The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth And The Human Imagination (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
But its familiarity cannot be expected to trouble the extraterrestrial listeners for whom the Voyager record was intended, and it doesn’t much bother us here on Earth either. —TIMOTHY FERRIS, “Voyager’s Music” (1978) Because pronouns involve repeating the first tone of a sequence thrice, Martians were greatly delighted by Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for it seemed to them a toying talk in praise of the ego. —W. P. LEHMANN,“Decoding of the Martian Language” (1965)1 IT TOOK the Second World War to find a steady movie role for the Fifth Symphony. It had not been used very often, possibly being already too much of a cliché even for Hollywood. But the success of the “V-for-Victory” meme gave the Fifth its big break: war movies. The four-note motive, along with the Marseillaise and “Rule Britannia,” became an essential tool for cinematic pro-Allied sentiment. (It even worked its way into the plot on occasion: in Universal’s 1942 Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror, which brought the Victorian detective forward thirty years to battle the Nazis, Holmes [Basil Rathbone] analyzes radio broadcasts of the Fifth with an oscilloscope in order to unmask a Lord Haw-Haw–like propagandist.)2 Animated cartoons, already a playground for free-floating semiotic bits of music, seized on the association.
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