Music From Earth Live: The Sound of Humanity Returns Home

In the late summer of 1977, a pair of small spacecraft stood awaiting launch on the Florida coast, the morning air thick with heat, salt, and anticipation. No bigger than a Toyota Corolla, each was equipped with cameras, antennas, and scientific instruments, prepared for its never-ending journey.

Aboard was a unique passenger: the soundtrack of our world. A twelve-inch disc of gold-plated copper. On its concentric ridges was recorded everything we believed important about humanity, should it ever be found by strangers among the stars. On it were greetings from around the world in fifty-five languages, the sound of wind and rain, the cry of a baby, and the slow heartbeat of a woman in love.

Carl Sagan and a team of dreamers carefully curated this collection over six weeks. He believed that if the universe ever called back, this record might be the reason why. It was humanity’s mixtape, its hope. This portrait of humankind was present when the rockets lifted off, carrying in their roar the sounds of Bach, Chuck Berry, and a Navajo night chant beyond the pull of the sun.

Voyager has now drifted more than fifteen billion miles from Earth. The record still spins, silent in the dark, waiting for someone to listen, to understand. And nearly fifty years later, a composer named Russ Kaplan is trying to play it again. Not for the cosmos this time, but for the world that sent it.

The music that pops and crackles out of my speakers as I play The Sounds of Earth, the Voyager Golden Record, does what it was meant to do. It takes you out of yourself. It spins you, as the record spins, around the world in ninety minutes. Voices greet you in fifty-five languages. A child cries. A train rumbles. Then comes a Bach prelude so clear it almost aches.

The humanity pouring through those grooves feels both ancient and immediate, something primal and newly born.

It isn’t hard to see why Russ Kaplan, who recently traded New York for Minnesota, felt drawn to it. “Ever since I heard the record,” he told me, “I knew it was something I wanted to interpret, to actively participate in rather than just listen to.”

That impulse, participation over observation, has guided much of Kaplan’s work. He has built a career translating one form of music into another: Broadway a cappella into jazz, jazz into chamber suites, classical motifs into improvisation. The Golden Record, with its impossible mix of precision and chaos, offers him a new translation problem. How do you reperform the sound of humanity without distorting it?

In rehearsal, Kaplan imagines the circle of voices and drums as a microcosm of Earth. “They’re the most universal instruments,” he says, nodding toward the circle. “Every culture, every era. You can always find a drum. You can always find a voice.”

If you picture the ensemble he describes, you can almost feel its energy, a current that hums beneath the skin. It’s the kind of sound that seems coded in our DNA, the pulse and rhythm of breath and body anchoring the work in a human through-line.

Kaplan, known for arranging music from Broadway stages to solo piano concertos, is exploring a different kind of vastness here. The clips are brief, but they flow together, passing through languages and landscapes like migrating birds. “It’s tricky,” he says. “You want to be respectful of the originals while still filtering them through your own perspective.”

To do that, he studies the origins of each piece: the language, the instruments, the rhythms — decoding and recoding them into new constellations of sound.

Among them is Siama Matuzungidi, a guitarist and composer from the Democratic Republic of Congo, whose song replaces the original Congolese track on the record. His piece, an ode to the birth of twins, unfolds in lilting call-and-response. Kaplan grins. “That joy,” he says, “is exactly the point.”

Kaplan isn’t trying to recreate the past. His work reaches deeper, showing that the acts of recreation and reinvention are as inherently human as the source material itself.

When the Golden Record left Earth in 1977, humanity introduced itself with optimism. The message assumed we were worth finding. It was the same decade we built space stations and personal computers, when faith in progress still felt infinite. The record’s curators believed that beauty and goodwill could represent an entire species.

Nearly fifty years later, Kaplan is replaying that message for a world that no longer feels unified. Our communications reach farther but connect less. We can speak to anyone, yet we rarely listen. The Voyager record once said, This is who we are. Kaplan’s version asks, Are we still?

He doesn’t frame Music from Earth as nostalgia; it’s more like a pulse check. “We could all use some hope and goodwill nowadays, couldn’t we?” he says. His ensemble, standing in a circle, becomes a counterargument to division, voices tuning to one another instead of to pitch. In that act, the record’s purpose mutates from self-promotion to self-examination.

Listening to him talk, I think about Ann Druyan’s brainwave recording embedded on the original disc, her heartbeat, her thoughts of love, frozen in copper and drifting forever. Kaplan’s project feels like a modern echo of that gesture: art as a measure of affection for a planet still trying to recognize its own voice.

When the final note fades, there’s a silence that feels planetary. Somewhere far beyond the pull of the sun, the original record keeps spinning, carrying the same sounds through darkness.

Yet we are still here, still singing into the void, still hoping someone might hear us and understand.

And in that silence, you realize: the listener has been here all along.Earth, listening to Earth.

On November 7, 2025, at 7:00 PM, the Vermilion Fine Arts Theater in Ely, Minnesota, will host Music From Earth: Russ Kaplan & The Pale Blue Dot, a live concert unlike many.

The stage will hold no orchestra, no electric guitar pedals, no backing tracks. Instead, voices and percussion will form its backbone. Kaplan’s ensemble, with percussionists Timothy Berry and Eri Isomura, will perform striking new arrangements of music from the Voyager Golden Record alongside freshly composed works created with international collaborators.

The program stretches across continents, from Bach and Chuck Berry to musical traditions from China, the Congo, and beyond. The idea is simple but bold: to collapse borders, recast humanity’s message, and let the stage become a listening Earth itself.

Tickets cost $20 for general admission, while students and youth attend for free.

But what will the room feel like when it starts?A hush first, then breath, then the pulse of humanity begins.

Purchase Your Tickets Here!