{"id":100580,"date":"2016-07-20T12:32:29","date_gmt":"2016-07-20T16:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=100580"},"modified":"2016-09-22T12:05:30","modified_gmt":"2016-09-22T16:05:30","slug":"dark-was-the-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/20\/dark-was-the-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Dark Was the Night"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the Voyager Mission.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Mozart_magic_flute\"<\/a>

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Stage set for Mozart\u2019s Magic Flute<\/i>, 1815.<\/p><\/div>\n

This summer, we\u2019re introducing a series of new columnists.<\/em> Up this week is Alison Kinney, whose column,\u00a0Songs to the Moon, is\u00a0a series on fandom and how the music, art, and artifacts of opera transform cultures and desires. \u2014 Ed.<\/em><\/p>\n

If the inhabitants of other stars should spot the Voyager 1 interstellar probe zooming past\u2014if they capture it and assemble its onboard audio player\u2014and if they have ears to hear, they might puzzle over this message from the Queen of the Night<\/a> (translated here from German):<\/p>\n

\n

The vengeance of hell boils in my heart,
Death and despair blaze around me!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps these German-speaking aliens will visit Earth to eradicate the threat posed by Mozart\u2019s 1791 aria. Or maybe they\u2019ll thrill to the prospect of subscribing to the Bavarian State Opera, only to discover that the soprano Edda Moser<\/a>, who performed the recording they\u2019d heard, had retired five billion years earlier, in 1999.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1<\/a> is the first human-made object to depart<\/a> our solar system, bearing the Voyager Interstellar Message (better known as the Golden Record<\/a>), a gold-plated disk containing music, pictures, and greetings in fifty-five languages. One project consultant said, \u201cThere is only an infinitesimal chance that the plaque will ever be seen by a single extraterrestrial, but it will certainly be seen by billions of terrestrials. Its real function, therefore, is to appeal to and expand the human spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n

In making their selections, the Interstellar Message team tried to accentuate the positive\u2014but art and culture, even NASA<\/small>-approved art and culture, tend toward revelations in excess of their creators\u2019 intentions. Though the team opted not to mention the nuclear arms race, Auschwitz, the Khmer Rouge, transatlantic enslavement, and the genocide of Native peoples, it was clear, as the team\u2019s creative director, Ann Druyan, said, \u201chow much of what we tried to hide was more obvious than we realized.\u2026 The lies we tell have a very short shelf life.\u201d One of the greeters, for example\u2014UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim\u2014was later accused of Nazi war crimes.<\/p>\n

And the approved music carries its own messages about conflict. The design director Jon Lomberg<\/a>, a fan of Mozart, Rossini, and baroque opera and oratorio, told me he ranks Mozart\u2019s music \u201cwith sex, sunsets, and sushi as among life\u2019s greatest pleasures.\u201d Lomberg gave Carl Sagan a tape of an aria from Mozart\u2019s ethereal, antic fantasy The Magic Flute<\/em>. (\u201cA wish-list project is to design a stage production of Magic Flute<\/em>,\u201d he told me. \u201cI could do some interesting things visually with the Queen of the Night!\u201d)<\/p>\n

Druyan wasn\u2019t an opera fan, but she was \u201cabsolutely thrilled\u201d by the recording; she extolled the mastery and emotional range of Moser\u2019s voice. \u201cIt\u2019s like a little mechanism for touching all the parts of you, when you hear it. It\u2019s so exciting, and of course, that wonderful passage where she seems to defy gravity, and she goes higher and higher and higher \u2026 She\u2019s the Queen of the Night, and you imagine these two Voyagers, moving around forty thousand\u00a0miles per hour through the night, for all the nights of a thousand million years,\u201d Druyan said. \u201cThe idea that she retains her dominance of the night, from Mozart\u2019s brain to the cosmos, is the closest thing we get to eternity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"voyagerrecord\"<\/a>

The Sounds of Earth<\/em>\u00a0record cover.<\/p><\/div>\n

But the Queen\u2019s dominance isn\u2019t just artistic. The Voyager aria, \u201cDer H\u00f6lle Rache,\u201d is about assassination, violent coercion, and parental abuse. As Lomberg said, Mozart is \u201cthe genius of musical contradiction and reconciliation of opposites.\u201d The crystalline, stratospheric perfection of Moser\u2019s voice rings with power: both murderous political absolutism and virtuosic mastery. Sometimes the loveliest music exhorts you to kill. Among the disk\u2019s other songs about violence, the Bulgarian folk song \u201cIzlel ye Delyo Haydutin,\u201d\u00a0performed by Valya Balkanska, stars a rebel warrior, warning the authorities not to convert his aunts to Islam\u2014or else.<\/p>\n

The team might have confined themselves to wedding songs, nonverbal music, or the whale\u2019s song, but Druyan said she saw the recording as both a conceptual artwork and an act of atonement. The disk also includes a recording of her brain waves, during which, she said, \u201cI was trying to be honest in my meditation about the real state of the world, the history of the world \u2026 as well as the plight that we found ourselves in, in 1977\u2014fifty to sixty thousand nuclear weapons, and at least one-fifth of the whole population of\u00a0Earth couldn\u2019t find potable water, get enough to eat, find shelter. So I tried to be honest about our worst.\u201d The reckoning with violence, war, and responsibility, indivisible from beauty, is Voyager\u2019s most profound message to the universe.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s no reason to expect an extraterrestrial to understand. Musicologists debunk the supposedly universal communicative potential of music<\/a> even among different peoples of our own planet. When not everybody understands German\u2014when happy and sad songs don\u2019t cross cultures\u2014when even a bel-canto fan might profess not to get<\/em> Verdi, much less Sch\u00f6nberg\u2014no aria can universally connote beauty, much less understanding, self-revelation, or ethical standards. But the Voyager message also suggests, tacitly, the desire not to be wholly understood, by either extraterrestrials or future earthlings. If our music and chatter turn out to be unintelligible to them, than we might earnestly hope that murder, genocide, and deprivation will be, too.<\/p>\n

We can still marvel that this fragment of opera, and the Navajo \u201cNight Chant<\/a>,\u201d and Blind\u00a0Willie Johnson\u2019s \u201cDark Was the Night<\/a>,\u201d hurtle through the vast nighttime of space. We can also fantasize that one of Lomberg\u2019s alternate musical suggestions might have gone aboard Voyager: the tender, charming \u201cVoi che sapete<\/a>\u201d from Mozart\u2019s opera The Marriage of Figaro, <\/em>a youth\u2019s amazement at the mysteries of love. May all opera fans\u2019 minds be blown by the concept of Cherubino in space! May we all sing of love, of nothing making sense to us, and of yearning to understand the world a little bit better.<\/p>\n

This series, like Voyager, essays the starry void. It bears a message about music, creativity, and the unruly passions opera fans can\u2019t help but flaunt to the universe, in hopes of interception and understanding. Everybody needs a playlist for the cosmos!<\/em><\/p>\n

Alison Kinney<\/em><\/a> is the author of <\/em>Hood (Bloomsbury, 2016). Her writing has appeared\u00a0online at\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review Daily, <\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,<\/em> The Atlantic, Hyperallergic,<\/em>\u00a0New Republic, <\/em>The New Inquiry, <\/em>The Mantle, <\/em>VAN Magazine, and the<\/em>\u00a0New York Times. @Alison_Kinney<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the Voyager Mission. This summer, we\u2019re introducing a series of new columnists. Up this week is Alison Kinney, whose column,\u00a0Songs to the Moon, is\u00a0a series on fandom and how the music, art, and artifacts of opera transform cultures and desires. \u2014 Ed. If the inhabitants of other stars should spot the Voyager 1 interstellar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":907,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[23361,23347,23366,23358,18229,23345,16554,9950,18260,14764,14279,23357,1273,23351,23348,2111,23344,46,23359,15805,23360,2204,22944,23352,23364,23349,24672,878,23356,23354,23355,23353,23365,23363,23362,3693,23346,23350,23342,16144],"class_list":["post-100580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-night-chant","tag-23347","tag-alison-kinney","tag-amazement","tag-awe","tag-blind-willie-johnson","tag-carl-sagan","tag-cold-war","tag-cosmos","tag-creativity","tag-fandom","tag-galaxies","tag-german","tag-golden-record","tag-interstellar","tag-love","tag-mozard","tag-music","tag-musicology","tag-mystery","tag-navajo","tag-opera","tag-our-correspondents","tag-queen-of-the-night","tag-schonbrg","tag-solar-system","tag-songs-to-the-moon","tag-space","tag-stars","tag-sublime","tag-sublimity","tag-the-magic-flute","tag-the-marriage-of-figaro","tag-the-truth-is-out-there","tag-universe","tag-verdi","tag-voyager-1","tag-voyager-interstellar-message","tag-voyager-record","tag-wonder"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDark Was the Night: On the Voyager Mission<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Our new correspondent, Allison Kinney, is writing a series on fandom, and how the music, art, and artifacts of opera transform cultures and desires.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/20\/dark-was-the-night\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Dark Was the Night by Alison Kinney\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"July 20, 2016 \u2013 On the Voyager Mission.This summer, we\u2019re introducing a series of new columnists. 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