Sun shining, Sunday morning, driving along an urban highway feeling relaxed. My car radio plays ‘Desert Island Discs’. The interviewer asks :’Which eight records would you take to your desert island Commander Chris Hadfield? You are a Canadian astronaut’. He is reflective and soulful about his space missions.He says, on his second space flight, they found a guitar, kept in quarantine, which stays in the space station. We play it and sing songs, he says. From the space shuttle, you see the earth from the blackness of space. You are small, separate human entity in space. I have forgotten about the sunshine and the urban highway, I’m with him in space, far from home on a mission.
http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2003/07/binary_system_earth-moon/10225612-2-eng-GB/Binary_system_Earth-Moon.jpg
He choses a track from Stan Rogers – ‘Living from Day to Day’, to remind him of his first space flight. Looking at the tiny earth, with everything that’s intimate so remote, it’s become almost an idea. You are so far from home. You are on the flight for good reasons yet yearn to go home.
YouTube GB stan rogers take it from day to day
The song moves me, the tune is so jaunty, the mood so poignant. It’s about a sailor parting from his love, travelling, dreaming of home. I’ve never heard it before. Good title, good advice : take it from day to day. The astronaut is after all a sort of star sailor, isn’t he ?
December 23, 2015 at 9:55 am
The Monteverdi is sublime- good choice for your desert island. My desert island choice — ahhh – I love a folk song ‘Bringing in the Sheaves’ by Coop Boyd and Simpson – it has personal resonances, or a section out of Biber’s Saltzburg Mass – big sound baroque.
December 22, 2015 at 12:48 pm
That’s so tricky. No one thing can really do. Maybe ‘Winterreise’ (only partly for its journey through cold spaces)? And when I didn’t listen to that – because surely no-one can listen to the same thing all the time – I’d have to listen to the music inside my head. Or then again, if we can have a whole opera . . . hmmmm.
December 23, 2015 at 9:47 am
I think you’re right about not listening to the same thing all the time – I like to be surprised by music – even if it’s a favourite. So I ‘forget’ about it for a while. With the Stan Rogers song, it took me quite by surprise – whoosh ! Good to have a smorgesbrod (is that how you spell it ?) of music..John Dowland then Stan Rogers…
December 22, 2015 at 12:20 pm
Love the way you’ve put this together – and the star voyager into the unknown is lovely too. The Starship.
December 21, 2015 at 11:02 pm
I’d never heard it before either. It had a sound to it of folkies in the 60s and 70s so I looked further. Stan Rogers is very well-known in Canada even though he died in 1983.
I’d take the Monteverdi Vespers to my desert island. Here’s my favourite D major chord: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHCf9KSj-gk.
What would you take?