One of my more enjoyable lessons from music teaching was a short project that I did with 7th grade students based upon the musical tastes of aliens.
Let me explain, and give you a bit of background…
I am a space nerd and love anything and everything that has to do with our solar system, its exploration, and stars in our night sky. I own a telescope and a subscription to a monthly magazine for the enjoyment of pursuing knowledge about all of this stuff that I can actually understand. I am no Stephen Hawking, but I try my best.
Some time ago, while reading my Sky & Telescope, I came upon a story about NASA’s Voyager missions.
- Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched in 1977 and made a grand tour of the solar system’s outer planets.
- They are the only functioning spacecraft in interstellar space, and they are still sending back measurements of the interstellar medium.
- Each spacecraft carries a copy of the golden record, a missive from Earth to any alien lifeforms that may find the probes in the future.
Both spacecraft snapped now famous photos of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) as they headed out of our solar system. Both Voyagers are still moving away from us and are, currently, the most distant objects made my the human race, out in space. For fun, you can go HERE to see the current distance of both crafts from Earth as well as a bunch of other cool stuff.
My crossover from space travel to music class came as I read about the Golden Record, which, as explained above, contains math, maps, photos, spoken greetings in a multitude of languages, as well as sounds and music from Earth.
Music from Earth.
I learned that the planning for the stuff to be included on the Golden Record took place with scientists, and citizens in the mid 1970’s, along with the help of The United Nations. This makes perfect sense if we want to be globally inclusive.
While taking all of this information in and looking up what is actually ON the record….a lesson formed in my head:
Me to the kids: “What if you were going to introduce the music of Earth to an alien race? Assume that these beings can hear in the same range as humans but they have never experienced listening to what we call music…which, of course, is sound or sounds that have been organized. Would you include different styles? Different time periods? Different groupings of instruments? Pieces of music that humans consider timeless? Something else? Working along with a partner, to encourage debate and the openness of ideas, you are going to create a playlist of no more than 15 pieces of music of any length, to be included on your Alien Record. When you have decided on a playlist, you will compare with the rest of the class to see if any groups have chosen the same music, and then the class will debate and vote to create one master playlist that will introduce an alien race to our music.”
I spent the first class going over the Voyager program to show the kids that something like this has actually happened and that people from all over the world were in on the decisions. I played them part of the human greetings section, and showed them some photos, as well as the galactic map that is supposed to represent the location of Earth if aliens can decode math….this led to all kinds of fun rabbit holes as the kids poked holes in the possibility that this Golden Record will ever fall into alien clutches…
I did not let them in on any of the music that is on the Golden Record, but if you want to cheat and see a list, go HERE. There are also playlists of the contents on Spotify and Apple if you search ‘Voyager playlist’
I asked the kids to guess what music is on there and they usually start off with some pop song of today until I remind them that this was put together back in the 1970’s (Hot Property weekly shout out for you Gerry). Almost every class then answered “Some Beethoven thing and The Beatles.”
Half right. Go look and listen for yourself if you would like, but back in my room, the kids were allowed to research prompts such as “the most popular music in the history of the world”, or “top ten musical styles of the last 300 years.” They could then listen, debate, and support their choices.
I got everything from Gregorian Chant, to Jazz, to African drumming, to people playing exotic instruments like Koto, Sitar and Dizi. (Look ’em up).
Some kids just argued for American pop, while others went deeper to attempt to show the world in a multicultural light.
It was a fun lesson for several years, and what triggered me to write about it was the recent Super bowl show by Puerto Rican artist Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio.
A lot of strong opinions came out during and after the performance, but I couldn’t help but wonder….what would the aliens think of the expression of culture? Would they feel the love, or still view humans as a struggling class of beings who find it more interesting to argue over our differences than come together to celebrate them. What are we afraid of?
Stay safe, stay awesome and stay strong.
Moeschen! 