I chose this purely because it was being performed by a woman. To be fair, I did not look into the origin of every piece on the record, so it is possible women made more contributions than what I picked up on.
#2 Ugam – Azerbaijan bagpipes
I have Scottish roots and was drawn to the piping mentioned in the title. I looked into this specific song a bit more and it turns out that there were a few errors in the description, perhaps because at the time of collecting this music Azerbaijan was under Soviet rule and very much inaccessible. The instruments we hear are not a type of bagpipe, but I love that a project of this magnitude had an error despite the best of intentions.
#3 Mozart – Queen of the night
There were a number of classical music options on the record that I eliminated rather quickly. Much like the Peruvian wedding song, this made my list due to the female performer.
#4 Men’s house song – Papua New Guinea
This sounded like a message we could have received from space. The pace and staccato articulation reminded me of binary coding.
#5 Morning Star and Devil Bird – Australia
I really disliked this track. As we heard this week in Dr. Smith Rumsey’s lecture, when looking at what is being collected/saved, we should not ignore what we don’t personally enjoy.
#6 Melancholy Blues – L Armstrong & His Hot Seven
My grandparents always had old records playing at their house (old for me anyways, not for them). They made me a fan of jazz and big band. This was a nostalgia pick.
#7 Jaat Kahan Ho – India
I lived in India for several months when I was 18 and this transported me back. Though I thought this was a male voice singing, after a quick search it turns out that this was a very celebrated female performer. In keeping with the selection criteria I’ve established, this woman was one of the reasons for this pick.
#8 Dark was the night – Blind Willie Johnson
This really encapsulated a feeling a loneliness that is universal to all humans. “Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight” (Sagan, p. 178).
#9 Sacrificial dance – Stravinsky
If an invasion needed a soundtrack, this would be it. I’m not a huge fan of this song, so his was another example of me trying to include something that I do not like myself and move beyond my personal tastes.
#10 Cranes in their nest – Japan (Shakuhachi)
The last place I travelled to before the pandemic hit was Japan. Another nostalgia pick that had me longing for a trip beyond the bi-weekly grocery shop run.
References
Sagan, Carl. Murmurs of Earth : the Voyager interstellar record (1st ed.). Random House. p. 178. ISBN0-394-41047-5.
