Our 2023-24 season of Bach, the Universe and Everything continues to explore beyond the boundaries of our home planet.
Is there life out there? It may be some time before we’re making reservations at Milliways (aka The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy ‘trilogy’), but astronomers and scientists are increasingly finding signs of life in the solar system and beyond. The 2023-24 season of Bach, the Universe and Everything – the OAE’s concert series with a difference – sets off in search of answers once again.
Bach, the Universe and Everything is a concert series with a difference. Across six Sunday morning events, each with a guest speaker, our mission is to explore the human desire to better understand our place in the cosmos, guided by the work of JS Bach – composer and intergalactic genius – through his 200 cantatas.
Each event is built around a Bach cantata and a talk from an eminent astronomer, writer or scientist, alongside choral and instrumental music by other baroque and renaissance composers. The concert lasts approximately one hour.
‘He was wrong to think he could now forget that the big, hard, oily, dirty, rainbow-hung Earth on which he lived was a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot lost in the unimaginable infinity of the Universe.’
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy