What would aliens make of the waltz?
That was the big question on Saturday evening while the Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed Johann Strauss’s world-renowned “Blue Danube” waltz, as a 35-meter antenna in Cebreros, Spain, simultaneously transmitted a recording of it into space.
The Vienna Tourist Board, which organized the event at the Museum of Applied Arts in collaboration with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra and the European Space Agency, said beaming the music into the cosmos was an effort to correct the record, as it were.
In 1977, when the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft left the Earth with two copies of the Golden Record, which contains images, sounds and music from Earth, Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz did not make the cut. This was a mistake, according to Vienna’s tourism board, which is celebrating Strauss’s 200th birthday this year.
After all, Strauss was the 19th-century equivalent of a pop star. According to Tim Dokter, the director of artistic administration for the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, back then, each composition for the waltz was like a hot new single. “People would wait for it, like, ‘Oh, a new waltz dropped today,’” Dokter said. “It was something new to dance to, like a new techno song.”
With Voyager 1 already more than 15 billion miles from Earth, the farthest of any object humans have launched into the universe, there’s no way to make changes to the Golden Record. Instead, the “Blue Danube” waltz — traveling as an electromagnetic wave at the speed of light — will overtake the spacecraft and continue to soar into deep space.
Will aliens be able to access the recording?
“If aliens have a big antenna, receive the waves, convert them into music, then they could hear it,” said Josef Aschbacher, the director general of the European Space Agency.
“Of course, the probability that this will happen is very, very, very low,” he added, crushing the hopes of Ufologists, tinfoil hatters and alien enthusiasts the world over.
While the Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed at the Museum of Applied Arts, a video feed of the concert played a short walk away on a jumbo screen at Strandbar Herrmann, a trendy space spread on a bank of the Danube Canal and offering sun umbrellas, tables, a sandy beach with low-slung canvas chairs and a collection of bars. With temperatures reaching the low 80s, Saturday felt like the official start of summer in Vienna, and the open-air venue was packed.
Among dozens of rows of canvas fold-out chairs, Matej Sirotek, 27, and his girlfriend, Alzbeta Malkova, 26, waited for the show to begin, a bottle of wine in a cooler sleeve stuck in the sand between them. The two had traveled from Prague for the weekend to celebrate Malkova’s birthday.
Sirotek wondered how a being that received the music might interpret it. “They could see it as a threat, maybe,” he said.
Malkova laughed. “And then tomorrow, there will be an apocalypse or something,” she said with a glance at the darkening sky.
As the livestream of the concert switched on, the crowd appeared equally split: Half sat hushed, eyes on the screen, while the other half seemed oblivious as they continued chatting, sipping summery cocktails and puffing on vapes. Before playing “The Blue Danube” waltz, the orchestra performed several other space-related compositions, including the fourth movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C , (K. 551 “Jupiter”) and Charles Ives’s “The Unanswered Question.”
Chantal Sturm, 24, sat facing away from the screen with her boyfriend, Fabian Bergman, 27. The two had stumbled in to the event by accident.
“This isn’t my type of music,” said Sturm, who listens exclusively to techno. “It’s a little bit boring.”
Bergman was more enthusiastic. “It’s very typical Vienna to have some classical music with everything,” he said. “I like it a lot. I like the music, and I think it’s part of our history. There’s a long line of composers who shaped music as it is today.”
As sunlight completely faded and a sliver of moon peeked out, a column of light beaming from the Museum of Applied Arts appeared in the night sky. The graffiti decorating the walls of the Danube Canal faded into the shadows and a pleasure boat gliding by twinkled with lights.
At 9:30 p.m., after the countdown clock on the screen hit zero and the orchestra began playing “The Blue Danube” waltz, more and more people crowded around the edges of the rows of chairs to watch. A woman wrapped an arm around her friend, who dabbed at her tears with a tissue. Minutes later, as the music picked up, the two began giggling and spinning each other around in circles. Near them, a young couple placed their plastic cups of alcohol on the ground and began a tipsy attempt at a waltz.
Irene Stockner, 58, stood as close to the screen as possible, enraptured.
“Almost every Austrian knows ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz,” said Stockner, who was born and raised in Vienna. “We grew up with it, with Johann Strauss, and at age 14, we started going to balls and dancing the ‘Blue Danube’ and other waltzes. Every New Year’s Eve, too. There are so many memories.”
Her friend, Maja Endres, 62, said that hearing “The Blue Danube” waltz is “like coming home.”
On the other side of the beach bar, Anna Drujan, 27, sat with a group of friends. They happened on the show by chance after spending their afternoon hanging out by the Danube River, a few subway stops away.
“For me, it was really surprising and kind of postmodern,” said Drujan. “We’re listening to classical music, and at the same time sending it into space, and we’re sitting here watching it on the screen, and the orchestra is one street away.”
Next to her, her friend Jakob Moritz, 26, said he was initially skeptical of the event.
“At first, it felt a bit like marketing and fake,” he said. “But with the right amount of Aperol spritz, it was a very pleasant experience. The piece felt very much like swimming or floating into space. I definitely listened to it in a new way.”
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