Out of this world... Neil Armstrong

From a BBC piece on Neil Armstrong...


And then there is Armstrong's apparent eccentricity.

"The music he took on the mission to the Moon was deeply eccentric," says Smith. "Most astronauts took one classical piece, and one country and western.

"Armstrong took Dvorak's New World Symphony. But the other was theremin music - that eerie, wavy sound associated with sci-fi movies that goes 'woo woo'. On one hand it was the most perfect thing he could take, on the other it is massively eccentric - and that's kind of him."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8133835.stm (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8133835.stm)



Apologies if this is common knowledge!

Actually, that's not common info. I knew he took classical music, but never knew about the theremin music. Thanks for sharing that.

I remember watching Neil set foot on the moon live when I was a kid.

Here is a quote from the final paragraphs of Andrew Smith's book, MOONDUST - IN SEARCH OF THE MEN WHO FELL TO EARTH (published in 2005, an account of the Apollo mission and the astronauts involved with it).

********************

"Of more interest to me, though, was Neil Armstrong’s response to a supplementary question about “the strange, electronic sounding music” that Collins reported him taking to Luna. Armstrong told me that the electronic sound I referred to was the theremin music of Dr. Samuel Hoffman, specifically an album called “MUSIC OUT OF THE MOON”, which he had committed to tape from his own collection.

The theremin was an early form of synthesizer, played by moving one’s hands through two invisible radiostatic fields to produce

continued:

"..... a kind of unearthly quaver, eerie, like the pleadings of an alien choir. Now mostly associated with Fifties sci-fi movies such as THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, Armstrong’s decision to make it part of his own soundtrack struck me as at once deeply, deeply eccentric and absolutely perfect, and ever since, when I’ve thought of Apollo, I’ve thought not of the first step or the raging Saturn, but of him and his little band drifting out there toward the secret moon, spinning slowly to distribute the heat and spilling spooky theremin music out at the stars who think it’s just as weird as I do - and it occurs to me that in the final analysis this might be as good a way as any to remember Apollo, as a kind of collective dream, a tale from a comic book come to life. "