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Mozart in Space: A Love Story

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Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ((PASTMULI))

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Abstract

The 1977 Voyager II Golden Record includes sounds of animals and humans on Earth, as well as music ranging from Bulgarian folk songs to the Queen of the Night’s famous aria from Mozart’s Magic Flute. This once-utopian project seems quaint in the era of climate crisis and renewed nuclear threats, not to mention the extreme unlikelihood of its being heard by alien “ears.” The recording tells a love story, through the collaboration between Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, and also of human beings toward the larger cosmos. At the same time, the violence of the Mozart aria “talks back” to its own, recorded historical moment from a darker future.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jill Lepore, “A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction,” in The New Yorker, June 5 and 12, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/a-golden-age-for-dystopian-fiction. Web, accessed September 30, 2017.

  2. 2.

    See Gregory Claeys, Dystopia: A Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  3. 3.

    Lepore, “Golden Age.”

  4. 4.

    See Ellie Mae O’Hagan, “Climate Optimism Has Been a Disaster,” in The Guardian, September 21, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/21/climate-optimism-disaster-extreme-weather-catastrophe?CMP=share_btn_fb. Web, accessed September 30, 2017.

  5. 5.

    E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 13.

  6. 6.

    See Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso Books, 2005).

  7. 7.

    Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (London and New York: Doubleday, 2011), 85.

  8. 8.

    NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Voyager website, http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html. Web, accessed September 30, 2017.

  9. 9.

    Jim Bell, The Interstellar Age: The Story of the NASA Men and Women Who Flew the Forty-Year Voyager Mission (New York: Dutton, 2016), 81–82.

  10. 10.

    NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Voyager website.

  11. 11.

    Ibid.

  12. 12.

    For a detailed account of the development of tuning systems in response to the Pythagorean conundrum, see Stuart Isacoff, Temperament (New York: Random House, 2001).

  13. 13.

    See Marshall McCluhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Boston: MIT Press, 1964, 1994).

  14. 14.

    Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy, trans. Anthony Enns (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 59.

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 57–58.

  16. 16.

    See Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, “The Voyager Golden Record Finally Finds an Earthly Audience,” National Public Radio, All Things Considered, September 30, 2017, http://www.npr.org/2017/09/30/554489944/the-voyager-golden-record-finally-finds-an-earthly-audience. Web, accessed October 5, 2017.

  17. 17.

    The term “trace” has been worked over by so many thinkers, from Heidegger through Derrida and beyond, it has become far weightier than its everyday connotations suggest. Sybille Krämer takes the word back to its origins in Old and Middle High German, as “spor” or “spur,” meaning “footprint”: “an impression that reveals the presence of someone or something in the past; it crystallizes a movement in time as a spatial configuration. See Krämer 174.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., 175.

  19. 19.

    Jørgen Bruhn has suggested the term media “transfermation” to address movement and change in mixed, adapted forms of media. “How Do ‘We’ React to the Anthropocene? Scientific Concepts Transformed into Media Products—And Affects,” Draft of Material Presented at IEAT Research Centre, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, May 2016, 9. For a nuanced discussion of Earthly materials and their “distribut[ed] … agency” in musical instruments, see Kevin Dawe, “Materials Matter: Towards a Political Ecology of Musical Instrument Making,” in Aaron Allen and Kevin Dawe, eds., Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Nature, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2016), 109–121.

  20. 20.

    Ibid., 16.

  21. 21.

    Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 48.

  22. 22.

    For a discussion of Yuri Lotman’s idea of the “semiosphere” and its borders, as applied to spatial studies of words and music, see Heidi Hart, “Translating Bodies: A Spatial Approach to Words and Music,” in Danish Musicology Online, Special Edition, 2016, 27–40.

  23. 23.

    William Graham, “ULA Atlas V Successfully Launches Secretive CLIO Mission,” NASASpaceFlight website, September 16, 2014, https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2014/09/ula-atlas-v-secretive-clio-mission/. Web, accessed October 1, 2017.

  24. 24.

    Irmgard Emmelheinz, “Images Do Not Show: The Desire to See in the Anthropocene,” in Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, eds., Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 131–142.

  25. 25.

    Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, The Old Place (1999 film), quoted in Emmelheinz, 139.

  26. 26.

    Margaret Ronda, “Anthropogenic Poetics,” in Minnesota Review 83 (2015), 104.

  27. 27.

    Bell, 76.

  28. 28.

    See http://www.anthonymichaelmorena.com/misreader. Web, accessed October 5, 2017.

  29. 29.

    Anthony Michael Morena, The Voyager Record: A Transmission (Brookline, MA: Rose Metal Press, 2016), 28.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 29.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 52.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 62.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 63.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 101–102.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 84.

  36. 36.

    For a thorough listing of the various forms of musical material in and around literature, see Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Rodopi: Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1999).

  37. 37.

    Alex Ross, “Tremors: The Deep Sounds of Ashley Fure’s ‘The Force of Things,’” in The New Yorker, October 30, 2017, 74.

  38. 38.

    Ibid.

  39. 39.

    Ibid.

  40. 40.

    Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 39.

  41. 41.

    See Randy Showstack, “Nick Sagan Reflects on Voyager I and the Golden Record,” in Eos, Vol. 94, No. 40, October 2013, 351.

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  1. Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA

    Heidi Hart

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Hart, H. (2018). Mozart in Space: A Love Story. In: Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01815-3_2

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