HMN 2025: How Strauss’s ‘Blue Danube’ waltzes into outer house

Austrian composer Johann Strauss II’s “The Blue Danube” has, for many individuals, been synonymous with house journey because it was utilized in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci?fi traditional “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

But the world?well-known waltz actually traveled among the many stars on Saturday when the European Space Agency’s antenna broadcast a reside efficiency of it into house to rejoice the composer’s 2 hundredth birthday.

The Vienna Symphony Orchestra performed a live performance within the Austrian capital.

The live performance was broadcast reside on the web and in addition proven at a public screening in Vienna, in New York at Bryant Park, and close to the antenna in Spain.

“The digitized sound might be transmitted to the big 35?meter satellite tv for pc dish at ESA’s Cebreros floor station in Spain,” Josef Aschbacher, the ESA’s director normal, informed AFP forward of the efficiency.

And from there, the waltz might be “transmitted within the type of electromagnetic waves”, the Austrian astronomer stated.

‘Typical of house’

“The Blue Danube” evokes the class of nineteenth?century Vienna, which lives on within the metropolis’s roaring ball season.

For Norbert Kettner, director of the Vienna vacationer board, the Danube waltz is a “true unofficial house anthem” due to Kubrick.

The timeless waltz is the “typical sound of house”, Kettner stated, with the tunes being performed “throughout varied docking maneuvers of the International Space Station (ISS)”.

When the waltz was carried out on Saturday, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra famous the waltz’s airiness as if it have been floating by means of house, its director Jan Nast stated.

Nast, who put collectively this system for Saturday’s hour?lengthy “interstellar live performance”, stated music is a language “which touches many individuals” and has “the common energy to convey hope and pleasure”.

Filling a spot

Once transmitted through Spain’s satellite tv for pc dish, the sign will journey on the pace of sunshine to finally attain NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft—essentially the most distant man?made object within the universe—in roughly 23 hours and three minutes.

After surpassing Voyager 1, it should proceed its interstellar journey.

By catching up with the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, Austria additionally seeks to proper a perceived flawed.

Both Voyagers carry “Golden Records”—12?inch, gold?plated copper disks meant to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

The document holds 115 photographs of life on Earth, recorded in analog type, and quite a lot of sounds and snatches of music.

While “The Magic Flute” by Austria’s composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was included among the many number of 27 music items, Strauss’s well-known waltz was not.

© 2025 AFP