Apollo: Music for Space

If ‘in space, no one can hear you scream’, as the publicity for another film says, then certainly no one can hear you talk, laugh or sing, still less can anyone hear Country and Western music. Except, that is, if you are in a spaceship. Outer space is a vacuum and – like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 crew – you can travel through it in a private capsule of sound as long as you have the might of one of the technological superpowers behind you. And in fact if it’s not you, it could just be someone else. In retrospect it is the discrepancies that are haunting about the first moon landing of 20th July 1969. This singular event pitched the smallness of that tiny capsule of air sustaining the lives of three people against an infinite universe of emptiness; sound against silence; frailty of human lives against the immense power of the Saturn V rocket needed to separate them from Earth; mortality against grandeur; ‘we came in peace for all mankind’ against the dirty competitive politics of the Cold War era.
On earth, anyone can hear you cavil about the motivations for ‘the space race’. That archaic term says it all; it was a ‘race’ with only two contenders in search of a prize of only symbolic value; an inverted metaphor in which the positive triumph of setting foot on the moon stood as proxy for avoiding the negative of obliterating everything we know in a nuclear war. 1969, we might recall, was also the year that saw the release of Richard Lester’s darkly comic post-nuclear fantasy The Bed Sitting Room.
The moon landing seemed like the beginning of something big, a continuation of the dynamic that led from the Soviet daring of hurling Sputnik, the first satellite, into space only a dozen years before. This was the realisation of the spirit of HG Wells in William Cameron Menzies’ Things to Come (1936). At the film’s conclusion, conservative forces are trying to prevent the firing of a space gun that will send people to the moon. Wells gives Oswald Cabal, the leader, a speech that pitches humans with lives ‘mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done’ against the destiny of technological progress: ‘It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be ... Which shall it be?’ In 1936, the technocrats offered an alternative to a world war everyone knew was coming, and to living in the smoke-stained ruins left by the industrial revolution. In 1969, Apollo was an optimistic alternative to nuclear war and the environmental concerns of pollution and the squeeze that overpopulation was making on the food supply. Perhaps we need another space adventure to lift our eyes from ‘the war on terror’, and the environmental panic of our own age, climate change.
Last year’s first live performances of Apollo accompanied, with his kind permission, a wordless version of Al Reinert’s For All Mankind. This brought out a different aspect of the film, perhaps closer to his experience in selecting from the thousands of hours of NASA footage. In this context, Eno’s music lends the Apollo mission something of the mysticism of that other member of space age culture, Solaris (1972). Andrei Tarkovsky’s interest in his film’s source novel was not at all about technology and the future, but ‘about the clash between human reason and the Unknown but also about moral conflicts set in motion by new scientific discoveries’. Similar thoughts may occur to you as you witness the Brighton performances.
The forty years that have elapsed since the moon landing provide a useful frame for comparison. We no longer inhabit the ‘space age’, a term that once connoted glamour, high tech and the thrilling hubris of space exploration. If you come to the Science Museum’s Making the Modern World gallery today you can see a spaceship; not Apollo 11, but the command module of its older sibling Apollo 10, which was, in May 1969, the vehicle for the moon landing’s dress rehearsal. It is an object of some magnetism, a charred lump of palaeotechnology, shaped like a conical vastly oversized pebble. If you peer through its window, you can see that it is crammed with yesterday’s high tech, whose seeming crudeness reinforces the sense of vulnerability we may be inclined to project onto the astronauts. The invisible and ubiquitous software and hardware of today is capable of delivering For All Mankind to our phones; the computer aboard Apollo 11, for all that it represented a triumph of miniaturisation, had a specification closer to that of a 1982 Sinclair Spectrum; 36KB of ROM and 2KB of RAM. And, if you feel nostalgia for the technologically cruder world of 1969, is this merely the desire for a return to the simpler world of childhood, or do we share some of Tarkovsky’s concern about the moral implications of scientific and technological change?
The genesis of the live performances of Apollo owes much to another memorialisation of ordinary lives bound up in superpower conflicts. On Remembrance Sunday 2008, the Science Museum held a short service to inaugurate a new war memorial to honour those in the service of the Museum who had lost their lives during the World Wars. The bugle call of The Last Post rang through the Energy hall of the Museum with an extraordinary and poetic potency, as if it were a requiem for the dead and scarred of the industrial revolution which that gallery memorialises, as much as for the war dead. What other musical performances might have a similar sense of rightness within a science and technology museum as the bugle call of a war memorial? What music could complement and bring out the drama of the objects we show and the stories we tell? With the Museum’s centenary celebrations in the planning stage, we already had a list of shared anniversaries, with the moon landing at the top. It was, to coin a phrase, a small step to imagine performing Apollo in the company of Apollo 10, but a giant leap for the Science Museum to hold its first ever concert. For this we needed the Mission Control of Ed McKeon at Sound & Music, the organisational genius of Gaetan Lee, Brian Eno’s enthusiasm for a madcap venture, the studious and subtle score-writing of Jun Lee and the unblinking faith of James Poke and Icebreaker that the largely electronic original could be rendered by an ensemble including accordion, clarinet and guitar.
One remarkable aspect of the first performances of the live Apollo last year was a further discrepancy, between the grandeur of big history and the warmth of personal significance. There was a trade, amongst those of us who remembered the moon landings, in what it had meant to us individually. For me aged eight, it was a the excitement of normal life displaced with the television moved upstairs and my father holding an aerial out of the window, as if to get the signal better from the moon. For everyone it was at least as much about what 1969 felt like, as much as about space exploration. What will it signify for you?

Tim Boon, Chief Curator, The Science Museum.