What Remains of the Past ...: Diegetic Music in the Star Trek Series as Reference to the Cultural Heritage of Humanity

Headnote

Summary

The diegetic music used in the different Star Trek series belongs to a whole network referring to different products of human art, and therefore representing the quintessence of culture as a repository of society's most valuable and priceless treasures. This network is highly significant for the Star Trek universe: it states that the fine and performative arts are an important part of human education, necessary for the refinement of one's character as well as a condition for the evolved state of humanity as primarily peaceful race in a non-dystopian future. Based on a selection of examples from the different series, the paper questions the repertoire, the performance practice and the use of human music framing the cultural background of living in the future. By looking closer at one special episode, it also examines the importance of opera music as representative of the classical music culture.

As a genre of literature or film, 'in which the setting differs from our world' science fiction enables a narrative which - detached from reality and therefore as a kind of abstraction, but nevertheless 'based on extrapolations made from one or more changes or suppositions' - focuses on social problems or philosophical questions to get them more clearly.1 Superficially, the main subject of the stories presented in the six different series of the Star Trek television franchise with their 'optimistic imagining of humanity's future'2 is the exploration of space, the mission 'to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before'.3 Nevertheless, there is a more profound understanding of the events: Michele and Duncan Barrett point out that actions and behaviour of the main figures allow 'for a definition of that which is specifically human', so that space in Star Trek 'functions metaphorically as the 'constitutive outside' of the project to define humanity'.4 This 'interrogation of human nature'5 - primarily to be found in the questions 'how can we define the human?' and 'what constitutes humanity?'6 - extends to several phenomena of human culture; it has been extensively discussed with reference e. g. to philosophy, history, religion, or gender7, but has so far been neglected in regard to the cultural heritage manifested in music.

Accordingly, this...