About Bach, the Universe and Everything

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. We set off in search of answers once again.

Guided by the work of JS Bach, composer and intergalactic genius, our mission is to explore the human desire to better understand our place in the cosmos through his 200 cantatas. Each concert is built around a Bach cantata and a talk from a guest scientific speaker, alongside choral and instrumental music by other baroque and renaissance composers.

Got To Have Faith – Sun 18 Feb

Bach’s Jesus nahm zu sich die Zwölfe, BWV 22 may have been his audition piece in Leipzig. Aptly for our series, it speaks of the need for faith in the face of a journey into the unknown.

Our guest speaker will be Dr Meganne Christian, a researcher and member of the European Space Agency (ESA) Astronaut Group. She will talk about her experience of extreme exploration working for a year at the Concordia research station on Antarctica (nicknamed ‘White Mars’), her successful application to train as an astronaut with the ESA and her hopes that she will one day travel to space.
 
This performance will last approximately 1 hour, without an interval.

‘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