Trivia for Thursday – Music in Space

I’m a big fan of classical music trivia, but sometimes it is very difficult to tell if a fact is true, or just hearsay. I’m always happy to find music trivia that is actually true, so here’s one of my favorites:

Do you know the first musical work performed in space? It’s a piece by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. He wrote a series of patriotic songs for a play that never quite materialized, but the songs themselves were published. One of them is called “The Motherland Hears, The Motherland Knows”.

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to travel into space, and orbit the earth. During his two hour voyage sang and whistled the song, making it the first performance in space.