AHCS Speaker Series | Alex Rehding "Earth Music: A Media Archaeology of the Golden Record"
ٰ:The Golden Record on board of the Voyager spacecraft (1977) is on a journey through outer space, carrying a sampling of world music into the unknown. Conceived as a visiting card to other life in the universe, the Golden Record has been called a “message in a bottle” and an “interstellar mixtape.”—The question I want to ask is simple: What would actually happen if extraterrestrials picked it up at the other end? Can we expect that extraterrestrials have ears? What does listening even mean in an interstellar context? In what could be termed a media archaeology of the future, we will examine the record as an interface in the communication of various expressive forms—words, music, images—with the aim of getting a better sense of how exactly the Golden Record might function in this unpredictable context.
Bio:Alexander Rehdingis Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. His work is located at the intersection between music theory and cultural history. His publications includeHugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought(2003), Music and Monumentality(2009) andBeethoven’s Ninth Symphony(2017). Rehding has also co-editedMusic Theory and Natural Order(2001),The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Studies(2011), andMusic in Time(2016). Recent work has also taken Rehding toward media studies and transcultural work, in such articles as “Instruments of Music Theory” and the online exhibitionSounding China. A former editor ofActa musicologica,Rehding is editor-in-chief of theOxford Music Handbookseries. Rehding’s awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Dent Medal (2014). Current projects include theOxford Handbook of Timbre, theOxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, a volume on transcultural music theory, and a book on the Golden Record.