Austrian composer Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube has, for many people, been synonymous with space travel since it was used in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
However, the world famous waltz truly traveled among the stars yesterday, when the European Space Agency’s (ESA) antenna broadcast a live performance of it into space to celebrate the composer’s 200th birthday.
The Vienna Symphony Orchestra was to play a concert in the Austrian capital from 7:30pm, ESA director-general Josef Aschbacher said.
The concert was to be broadcast live on the Internet and shown at a public screening in Vienna, New York and near the antenna in Spain.
“The digitized sound will be transmitted to the large 35m satellite dish at ESA’s Cebreros ground station in Spain,” and from there, the waltz will be “transmitted in the form of electromagnetic waves,” he said.
The Blue Danube evokes the elegance of 19th-century imperial Vienna, which lives on in the city’s roaring ball season.
For Norbert Kettner, director of the Vienna tourist board, the Danube waltz is a “true unofficial space anthem,” because of Kubrick.
It is the “typical sound of space,” Kettner said, with the tunes being played “during various docking manoeuvres of the International Space Station (ISS).”
The Vienna Symphony Orchestra would make sure to underline the waltz’s airiness as if it were floating through space, orchestra director Jan Nast said.
Music is a language “which touches many people” and has “the universal power to convey hope and joy,” said Nast, who put together the program for yesterday’s hour-long “interstellar concert.”
Once transmitted via Spain’s satellite dish, the signal was to travel to reach NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft — the most distant man-made object in the universe — in approximately 23 hours and 3 minutes.
After surpassing Voyager 1, it would continue its interstellar journey.
By catching up with the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, Austria also seeks to right a perceived wrong.
Both Voyagers carry “Golden Records” — 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials. The record holds 115 images of life on Earth, recorded in analog form, and a variety of sounds and snatches of music.
While The Magic Flute by composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was included among the selection of 27 music pieces, Strauss’ famous waltz was not.
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