2001: A Space Odyssey’s balletic waltz to be beamed to Voyager 1
By David Szondy, New Atlas - May 25, 2025
https://newatlas.com/space/2001-a-space-odysseys-balletic-waltz-to-be-beamed-to-voyager-1/
On May 31, Voyager 1 will be the guest of honor at what may be the most exclusive concert in history. To mark the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss II, ESA will beam a live performance of “By the Beautiful Blue Danube” to NASA’s deep space probe. When Stanley Kubrick filmed the sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, he did what many directors do. During the editing, he used classical library music to fill in for the original score being composed by Alex North. To his pleasant surprise, Kubrick found that the library music worked much better than the planned score, so he kept the pieces in. One of these was Strauss’s “By the Beautiful Blue Danube,” which was used during the sequence where the Pan Am space shuttle docks with Space Station V in what has often been called a space ballet.
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It also caused a bit of a kerfuffle in 1977 when Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 lifted off on their mission to Jupiter and beyond that would eventually see them leave the solar system, never to return. Bolted to the hull of both spacecraft was a copy of NASA’s Golden Record, which was a gold-plated copper LP disc containing images and sounds from the planet Earth as a cosmic postcard to any beings who might find it eons in the future.
It was an ambitious enterprise, but when it came to the music selections the NASA committee opted for eclecticism and a certain ideological puritanism, which meant that entire genres of music were excluded. The inclusion of folk tune selections that would have stumped a music ethnologist meant the Blue Danube didn’t make the cut. Now the Vienna Tourist Board, ESA, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra hope to make some small amends by beaming the waltz to Voyager 1 as part of what is billed as an interstellar live broadcast. ….