Why Mozart's The Magic Flute is on the Voyager Golden Record

[pesco]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/24/why-mozarts-the-magic-flute.html

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[anon81034786]

That was awesome. Thanks for the podcast.

Magic Flute is my favorite and still gives me chills every time I hear that aria. I’ve seen it live several times already and it never gets old.

My favorite version is the Met’s performance by Julie Taymor. She did the costumes for the Lion King as well.

[euansmith]

“Why Mozart’s The Magic Flute is on the Voyager Golden Record…”

Is the answer the patriarchy? Or white, male privilege? Or cultural imperialism? I guess I’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out.

Edit: what must it be like to have that sound issuing from inside your body?

[Spizella]

Mother-hating masons?

Opera was in the hands of the white patriarchy for too long, and has mostly ceded its place at the forefront of popular culture to musical theater. Which is sad; opera began in Italy around 1600, as people who were rediscovering the ancient classics found that Greek plays were performed with music and tried to recreate that:
https://sfopera.com/discover-opera/intro-to-opera/a-brief-history-of-opera/

Opera can be as exciting as that sounds, idea-wise, but it’s too expensive to hear, too hard to learn about, not usually acted, and the repertoire is ridiculously misogynistic, colonialist, xenophobic, and on and on. which sucks, because this can be riveting, terrible and beautiful stuff:

[SamWinston]

Is this on DVD or CD-Rom also? Something that would also be able to frame index a specific image along with the audio like old school educational laser disks would do.

Voyager Company

They used to have laser disks that could be controlled by the remote, or more likely a macintosh hypercard stack to access individual frames. It was rather interesting to see the Louvre collection flash by at 26 frames a second for an hour if you just put in the disk and hit play.

[pesco]

The images on the Voyager Record weren’t meant to be timed with particular sounds. The music and images were selected independently by different people.

Also, Voyager Company was unrelated to the Voyager Record.

[Mal_Tosevite]

Opera can be pretty silly, too. I can’t find a video of this

http://awpotter.com/event/the-magic-flute/

But I got to see a performance of it and honestly, they mixed retro video games and Magic Flute incredibly cleverly.

Here’s highlight from their production of Abduction from the Seraglio:

[SamWinston]

Oh yeah…I know that. IE: Voyager Company being unrelated to NASA project.

However…it’s similar…and inspired by the message in the bottle we sent.

The Laserdiscs and CD-ROM’s voyager (company) released are very nicely done. I wonder if there’s an hard copy equivalent today? As quite a few of their laserdiscs were still frames of museum copyrighted artwork packed into a laserdisc with frame index access.

[pesco]

Right on. Yes, Voyager did some beautiful “new media” back in the day.