To start things off, here is a video from NASA in which radio-frequency reception from radio telescopes has been converted into sound:
We're going to play On the Beautiful Blue Danube, and you should know where that river is located, so here's a map for you:
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| The path of the Danube |
The Danube is a 1795 mile long river in Europe, which has its headwaters in the Black Forest of Germany, and then passes through, more or less in turn:
Austria
Slovakia
Hungary
Croatia
Serbia
Bulgaria
Ukraine
Moldova
Romania,
and runs into the Black Sea. If these places are unfamiliar to you, you should look them up. The map above indicates the path of the river from west to east, in red.
Greetings, Boys, Girls, Fruits and Flowers, this is Archie’s Archives.
If you, or someone you love, is interested in classical music, write this number down. No, just kidding; I’m just saying: we’re all about classical music, and this is the program for you.
You have to realize that there is an enormous volume of what we might call classical music out there, of which I have a tiny little sample, and that’s from where I have to select stuff to play for you. I have — let’s see, about, er, 800 CDs, altogether, including some pop, some folk, and a tiny bit of jazz, but I have to confess that about a third of it I have never listened to. For instance, if I like one movement of a classical work,—classical works come in multiple movements, and you can’t just buy one. Let me take that back: these days you can. But most of these CDs were bought before mp3’s were commercially available, so I have lots of stuff I have never listened to.
Unfortunately, my listeners —that’s you— probably want this to be background music, and you probably want me to stop talking right now. But, since you don’t write to me, I have absolutely no way of knowing what your preferences are. So I have to guess, and what are the chances, right? that I will guess correctly? Zero.
This week, my original plan was to play music that had to do with Space. Why space? Because Joseph LeBlanc. Who is Joseph LeBlanc, you might ask. Well, on Saturday mornings at 10, there is this professor from Penn College of Technology who has a program for young people (and older people) about science, called Spacetime, which I forgot to mention on the radio broadcast. Science is something that is going to play an increasing role not only in our daily lives, but in our future decision-making. It is going to influence whom we vote for, how we recycle our trash, what cars we buy, and so on. Our parents could leave science to the experts and just ignore all that. But for us, science is the elephant in the room. Or the elephant not in the room, because people are killing elephants left and right. Some people would say that killing elephants is good for business, and what’s good for business is good for everybody. Unfortunately, Business attracts some of the most inconsiderate and selfish people on the planet. (The other business people support WXPI.) So some of the poster boys of Big Business are exactly the people who should not be allowed to make all the decisions on our behalf.
Science is important.
One of the obligations—and actually, a rather pleasant obligation—of WXPI, is to provide diversity outreach. We have undertaken to draw into our programming, and into the cultural and educational activities of our town, people who do not usually participate in them. One way is to have workshops for young people to interest them in public and community radio, because the interested young people of today are the community leaders of tomorrow. So we have been trying to partner with the Firetree summer camp, and the Cappa summer camp, and the YMCA summer camp, to provide a 3 to 4 week set of lessons and workshops about WXPI, and how we put shows together. So Joseph LeBlanc has been taking the leadership for some of this, and in the process, I got to listen to one of his shows, and he borrowed one of my CDs to play there, so I’m going to use the Space theme here.
Did you know that July is National Space Month? That’s what Pee Wee Herman says, and he should know. I think the major Apollo 11 manned mission to the Moon was on July 21st, 1969, when most of my listeners were barely in elementary school, and could not even spell Moon.
Anyway, the background music you are hearing, is the same fugue I usually play for the sign-in, but this time being played by Alexis Weissenberg. By the way, I was not born being able to mangle German names like I do; this is an acquired talent, and I think most Americans should try to pronounce foreign words as well as they can. Some of our friends give up very quickly, and take the view that, hey, the elephant should not have to learn to pronounce words in the language of an ant. But a polite elephant would give it a jolly good try, you know? We should stop being Donald Trump elephants, and try to be, you know, like maybe John Kennedy elephants. Kennedy would occasionally say a German word or two, with some success (notably ich bin ein Berliner as the quote has come down to us, but he may have said ich bin Berliner, which is more correct.) We must look for more foreign-friendly heroes to emulate.
Well, this show was a lot of fun to put together, and I hope you like it. Here are the details of the few items for which I wrote up the introductions; for the later cuts, I improvised, so I shall have to improvise the written remarks as well.
Part A
The usual background to the opening of the show is the opening several bars of this same piece, but played via MIDI, using guitar and percussion sounds. But on the radio broadcast, I played a version by Mieczyslaw Horzowski, and here I'm using a performance by Alexis Weissenberg. These piano transcriptions are a lot more satisfying than a person accustomed to the original organ work would expect, and especially in this case, because there are few sustained notes---there certainly are a few, but not as many as you typically have in organ works.
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| Eugene Ormandy |
If you saw the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, you would remember this waltz: On the Beautiful Blue Danube. This waltz is used to symbolize Man's presence in Space, in fact used to suggest that Man's presence in space has become a comfortable one. Ever since I saw that scene of the spinning Space Station (Arthur Clarke, who collaborated with Stanley Kubrik on this movie was one of the most influential futurists of the 20th century, and never ceased to urge the use of a space platform as the most important tool of space exploration. Our Spacelab is only a pathetic gesture in the direction of establishing such a thing), I have always associated the Blue Danube with spinning space objects.
Several of the next set of pieces are from Gustav Holst's The Planets, a very influential work of the early 20th century.
Mars, the Bringer of War
Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Mercury, the Winged Messenger
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| Gustav Holst |
One of the most recognizable movements in The Planets is "Mars, the Bringer of War." Listen to the quintuple rhythm. We played this on our show for Halloween, because it is a little scary. I am only playing the first four or five minutes, because I don’t think I can stay focused on a piece this long.
The second movement from The Planets is "Venus, Bringer of Peace." Venus seems to be represented by a clarinet, and in the opera Tannhäuser Wagner also represents Venus with a clarinet, which is kind of interesting. We play a brief snatch of the Tannhäuser Overture with the Venus theme, and continue with about 5 minutes of Holst's "Venus the Bringer of Peace."
Next comes "Mercury, the Winged Messenger." Mercury is always represented wearing a hat with wings on it, and wearing winged sandals. But, you know, I can hear a note of mischief in the music, and I think Holst is conflating Mercury with Loki, the Norse fire god, who is definitely characterized as mischievous and unpredictable, but both Loki and Mercury were sort of errand-boys in their respective pantheons, so the leaking between the two entities was excusable.
Part B
NASA: Space Sounds
We take a brief break from Holst, and listen to something a little different: NASA space recordings. I’m not completely sure about what is going on here —maybe I ought to ask Joseph LeBlanc— but I believe that what happening was that Voyager was equipped to receive all sorts of wavelengths, including radio frequencies in a large band. Now these radio signals if interpreted as shortwave AM radio, the amplitude variations are in the frequency band of audible sound signals, so NASA converts the radio frequencies to sound as though it was an AM broadcast, and as Voyager passes close to the various planets and other features in the Solar System, the radio-frequency broadcasts may be converted into very distinctive sound signatures for each of these objects. We play several samples of these, including some electronic music composed to go with the other sounds. As we pass from one sample to the next, I announce the title of each one.
Holst: "Jupiter the Bringer of Jollity"
Actually, Jupiter was no such thing, but Holst was rewriting mythology, so what can you do? You can actually detect a sort of Christmassy spirit here.
Lennon and McCartney: "Across The Universe"
Part C
Holst: "Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age"
This is a little long, and I remark that we grow old just listening to this 9-minute movement.
Holst: "Uranus, the Magician"
I don't know where Host gets this; it's certainly not from Roman mythology.
Holst: "Neptune, the Mystic"
I give up. Neptune was the ancient god of the sea, a brother of Jove, or at least an uncle.
Michel LeGrand, Lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman: "Windmills Of Your Mind" (Petula Clark)
I included this because of the circles and rotation motif in the lyrics.
Jerry Goldsmith: Main Theme from Star Trek, The Movie (Eric Kunzel, Cincinnati Pops)
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| Delia Derbyshire |
The score, written by Ron Grainer, was actually performed electronically by Delia Derbyshire, a electronic musician who worked at that time for the BBC. She was very influential in the development of electronic music in Britain.
György Ligeti: Atmospheres (Southwest German Radio Orchestra)
The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, was an amazing piece of cinema, conceived by the team of Arthur C. Clarke, a British-American-Sri Lankan writer, and Stanley Kubrick, a movie producer and director. Based on a short story by Arthur Clarke called The Sentinel, it was a unique futuristic movie that was remarkable because it seemed a lot less fantastic than most science fiction movies; in fact, it almost seemed like a documentary.
The music score commissioned by Kubrik was being written by Alex North while the movie was being shot, and Kubrik wanted some temporary music to go with the rushes, to give the team an idea of what the movie would be like. In the end, they liked the temporary music selections so much that they never used the commissioned score. Mr. North was understandably devastated by this move.
This is a wonderful piece by Györgi Ligeti called Atmospheres, actually used in the movie.
Part D
Johann Sebastian Bach: Orchestral Suite No 1 in C - Overture
These suites were loosely based on the model of the grand dance suites written for the court in Versailles, though Bach's suites are arguably more grand and wonderful than any written in France! But it is all a matter of taste.
Someone once said that Mozart’s greatness was in conveying human experience: humor, romance, perfect agreement, disappointment, fear, joy. Beethoven’s greatness was in conveying his attitude towards the world and society: in short, what it felt like to be Beethoven. From Beethoven onwards, this trend towards expressing a very personal outlook was regarded very highly. But Bach, this same person says, and it was stated by John Eliot Gardiner, but I don’t think it was an original idea, but anyway, he says that Bach’s genius was in conveying the wonder of the universe. Some of Bach’s work was praise of god, and at the same time, marveling at the beauty of creation. But here I’m going for something grand, but very human, the overture to the Orchestral Suite no. 1 in C major. This is played by the Bath Festival Orchestra, conducted by Yehudi Menuhin, the great violinist and conductor.
These overtures all have the same structure: a grand formal entrance promenade, followed by an agitated fast section with lots of counterpoint, and for closing the grand promenade again. This is a small orchestra with modern instruments.
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| Tom Johnson, composer |
Tom Johnson is a musician who is very much interested in Mathematics, and in this album he illustrates many mathematical formulae and relationships and facts using a piano. In this piece, he demonstrates the Mersenne Numbers, which are
21 − 1 = 1,
22 − 1 = 3,
23 − 1 = 7,
.
.
.
29 − 1 = 511.
Over a drone bass, Tom Johnson plays a sequence of melodies of length 1, 3, 7 and so on. The melody of length 7 is actually obtained from two copies of the melody of length 3, and you will perceive the rule as you listen. For the sake of symmetry, Tom Johnson actually plays the melodies again in reverse order so that in fact the tunes are of length
1, 3, 7, ..., 255, 511, 255, ..., 7, 3, 1.
Elton John: Rocket Man
Archie: Tune-Waltz
This is our usual sign-off tune, but in the form of a waltz.
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