About Bach, the Universe and Everything:

This is a concert series with a difference. Across six Sunday morning events, we explore the human desire to understand our place in the cosmos, guided by the work of JS Bach – composer and intergalactic genius – through his 200 cantatas. As NASA shares images from the very first moments of time, we invite you to join us on a cosmic journey: each event is built around a Bach cantata and a talk from a guest scientist, writer or broadcaster, alongside choral and instrumental music.

In a Universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, how do we get out of bed every morning?

Inspired by Bach’s invitation to step upon the path of faith, Astronomer Chris Lintott explores cosmic vastness as a source of awe and wonder in this Sunday morning event, and explains how we tiny humans might be special after all.

One of Bach’s early cantatas, Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn hovers dramatically between dark and light, featuring solos for high recorder, oboe and (unusually in the cantatas) viola d’amore.

Chris Lintott is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, where he runs the Zooniverse citizen science project. He is best known as the presenter of the BBC’s long-running Sky at Night show.

Duration: approx. 1hr with no 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