ISS Commander Chris Hadfield Plays A Canadian Larrivée Guitar On Space Oddity
All the buzz this past weekend has been astronaut Chris Hadfield’s adaptation of David Bowie’s 1969 song,
The music video, six months in the making, has already attracted 530,000 views at the time of this posting. I anticipate it will break a million views before Commander Hadfield returns to Earth at 10:31 pm EDT in Kazakhstan.
The video opens with sparse piano played by the terrestrial Canadian musician, Emm Gryner. Gryner sang in Bowie’s band in 1999 and 2000 and has a musical relationship with Hadfield going back to her 2004 recording of, “Christopher,” to mark his first spacewalk. (Gryner and Hadfield go back even further in sharing the hometown of Sarnia, Ontario, albeit born 16 years apart.)
Hadfield had approached her about collaborating to retool Bowie’s classic song from space. After devising the piano part, she enlisted fellow Canadian producer Joe Corcoran to build the song with Hadfield’s vocals and ambient sounds from the ISS. Canadian filmmaker Andrew Tidby was tapped to do the elegant video. Hadfield’s son, Evan, also had a hand in the song.
I understand from their Twitter conversations that David Bowie gave his blessing — a note announcing the video appeared yesterday on Bowie’s Facebook site and he’s thanked in the video credits.
Gryner details the development of the production in a blogpost she put up yesterday.
My Forbes colleague Alex Knapp has been chronicling Hadfield’s success as a communicator and educator from space, particularly in sharing the connection between science and art. Interestingly, the Space Oddity performance was not the first music event from space. Hadfield had previously co-written a song called, “I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing),” with Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies and performed it from space on CBC Music with Robertson and the rest of BNL.
Music and Mars Mars
While I write about this news here as a fellow musician, I was intrigued by the health aspect of having a guitar on the I.S.S. Despite being a pharmacologist, I’ve recognized in myself and others that making and experiencing music and other arts can be more powerful than any drug.
The backstory here is that NASA psychologists pay close attention to the mental health of astronauts and have considered all aspects of a fulfilling life that would be necessary for extended space travel. If you’re an excellent musician like Hadfield, I can assure you that your mental health would certainly be compromised by the lack of an instrument for more than a few days, much less the nearly five months he’s spent in space.
In deciding on putting a guitar up with Soyuz for I.S.S. astronauts, Hadfield said that NASA representatives headed to Guitar Center in Houston to seek out a small, high-quality instrument. I looked closely on the video to see what kind of guitar made the journey, expecting it to be from a Texas outfit like Austin’s Collings Guitars.
To my surprise, the guitar was also Canadian: a Larrivée Parlor guitar.
Larrivée’s frontpage proudly notes this fact today with photos and a video of Hadfield visiting their Vancouver guitar-building facility and pictures of non-Canadian astronauts Dan Burbank and Steve Robinson wielding the famed instrument on the I.S.S.
Larrivee makes several versions of the Parlor Guitar and I have a query in to them as to this particular model.
The backstory on this particular guitar is told in this Larrivée video with Chris Hadfield — the first two commenters on the video were prescient in noting more than a year ago that it should be used to play “Space Oddity.” Hadfield notes therein that playing in zero gravity has some challenges but the guitar sounds excellent.
Hadfield notes that a second, identical model stays at Mission Control for comparison — you’ll see some squares on the side an reverse of the I.S.S. guitar that suggest to me some experiments have been done on tonality in zero gravity.
I just played a used Larrivée guitar at my local Guitar Center so I don’t question Hadfield’s story on its selection for the I.S.S. But the Canada-centric coincidence that he should play a Larrivée on this song makes me a bit suspicious.
I’ll be interested to see how this unique episode affects sales of Larrivée guitars and whether they’ll make a special Chris Hadfield edition. Already, Hadfield’s guitar pick-shaped Expedition 34/35 mission crest is out-of-stock at the Canadian Space Agency’s online store.
I know that I’ll be buying some Hadfield guitar picks as soon as they’re available.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2013/05/13/iss-commander-chris-hadfield-plays-a-canadian-larrivee-guitar-on-space-oddity/
