Musicians and music lovers rapidly run out of superlatives to describe his purported genius. Bach’s music, it seems, is untroubled by the boundaries of instrument, style or era. His music represents the pinnacle of the Baroque era’s concerns with counterpoint but also can be readily adopted for a wide range of instrumentations, eras and styles, from ‘classical’ to jazz, pop and electronic. This vision of Bach’s music floating above the Earth as a symbol of musical perfection resonates with a prevailing perception of Bach’s art: somehow transcendent, timeless, and not of this world. Ultimately, among the commendably diverse 27 pieces of music included on the record, a full three are by Bach, suggesting perhaps that he alone represents more than 11 per cent of the value of our entire musical history. When deciding which music could represent the pinnacle of human spirit and intelligence, Johann Sebastian Bach was inevitably suggested but – according to an unverified but irresistible anecdote – there was some dissent, because presenting music of such beauty and intelligence to any extraterrestrial listener would be ‘just showing off’. The importance of music to the project is clear: hand-etched on the record’s surface is the inscription ‘To the makers of music – all worlds, all times.’ The Golden Record. It speaks for itself through the common fabric of frequencies – amplitude over time – which can be etched directly and unfiltered into the surface of the disc. One elegant method of how this might be possible is through the medium of music, which – aside from lyrical content – has the advantages of neither needing visual representation nor a lexicon of phonic objects. Its aim is to convey – in the absence of a common language – not just the facts of human existence, but also evidence of our intelligence. Created to communicate the story of human civilisation to any extraterrestrial who happens to encounter it, the Golden Record includes images, mathematical equations, astronomical coordinates and sounds. This artefact was placed onboard the Voyager 1 space probe in 1977 (and another on the Voyager 2 sister vessel) and now, having long completed its scheduled planetary flybys, it hurtles at nearly 500 times the speed of sound into deep space. Some 14 billion miles from here floats a 12-inch gold-plated record.
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