I didn't have to look far.
Both men were revolutionary, but not consciously so. They developed what came before them without wanting to torch it. Throughout his life, Beethoven revered and built upon the work of his predecessor Bach, and his teachers, Haydn and Mozart. As Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford says, he was a "radical evolutionary". In slowly becoming himself, he became the Romantic era.
And Chuck Berry arguably fathered rock 'n' roll by taking the country and blues music he grew up with, straightening it rhythmically and transforming it into the driving, sexual, smart, demonic music of youth .
But where they meet most notably, and probably tragically, is that they were both kind of shitheads.
Scanning their bios, over and over, these guys made four-alarm burning-barf messes of their lives and the lives of others while creating some of humanity's most incredible art.
And in plunging my face into the ponds of their lives, I saw plenty of awfulness - abusiveness, violence, pettiness, whoring, sex offenses, theft - a hundred things that are impossible to ignore no matter how great the art. But I also saw one beautiful bit of cosmic comedy glinting in the mud: those two brilliant bastards are stuck in a tiny spaceship together.
In 1977, when Carl Sagan and a panel of experts, were deciding which human artifacts to put aboard the Voyager One and Two spacecrafts, they put Beethoven and Chuck Berry on the same Golden Record, along with tracks from a diversity of cultures and styles. Pointing to the Western-ess of the endeavour, Bach is dominant with three tracks. Beethoven got two, the first movement of his fifth symphony and the fifth movement, or Cavatina, of his string quartet in B flat, No. 13, Op. 130, played by the Budapest String Quartet.
Berry was alive in 1977 and only got one track, which probably pissed him off - "Johnny B Goode". And there was controversy around even including that. Opponents of the song's inclusion horrifically didn't object to Berry being a convicted sex offender, but that the song was "adolescent". To which Carl Sagan replied, "There are a lot of adolescents on the planet." And the song stayed on.
In August 2012, Voyager One reached interstellar space. I won't pretend to entirely know what that means anymore than I'll pretend to have a grasp on music theory. But essentially it means Voyager One is more than 20 billion kilometres from Earth, beyond our solar system, shooting through plasma "filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago". It's taken it 40 years to get there. The next closest star is "AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis which is heading toward the constellation Ophiuchus". To give some perspective to what eternity or infinity or vastness or endlessness or whatever you want to call it is, Voyager One will drift within 1.6 light years of that star in approximately 40,000 years.
I can't even.
Our little human "bottle in the cosmic ocean", packed full of all the things that are supposed to best define what we are, that mean so much to us, hurtling through space, plutonium propelled, surrounded by endless indifference. It's so hopeful and human, laughable and tragic.
And if artists live on eternally through their art, I like to picture two of our most crusty meaning-makers, Chuck and Ludwig, squished together, two Major Toms floating in a tin can, living out there longer than humanity will likely survive back on Earth.
Titans on earth. In the cosmos - uncomfortable bunkmates.
Before you listen to the music of theirs we shot into space, I really recommend spending some time on the Voyager website. There's great poetry in its numbers and scope. And in a nice coincidence, the realization that Voyager One had reached interstellar space came as NASA detected the plasma around the craft begin "to vibrate like a violin string".
Just seeing the distance numbers tick by alone is worth an existential laugh or two. You can also access all the recordings and images they put on-board.
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html
And here are the tracks that NASA hopes, one day, an alien life-form will find, build a turn-table based on the schematic provided, and listen to.
The Beethoven:
The Berry:
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