Life imitating art

Patty provided a link to mad scientists exercising their compositional chops. She rightly asks what makes it "classical" when clearly it comes from our most base nature. I'm thinking club music. But that's not all. I already knew about this story, thanks to an interesting Google search referral: Carl Sagan kazoo. I naturally had to click on the first story, which is about another mad scientist splicing genes with music to create... But I'll let you read the short story yourself.

Billions of memorials

Today is the tenth anniversary of Carl Sagan’s death. In honor of him, Joel Scholsberg has announced a memorial blog-a-thon. Keeping to my area of expertise, I have decided to write about the music included on the Golden Record sent on the Voyager space probes. Carl Sagan chaired the committee that selected the images, sounds, and music recorded on the record. Wikipedia lists the musical selections, confirmed(?) by this Latvian site. The majority of the pieces are World Music, with a sprinkling of classical works (Holbourne's Fairie Round; Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, Partita No. 3 and Well-Tempered Clavier Prelude-n-Fugue; Mozart's Magic Flute; Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and String Quartet No. 13; and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring) and three pieces of popular music (Louis Armstrong's "Melancholy Blues", Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground", and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode"). And those three popular pieces span jazz, blues, and rock. The newest composed piece was "Johnny B. Goode" as far as I could tell. I'm not an expert in ethnomusicology, so I don't know the history of most of those songs. So in 1977 the newest piece was over 20 years old, and by now it is over fifty years old. Dr. Sagan and his committee had only six months to pick the music, and clearly had been given the mandate to be as multicultural as possible, as evidenced by the fifty-five languages on the record. I'm sure the lack of new music was due to a fear of picking the '77 equivalent of Brittney Spears (the Bee Gees?) to send on a billion-year journey.

In related news, a student composer at Sagan's old stomping grounds of Cornell composed a tribute to him. Peter Salvi composed In Memoriam Carl Sagan in 1997 for flute, clarinet, and bassoon.