Beyond Earth (ATWG) - Chapter 16 - Music and Arts for Humans in Space by Bob Krone

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Chapter 16

Music and Arts for Humans in Space

By Bob Krone

"A discovery, a work of art, or a noble act enrich the mind of all humanity."


Michael Polyani, The Lindsay Memorial Lectures University College of North Staffordshire in The Study of Man, University of Chicago Press, 1959. Throughout human history, artistic expression has enabled humans to clarify and deal with important experiences, as well as a means to examine our values and aspirations, and express them for others. The stars, the heavens, and outer space have inspired artists since the earliest days and nights of human consciousness, they still do so today, and they will certainly continue to do so in the centuries and millennia to come. So as humans venture into space in ever larger numbers, the arts will come with them, and will have as significant a role to play in space settlements as they do in Earth-bound civilizations.

My own relationship with the arts is a deeply personal one, as my father, Dr. Max T. Krone, earned his Ph.D. in Music at Northwestern University in Chicago in 1940 when I was a young boy. He had married music educator Beatrice Perham in 1936, and their collaboration over the next thirty-five years produced a music and arts legacy that lives on. Max Krone was appointed the Dean of the University of Southern California's School of Music in 1940, and during World War II he planned the creation of the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts in the San Jacinto Mountains near Palm Springs. In 1949 Krone was appointed Dean of the USC Institute of the Arts, where music, dance, theater, visual arts, ceramics, and photography-cinematography have been taught to many generations of students. I was one of the forty students who attended the opening Summer Session in 1950.

By the end of 2005 the Music and Arts School that Max and Beatrice Krone created had served 6,561 alumni from thirty nations of the world, and forty-six of the United States.50 Now celebrating its 57th year, Idyllwild, as it is now called, is one of the world's most successful schools for music and the arts. (See Idyllwildarts.org). (1)

The values and principles Max and Bee Krone brought to their life's work was the fundamental reason for their personal successes, and for the survival and growth of the Idyllwild Campus through the early difficult years from 1950 - 1967. They also developed a library of music publications that eventually grew to over 300 compositions, including a series of folk music arrangements from around the globe entitled "A World in Tune." Each booklet began with the following: "Building a world in tune upon a background of hatreds, jealousies, suspicions, misunderstanding and bitterness, will be the task of us who sing these songs today. Barriers of language, creed, color and race must be broken down. Somewhere, somehow, we must find a common ground of understanding, of mutual respect, of enjoyment and enthusiasm in doing something together. "Singing together is such a natural way to begin; and nowhere do we prove that we are more alike than in our songs. We all - everywhere - sing our babies to sleep, we sing as we play and work, we sing when we feel the need of strength and help from the great Source, we sing to and for the ones we love, we sing of the joy and sorrow of life, and a song follows us to our final resting place. All over the world the same songs, different tongues, different tunes, but the same Songs" The Krones: Beatrice and Max, A World in Tune: Folk Songs of Our Inter-Americana Southern Neighbors, Book III, Kjos Music Company, 1945.

These thoughts express universal truths, and reflect an underlying hypothesis of this book, Beyond Earth: "We will find a common ground of understanding of mutual respect, of enjoyment and enthusiasm in doing something together." The something for the next human adventure of exploring, living and working in space is a revolutionary and grand undertaking that will certainly require A World in Tune. Repeating historical scenarios of the space race, or making the science fiction of Star Wars battlegrounds into a reality are dystopias to be prevented. With this in mind, let's take a brief survey to see how themes of space have been expressed in the arts.


Let's start with quantity. A search of the internet via Google in December 2005 yielded a mere 149 million hits for a query on "Space Art," and 143 million hits for "Space Music." Amazon.com showed 981 "Space Music" books and 181 "Space Art" books (using a broad definition of "space"). So the instances are massive. A more narrowly focused source, the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope web site (www.spacetelescope.org/), returned 633 images in response to a search simply for "Art."

And what about the history of art and music? There are countless compositions of classical music that make reference to space, such as Holst's "The Planets," Mozart's "Jupiter Symphony" (#41) and, Hindemith's "Die Harmonie der Welt." Popular music makes constant reference to the stars, space, and the cosmos, as exemplified by an early hit song called "Telstar" by The Tornados named after one of the first communication satellites; the song reached no 1 in 1962.

Starry Night is one of Van Gogh's most famous paintings, a vivid depiction of the night sky; he painted a "Moonrise" in 1889. Vermeer's "The Astronomer," painted, in1668, depicts the dawn of the new Copernican world view.

Science fiction is a staple of literature, from the stories of Jules Verne to more contemporary writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Ursula Leguin, and Arthur C. Clarke. Space figures prominently in the popular imagination, as HG Wells demonstrated with his 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which captivated the nation and gave voice to the latent fears of millions in the gathering storm of World War II, a powerful example of how the arts can capture the popular imagination.

Non-fiction literature also links the arts with space, as exemplified by Arthur I. Miller's Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc, (2) about which Martin R. Kalfatovic writing in Library Journal had this to say: "During the span of a few years shortly after the start of the 20th century, roughly from 1904 to 1908, two quiet revolutions in how we perceive the world were underway. In Switzerland, Einstein was working on the nature of time and space. In Paris, Picasso tackled a similar problem in the creation of the seminal Cubist work "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Miller examines the two men and the revolutions they initiated, pulling together the lives of the physicist and the painter, as well as the band of friends, colleagues, influences, and lovers that surrounded them at that time. Miller creates a compelling argument for the confluence of aesthetics and science."

And of course there are the movies - from the B movies of the 1950s depicting aliens in flying saucers, to Stanley Kubrick's eloquent film version of Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey," the big screen brings the Earthbound a bit closer to the experience of space. Soon after Kubrick's landmark, George Lucas introduced the world to Star Wars, which soon became one of the most lucrative film franchises of all time. Today you can even buy Star Wars M&Ms candies! Steven Spielberg then gave us a deeper look at the unexpected confrontation with other life forms in "ET: The Extra-terrestrial" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Meanwhile, Star Trek developed a loyal following on TV and then in the movies, expressing Gene Roddenbury's humanist vision of the human future in space. The large-film IMAX format, with its massive screen and surround sound, brings the experience even closer to real with numerous movies about the space, the Space Shuttle, and the Space Station.

Photography is also a means by which artists have expressed our connection with space. Some of the most famous photographs of all time are images of Earth as recorded on film by astronauts in flight. Recently, astronaut Don Petit lived about the International Space Station for six months in 2002 - 2003, and made a systematic photo survey of the world's cities at night, producing a series of hauntingly beautiful images.

Mythology, an art form that explores the depths of the human psyche, is of course intimately linked with the stars, and Raymond and Cheryl Garbos do an excellent job of recounting human relationships with the imagined heavens in Chapter 20, "The Meaning of the Heavens to Humankind through History." Mythology, of course, is a deeply metaphorical expression, which historian and mythologist Joseph Campbell evokes in his comment that, "Getting into harmony and tune with the universe and staying there is the primary function of myth." And then Campbell gives us a metaphor of his own, "Mythology was the song of the universethe music of the spheres."

Space inspires artists, and space organizations such as NASA sometimes commission artists to express space-related themes. Since 1963 NASA has had a Space Art Program, a public relations scheme through which artists are commissioned to portray space missions that are being planned and executed. Image 16.1 shows painting by Rick Guidice that depicts the work of the NASA/ASEE Summer Study on the Feasibility of Using Machine Intelligence in Space Applications, University of Santa Clara, 1980. The study participants were tasked to define "Advanced Machine Intelligence," and then apply the definition to four original missions:

  • Intelligent Earth-Sensing Information System
  • Space Exploration to Titan
  • Automated Space Manufacturing
  • A Self-Replicating Lunar Factory. Figure 16.1 Rick Guidice 1980 Painting (See this painting in the color section)

Two Beyond Earth authors, Joel Isaacson and myself, were participants in that summer research.

Among the earliest forms of artistic expression that remain with us today are human creations in architecture such as the great circles of Stonehenge, which apparently functioned as an observatory. The Greeks and Romans built countless temples to their gods, the Gothic cathedrals reached skyward, and even today our architects design church spires that reach toward the heavens.

The purpose here has been simply to convey a sense of the enormous scope of artistic expression that has been inspired by visions - real and imaginary - of space, and of course countless other examples could be cited. Space also presents new opportunities for artistic experience, an obvious example being dance in microgravity, which has already exploited in parabolic aircraft flight by choreographers in both Europe and Japan. Space dwellers will have unprecedented opportunities to experiment with all forms of expression as well as all forms of experience. (3)

We have countless painting of space, but how will painting in space bring us images never seen before? If Picasso lived on a space station, what would he see? Once space architecture moves beyond the purely utilitarian, what new forms of beauty will space architects create? Will films actually made in space differ from the images of space that are produced today using special effects and computers? Would a young Mozart, born to a space-faring family, compose music differently than his European counterpart? What would space-hip-hop sound like? If Ursula Le Guin lived on an asteroid, what would she write about? How would Baryshnikov perform Giselle or The Nutcracker on Mars?

If the many authors of Beyond Earth are correct in our conviction that humanity is destined to live in space, then the coming centuries will give us answers to all these questions. And even now on the Space Shuttle flights, astronauts asleep in orbit are awakened with music - from rock to classical, their choice.


Throughout Max Krone's tenure at USC (1940 - 1967) and as Founder/Director of the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts (1950 - 1967) the following phrase was printed on the bottom of his stationery:

"The greatest use of a life is to spend it for something that outlasts it."

What this meant to him, of course, was that great art far outlives it creators, and that each of us can all aspire to express the universal truths of our humanity in the works we leave behind, and also in the way that we live our lives.

The authors and publisher of Beyond Earth: The Future of Humans in Space believe that we are also contributing to what H.G. Wells described in 1902 as "The greatness of human destiny." (4) And although we are as yet far removed from a world in tune, we continue to search for and work toward harmony, and we believe that the journey to space can help to bring us closer to the harmony that we all seek. The arts, in all their wonderful manifestations, will help us to understand and communicate the hopes and aspirations that lie in the profound depths of human longing and joy. (5)

References

  • (1) Thanks to Theresa McCaughey, Idyllwild Arts Director of Parent & Alumni Communications, and Lissa Claussen, Director of Annual Giving, for the research to find these numbers.
  • (2) Arthur I. Miller. Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. Basic Books, 2002.
  • (3) Thanks to Professor Jim Burke, CalTech University for the information in this paragraph.
  • (4) H.G. Wells, Lecture at Royal Institution of London, 1902. www.sylviaengdahl.com.
  • (5) I appreciate the editing and additional content contributed by Langdon Morris.

About the Author

Extracted from the book Beyond Earth - The Future of Humans in Space edited by Bob Krone ©2006 Apogee Books ISBN 978-1-894959-41-4