The Vinyl Frontier

by Jonathan Scott

No, humankind would have to smile for the camera. The Voyager Golden Record was going to show humanity on a good day.

  Notes

  1 Which bears a striking resemblance to the final record’s sound essay.

  2 LA-born Soter achieved his PhD in Astronomy at Cornell in 1971. Between 1973 and 1979 he was working as assistant editor of ICARUS, and would go on to co-write Sagan’s documentary Cosmos and the eventual 2014 follow-up helmed by Neil deGrasse Tyson.

  3 He argues that any such list, seeking to capture so much in such a short space of time, could never be well decided by committee. No two ethnomusicologists would ever compile the same list. And he compares the problem to that of a botanist asked to represent the planet’s flowers with just six varieties. His entire letter is reproduced in full in the appendices of Murmurs of Earth.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Now That’s What I Call Music

  ‘I mean, as an assignment, in one sense, it’s laughably easy. You’re making a selection of 90 minutes from all the music in the world. Clearly you could do that every year for your entire life and they’d all be great records.’

  Tim Ferris

  With Alan, Robert, Ann, Tim, Jon and Murry all sticking their oars in, there was a deluge of music on the table. Listening sessions continued. And although articles written about Voyager like to focus on disagreements, most of the participants remember these days with delight. Ann, speaking back in 2007 when the record was celebrating its 30th birthday, summed it up as ‘thrilling, contentious months filled with beauty’, saying: ‘We took the responsibility to heart but luckily everyone involved had a sense of humour. There was some tension, yes, but also a lot of laughs. It was an honour and a deep source of pleasure.’

  In an interview with a doctoral researcher named Stephanie Nelson in 1991 (for an article that would eventually be printed in The Journal of Applied Communication Research in 1993), Tim explained that there were three criteria at work when choosing the music: geographical diversity, economic diversity and ‘good music’. Speaking to me in 2017, Tim said: ‘Everyone worked on the music – all the principals, people who weren’t principals, people who just heard about it. Lots of suggestions about the music came in and we didn’t have any tsar to say this is a good idea or this isn’t. We just kept listening to things and saying “yes” or “no” or “potentially”, and pretty soon you have a collection that’s five times more than you could fit on the record but is full of defensible stuff. You’re starting to get somewhere.’

  One particularly long debate took place on 14 May in a small office at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. ‘When I Need You’ by Leo Sayer had just replaced the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California’ at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Annie Hall was doing well at the flicks. The world was about a week away from the premiere of the first Star Wars film. And the 7″ of ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols would go in sale in 13 days.

  It was a Saturday. Wendy, Linda, Ann and Tim were all there, reviewing sounds at the Library of Congress. Towards the end of the day they met Carl, along with Murry Sidlin and his wife Debby. Inside the room was a hi-fi system and an enormous portrait of Louis Armstrong. They played some records. At times they listened in silence, at others they talked over one another. They enthused. They agreed. They disagreed. The meeting lasted until 3a.m.

  A number of topics were debated that night. They discussed Native American music,1 they discussed ‘Summertime’,2 they discussed the blues and, with Satchmo eyeballing them all the time, they discussed Louis Armstrong. The Armstrong question, though, was never whether to send, it was simply what to send. Ann said: ‘He was going to be there no matter what. You know it would have been over my dead body if we couldn’t put Armstrong on there.’

  The main issue on the table that night was the classical repertoire. Should they include more than one piece by the same composer at the expense of others? While Sidlin was ‘vigorously opposed’ to the idea, Carl felt that including two or more pieces composed by a single human being, would be a thought-provoking move. And as it was generally accepted that Beethoven and Bach represented the peak of the Western musical tradition, they seemed the logical choice. However, with such limited space, including more than one track by a single composer would effectively rule out including anything by other celebrated greats such as Wagner or Debussy or Verdi or Rachmaninoff.3 It wasn’t a decision to be made lightly.

  They moved on to other matters. At one point they played the Miles Davis recording of ‘Summertime’. Carl felt this was the ideal choice as a representation of ‘American’ music on the Golden Record as it celebrated both black and white – written by a great American composer in George Gershwin and performed by a true pioneer in Miles Davis. Others in the room felt that black influence on popular music should be represented on its own, or ‘without incumbent’.

  Approaching something of an impasse, Sidlin put in a call to critic and Smithsonian jazz curator Martin Williams. In Murmurs Carl recalls this being a Sunday night, which may have been right – perhaps this 14 May meeting spilled over to the following night – but in any event, the call to Williams was at 11p.m. on either Saturday or Sunday night in mid-May 1977. Once Sidlin had confirmed that yes, he was indeed calling so late at night to ask what was the best jazz to send to ET, Williams offered some thoughts. ‘Summertime’, it seemed, was doomed.

  ‘People sometimes talk about this project as if there were some sort of desperation to it,’ says Tim. ‘People fighting for their choices and everything. And you do get emotionally involved with music. But I think everyone recognised that if we don’t use this terrific track we’ll just use this other terrific track. I mean, as an assignment, in one sense, it’s laughably easy. You’re making a selection of 90 minutes from all the music in the world. Clearly you could do that every year for your entire life and they’d all be great records. What always worried me most was that if we don’t get a spectacular result we’re really going to look bad because the nature of the assignment is so easy.’

  Ann’s taste, which would exert a huge influence on NASA’s mixtape, had been partially shaped by an older brother. Her parents had exposed her to folk music of the 1940s and ’50s, and to Austrian singer Lotte Lenya.4 But it was her brother who, from the age of six or seven, introduced her to rock ’n’ roll.

  ‘I loved all kinds of mostly popular music. I think that in the late ’50s early ’60s through the ’70s, popular music was really distinguished and innovative – taking new territory. I loved Bob Dylan, I loved Motown, I loved soul music, I loved Otis Redding and I loved Marvin Gaye, I loved Martha and the Vandellas, Aretha Franklin, I mean I just loved all of it.’

  As a teenager Ann had befriended Steven James, the nephew of Duke Ellington. She’d got to know the family, been hugged by Duke Ellington’s sister Ruth, and she’d ‘schlepped around’ with the family to concerts of sacred music at local churches. She’d visited Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s New York house for dinner, where Ann would sit under the piano, which just about everybody, it seemed to her, could play except her. Then, aged 19, she met Jonathan Cott from Rolling Stone.

  ‘It was just an astonishing exposure to great music. He would take me to meet all these people and to listen intimately to their music in their homes and in all kinds of different settings.’

  At this time, she was not a huge fan of classical music, being much more drawn to ‘something with a backbeat and some soul’. However, by 1977 she had acquired a taste for other forms – for Stravinsky, for Beethoven – and she’d visited the Lincoln Center to listen to Pierre Boulez. Her taste was nothing if not eclectic, although she would admit that her knowledge of classical music was not comparable to her knowledge of blues, soul and folk music.

  Back in March, when Carl had told Jon about the record, he’d made it clear that he wanted to satisfy the contemporary Earth-based audience by making it representative of the planet and species, not just of the Americans who were sending it. Jon, though, with his aliens-first hat o
n, wanted form and structure to be at the heart of the music.

  ‘One of the first things that Carl and I had discussed years before was the notion that music might be as interstellar as physics,’ he says. ‘In other words, one of the things that people like Frank had established as the axioms of the discipline was that you couldn’t communicate with somebody unless you had something in common. And what would you have in common? Well, you had the physical universe in common and you had the laws of physics in common. So that’s what you use to establish communication. The series of prime numbers. The Fibonacci series5 – things that are not generated naturally, but indicate intelligence.’

  But, while pure mathematics could be the common ground for establishing communication, it doesn’t make for a very interesting conversation. ‘I mean, we both know prime numbers. Great. But telling each other prime numbers back and forth doesn’t really get you very far.’ Jon felt that a lot of the arguments you could make for mathematics being universal, you could make for music being universal. Carl had shared that paper by von Hoerner with him by radio astronomer Sebastian von Hoerner,6 which argued that the notion of scale and harmony were not arbitrary cultural constructs but that they arose out of the physics of sound. Some frequencies harmonise with each other, others damp each other out. ‘So that kind of amplitude and dissonance is not just something we learn, it’s really in the physics of the sound,’ says Jon.

  Another idea Jon floated was starting the record with some explicit formal instruction in Earth’s musical language. Sound a note, play the same pitch an octave higher, introduce fifths and thirds, a pentatonic scale, a major scale, a minor scale, a chromatic scale. Then introduce more complex scales, then follow this with a similar ‘dictionary for rhythm and timbre’.

  However, Carl quickly axed this idea. They just didn’t have the space on the record to do it properly. They had to devote as much available space to the music as possible. So any thought of a rudimentary musical grammar lesson was shelved.

  Jon made more suggestions, on tape and by letter.7 He chose some pieces to satisfy Carl’s desire for a ‘global’ record, but his playlist is dominated by music with interesting structure or shape. In other words, Jon’s priority was not that the music should be ‘great’, but that aliens could understand the music, and perhaps learn something interesting from it. Emotion was secondary to structure.

  ‘Nobody likes to be sad but everybody likes sad songs,’ he says. ‘Music has a way of transmuting emotions to make them more bearable. On that level I don’t know that we have much to say to the aliens because we don’t know anything about emotions really – whether they even have them. So music that relied primarily on its emotional content seemed to me the music least likely for extraterrestrials to understand, whereas music that was more formal in nature would be a theme and variations, a rondeau, musical forms like verse and chorus, where there’s an architecture that can be perceived. Those would be the pieces that at least the aliens could get some sense of “well, there’s some structure here”. So a Bach fugue will be unique … and a fugue is just a beautiful little puzzle in sound. All the information you need to know about that puzzle is there in the puzzle. In other words, there’s nothing outside of the piece that you need to know in order to appreciate the piece. So that’s kind of where the discussion started on music.’

  Jon didn’t worry too much about music from non-European traditions either, partly because he knew the team was already consulting with ethnomusicologists.

  He writes: ‘I proposed works from the Western classical tradition that I thought best met my criterion of accessibility-through-structure, including the gavotte en rondeau from J.S. Bach’s Third Partita for Unaccompanied Violin, whose verse and chorus architecture had the clarity of a snowflake. Also Mozart’s piano variations on the tune known in English as “Twinkle twinkle little star”, which seemed an appropriate tune. In both works a simple theme unfolding into a bouquet of variations demonstrates perfectly how a composer can take the simplest of melodies and weave it into webs of ever-increasing elegance and complexity.’

  He suggested ‘Ma Fin Est Mon Commencement’ – the so-called Crab Canon by 14th-century composer Guillaume de Machaut – a musical palindrome for three voices, whose end is also its beginning. He also argued for Chaconne in D minor from Bach’s Second Partita for Unaccompanied Violin, a piece of ‘limitless depth and profundity’ that was never really in the running being some 14 minutes long.

  Sidlin, Carl’s conductor friend, had already suggested the Prelude and Fugue from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and Jon put forward the performance by Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who he sometimes ran into at the Xerox machine in the CBC radio building.8 His tape also included ‘Summertime’ (the Ella Fitzgerald–Louis Armstrong recording) and ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise)’ by The Beatles.

  ‘Had it been left up to me, I might have chucked all the rest of the Beethoven and other Bach pieces, and let the Chaconne and Mozart aria stand for the Western tradition of classical music,’ Jon wrote. ‘Nothing could represent us better.’

  Tim, however, was most concerned with making a good record. That was his overriding ambition. I asked him whether, back in 1977, he had ever felt overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility of selecting music to represent Earth. He replied: ‘Well, there are lots of fields where I would not have known enough, or had sufficient maturity, to be responsible in accepting such an assignment. Economics, for instance. I wouldn’t have known enough about economics, or many areas of history or social policy. I was just too ignorant of those things. But science and music were not in that category. I was working as a writer … I had an apartment that had a home office stuck out in the middle of these treetops – it was a really good place to work. And then we would have music listening sessions at either my place in New York or at Carl’s house in Ithaca. It was fun – you’re just listening to music and then you’re gathering comments.’

  He chuckled to himself and continued: ‘A lot of the selections we were listening to, the time wasn’t listed on the medium and I was supposed to time all these tracks and I kept forgetting to time them. That was my constant flaw. Carl’s was that he kept forgetting that time is a six-based system not 10-based, so he kept dividing seconds by 10. So we each had our blind spots. We knew each other pretty well and we’d done a lot of work by then. We’d edited a lot of each other’s copy and everything – we worked pretty smoothly together.’

  Ann and Tim paid the first of several visits to Alan Lomax’s place. He lived in an apartment in uptown New York, 215 West 98th Street, ‘a warren of 100,000 LP records’. One of the first things he put on the turntable when they arrived was ‘Melancholy Blues’ by Louis Armstrong.

  Armstrong had passed away in Queens six summers before at the age of 69. Born in New Orleans, his career had started on street corners, singing and playing the cornet. He’d been sent to the Colored Waifs’ Home by the New Orleans Juvenile Court for firing his stepfather’s handgun back on New Year’s Eve in 1912. Already a self-taught musician, it was here that he developed his skills, playing with the home’s own band and eventually becoming band leader. By 1925 he was living and performing in Chicago, and his reputation was beginning to spread beyond the jazz community. He had starred in leading bands, performed at big venues, and played for both black and white audiences. He was known for his emotional, expressive playing, effervescent jive delivered in distinctive gravelly tones, and in contemporary PR material was being billed as the ‘World’s Greatest’. It was around then that he made his first recordings for the Okeh jazz label under his own name, with his ‘Hot Five’ and ‘Hot Seven’ groups.9

  Jazz historians generally agree that this period in Armstrong’s career changed the direction of popular jazz music. The focus was torn away from the traditional New Orleans collective improv, to numbers dominated by individual solos. And it wasn’t just soloing; Armstrong was trying out new rhythms and arrangements, and his singing on records such
as ‘Heebie Jeebies’ would popularise scat. These records shook up jazz, influencing his contemporaries and generations to come.

  In among 12 songs with his ‘Hot Seven’ was a number called ‘Melancholy Blues’, recorded in Chicago on 11 May 1927. The fact that it was chosen above all others from this period is all down to Alan Lomax and his warren of LPs.

  Alan played them one song after another. After ‘Melancholy Blues’ came ‘Dark Was the Night’ by Blind Willie Johnson, then a Georgian men’s chorus. Throughout he enthused about his theories of cantometrics, about how the Voyager record could be used as a platform to show the development of human culture through music. One highlight that would also make the final cut was a haunting Bulgarian folk song called ‘Izlel ye Delyu Haydutin’. It tells the story of a folk hero who harasses and badgers occupying troops, a tale of resistance to an outside invader. It was performed by Valya Balkanska,10 backed by gaida11 players Lazar Kanevski and Stephan Zahmanov, and recorded by Martin Koenig and Ethel Raim in Smolyan, Bulgaria in 1968. When Alan first played it for Ann, she was moved to dance. Lomax leaned forwards, grinned, called her ‘honey’, then explained that this was the sound of agricultural communities, the first people who had enough to eat.

  Tim says: ‘Alan was a good producer. His dad was a good producer. He was very valuable to me on the record … We left on pretty good terms but he always felt that he should have had more to say about the choices rather than just coming up with material.’

  Ann says: ‘[Alan] was a very cranky, cantankerous, difficult man. But he was a genius of ethnomusicology. Some of the stuff that he gave us turned out to be other than what he told us it was. You know, he told us it was one thing, and then we find out later on that it was something else, but he was hugely important to the music.’

  This uneasy interface between Lomax and the record team is also where some errors crept into Voyager’s liner notes, many of which would last for decades. They were first printed in Murmurs, and were continually reprinted and shared by NASA online and in print. It wasn’t until the crowdfunded 40th-anniversary project by Ozma Records, which succeeded in bringing out a deluxe reissue of the Golden Record in 2017, that some errors and missing pieces of information were uncovered and put right.