Today's episode is brought to you by Into the Mix, a Ben and Jerry's podcast about joy and justice produced with Fox Creative.

Their second season tells real stories from real people directly impacted by some of today's most pressing issues.

Their latest episode of Into the Mix takes listeners to the dairy barns of rural Vermont to tell the story of how grassroots activism for safe conditions, competitive wages, and humane working hours

led to an innovative worker-led program that led workers decide for themselves what dignified working conditions look like.

Hear their story on Into the Mix, out now.

Charlie, somewhere deep in interstellar space, there's a robotic probe called the Voyager. Yeah, I know about it.

It's been traveling the galaxy since it was launched in 1977, and it contains a message intended for any forms of life that may encounter it.

A message in the form of a golden record. I actually have a copy of this golden record I love it so much. Wow, okay, no need to brag.

You know, it's filled with excerpts of human language and music that's meant to represent the best of Earth, from Javanese, Gamelan,

to Provean wedding songs, to the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.

Oh, man, what do they got to think of us? Like what's a maleian civilization discovers as golden record and we greet them with like, dun, dun, dun, dun.

So, are we the conquering intergalactic empires? That what they're going to think? It's a great question because not everyone feels that Beethoven is the best representation of our species collective achievement.

For a lot of people, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony doesn't represent triumph and resilience, but elitism and exclusion.

So, how did this happen? How did the meaning of this symphony get so tangled over the centuries?

I'm musicologist Nate Sloan, and I'm songwriter Charlie Harding, and this is the Fifth Movement 3.

To understand the complicated legacy of the Fifth Symphony, we need to go back to the story, the struggle from minor to major that begins with the first notes of the symphony, and ends with a major key triumph in the Fourth and Final Movement.

You remember Frank Juan, the New York Philharmonic violinist and concertmaster. Well, he has an explanation for why we still gravitate towards the symphony over 200 years after its composition.

We all feel this daily struggle, sometimes, whether it's like stress from watching your kids all day, or worrying about COVID or whatever it is these days, but anytime you have a small victory or something goes right, you feel the sense of joy.

So, it's easily relatable to this minor major. Once you get that connection into music harmonically, it's very easy to feel inspired by these things.

That is the perfect metaphor because my toddler's stomping feet can be like a double bump on when he successfully got him to sleep. It is a major victory.

I love that, right? There's something timeless about this journey, this story of resilience. And in the decades after this piece premiered, people became kind of obsessed with this story.

And they turned it from this personal story about Beethoven's own life into this kind of collective story. I want to read something to you. This is from the diary of a New York music lover named George Templeton Strong.

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