Alien Listening

Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth

Daniel K. L. Chua, Alexander Rehding

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781942130543
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musikgeschichte & -kritik

An examination of NASA's Golden Record that offers new perspectives and theories on how music can be analyzed, listened to, and thought about—by aliens and humans alike. In 1977 NASA shot a mixtape into outer space. The Golden Record aboard the Voyager spacecrafts contained world music and sounds of Earth to represent humanity to any extraterrestrial civilizations. To date, the Golden Record is the only human-made object to have left the solar system. Alien Listening asks the big questions that the Golden Record raises: Can music live up to its reputation as the universal language in communications with the unknown? How do we fit all of human culture into a time capsule that will barrel through space for tens of thousands of years? And last but not least: Do aliens have ears?The stakes could hardly be greater. Around the extreme scenario of the Golden Record, Chua and Rehding develop a thought-provoking, philosophically heterodox, and often humorous Intergalactic Music Theory of Everything, a string theory of communication, an object-oriented ontology of sound, and a Penelopean model woven together from strands of music and media theory. The significance of this exomusicology, like that of the Golden Record, ultimately takes us back to Earth and its denizens. By confronting the vast temporal and spatial distances the Golden Record traverses, the authors take listeners out of their comfort zone and offer new perspectives in which music can be analyzed, listened to, and thought about—by aliens and humans alike.

PART ONE

Toward an Intergalactic Music Theory of Everything

CHAPTER ONE

Manifesto

In a galaxy far, far away …

— Star Wars

Music theory has seldom been modest. A manifesto entitled “Toward an Intergalactic Music Theory of Everything” should be no surprise, except for the modesty of the word “toward.” Such caution is unbecoming of the genre. After all, music theory, in all its speculative glory, was the first “string theory” of the universe (Figure 1.1). Admittedly, compared with the quantum vibrations of current string theory, it was somewhat reductive, consisting of just one string; but it was a very long one that tuned the motion of the planets and ordered the entire chain of being along its harmonic series. Music theory ratio-nized the cosmos. It was a theory of everything. The universe vibrated with knowledge, and there was one string to rule them all.

Pythagoras would have called this his “big twang theory,” were it not for the fact that such music didn’t have a beginning. It was eternal, a resounding ring of timeless integers that intimated a metaphysical reality. Music was being. This ontological string pulled the world together and kept it in proportion for some two thousand years. Even when its cosmic order waned as the light of reason dawned upon the eighteenth century, music theory continued its immodest claims, stirring up quarrels among the intelligentsia concerning the identity of body and soul, matter and spirit, the world and the self. Indeed, music theory was seldom just about music. So much else seemed to hang on this one string.

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Times have changed. Although music theory today is still entangled in the frayed fibers of its ancient string, it has become increasingly irrelevant in explaining anything other than itself.

A string walks into a bar

It has evolved into kind of a truism that borders on tautology: music theory is for music theorists. It has fallen into an academic narcissism that would be quite beautiful, were it not so boring for everyone else peering into the discipline. Of course, this assumes in the first place that it is possible for those on the outside to penetrate the density of its discourse in order to experience the beauty of its boredom. It is dull and forbiddingly opaque, and most scholars leave music theory alone to talk to itself.

So why bother with music theory? Because its cosmic potential is too big to fail. For music theorists, this manifesto will clearly be a sharp, short critique intended as much to be a goad as it is a call to action. For others, this internal critique may seem irrelevant. Why not skip the chapter and leave music theorists to circle within their solipsistic enclosures? Because such an omission would be a failure — a failure not just of nerve, but of method. This chapter is vital in revealing that we all need to be music theorists and that there is nothing to fear from the music-theoretical barriers erected to exclude a wider participation.

So what are these barriers?

To summarize the issue, there are two questions facing music theory that those on the inside often fail to see, but that are blindingly obvious when viewed from the outside:

1. Why is music theory so boring?

2. Why is music theory incomprehensible?

The two questions are obviously related, complementing each other as partial answers, but there is more to this than just boredom induced by incomprehension. Let’s address the two questions.

1. In answer to the first question — Why is music theory so boring? — we need to be clear that this has nothing to do with the quality of current scholarship. It has never been better. If anything, it is too interesting to suffer from ennui.¹ No, this boredom is of another order. It has to do with vision. Or rather, the total lack of vision. It is as if music theory has erected thick double-dotted bar lines on all sides to contain itself in a perpetual state of internal motion (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2. Music theory’s cordon sanitaire

This isolationism probably stems from its emulation of “absolute music,” the idea that music is essentially a self-referential system about only itself, music that, as Richard Taruskin explains, requires the cordon sanitaire of theory to keep music’s essence pure and its form autonomous.² But this obsession with hygiene results in a theory that is highly allergic to everything. What was formerly a theory of everything now sneezes at the cosmos it once explained to keep its knowledge to itself. As a consequence, music theory is boring because it is irrelevant. However interesting it might be internally, it just has nothing to say beyond its little plastic bubble, its cordon sanitaire. What used to be the most gregarious and speculative of disciplines, with a reputation for nosing around the cosmos as a cross-disciplinary space invader, is now reduced to a lonely, solipsistic existence. The fact that some intrepid music theorists may burst out of the bubble, venturing beyond their disciplinary borders to enliven their own scholarship, is beside the point. The questions is: Who adopts music theory to enrich their discipline? The answer is: no one. Music theory has written itself out of any participation in epistemology. It is structurally boring.

Q: Why did the music theorist cross the road?

A: He didn’t.

2. As for the second question — Why is music theory incomprehensible? — the answer cannot be attributed to the incomprehensibility of scholarly discourse, which is the native tongue of academia. Academics understand each other’s incomprehensibility perfectly. No, music theory’s incomprehensibility is of another order. It is usually blamed on the nature of music and the apparent opacity of its inner workings, which require the use of specialized terms, nonverbal symbols, and insular concepts that exclude most academics from listening in. But music did not invent this language. Music is everywhere and for everyone, so why is its theory so impenetrable that only a few understand it?

The problem with music theory is that it is fundamentally incomprehensible. What is basic is not basic — it is already too difficult. There is no passing note long enough or consonant skip high enough for the uninitiated to cross the divide and scale the walls of the citadel. To be clear, there is nothing wrong with these “basics.” Who would want to hold anything against a passing note or a triad? They work just fine. After all, that’s what they are supposed to do — work. But that is the problem. Everything functions in music theory: harmonic functions, formal functions, tonal functions, chord functions, thematic functions. Theory is preoccupied with work, busying itself with what music does, and not what music is. If an alien were to land inside its walls, ze (the gender-neutral pronoun seems appropriate here) would see a strange world populated with human doings, rather than human beings. The graffiti in its streets would read: “Utility rules. Ontology sucks.” Its ivory towers would espouse the maxim: “To do is to be.” Technique would be its law and labor its politics. But there would be no meaning, because the basic questions — the “What?” and “Why?” of being — are lost in the hum of activity.

It didn’t used to be this way. In the past, music theory was all about being. That long piece of string fixed permanently at either end of the universe may not have done much, but it was the basis for everything. Everyone had their being in its vibrations. It was as simple as 1:2:3. But now, with its technical turn, music theory has become a highly specialized skill, as arcane as

. (An in-joke for music theorists; if you didn’t get it, then it proves the point.³) As long as theory obsesses over technique (doing) with a disregard for ontology (being), then what it considers “basic” is simple only to those already in the craft and is incomprehensible for those outside its industry. By failing to address what music is, what passes as a fundamental concept is not fundamental at all. Even something as simple as a passing note involves a highly complex operation requiring a vast technical apparatus to support its tiny steps. These “basics” are so high on the theoretical ladder that one wonders whether its base is still grounded in anything, since without “being,” there can be no ground. And if you look carefully, theory has no legs to stand on. It simply uses technique to pull itself up by its own bootstraps. It manufactures its own standardized models, mistaking “normativity” as a form of self-rule when there is nothing “normal” supporting its claims. Hence, theory can guarantee music’s autonomy only by binding its procedures with technical rules and formal laws to create a dense, disembedded, impenetrable structure. It is incomprehensible.

But this incomprehensibility points to a deeper incomprehensibility within theory itself. Music theory does not know what music is. Or rather, as a theory committed to technique, its “basics” are so specialized that it narrows down what counts as music; its tools are designed for a limited span of mostly Western art music and only when they are encased in the form of musical works. Theory, then, legitimizes only that which it can analyze (the canon of Western art music) and excludes most music in the world which it cannot recognize. Music is everywhere and for everyone except in music theory where it is incomprehensible — even to itself.

The Ministry of Works

Mr. Stravinsky, I believe your bi-tonal chord contravenes Section 7-32 of the ordinance for sacrificial dancing in a public space.

It is a serious situation when theory is both epistemologically insignificant and ontologically ignorant. What should be the theoretical life of music, unifying its diverse manifestations, has lost its purpose. Structurally boring and fundamentally incomprehensible, music theory has failed music. It is unable to provide a common platform from which to theorize music across the disciplines with basic concepts that are equally meaningful to all music. Music theory fails as theory.⁴

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Exactly at 8:56 a.m. on September 5, 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe rocketed into space. This official launch followed on the heels of the craft’s identical twin, Voyager 2, which was sent ahead a few days earlier as a trial balloon. While music theory was boldly orbiting “the music itself,” the astronomer Carl Sagan sent music in the opposite direction — into outer space. A gold-plated audiovisual disc with a selection of music ranging from J. S. Bach to Chuck Berry and from Mexican mariachi m...