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 the final event of the season we explore how humans and space are inextricably linked.

Dr Sheila Kanani will discuss jobs in the space sector ranging from astronaut to space food taster and showcase some amazing space spin-off technologies that are arguably more important down on Earth than they are in space!

Our final canata returns to the big theme of this season: what is our place in the history of the universe? Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit seems to have been written as a funeral ode, but no-one knows who it was for. From the opening sonatina for two recorders to the closing chorus, it is a work of transcendent beauty and peace that affirms the qualities of confidence and inner calm.

Sheila Kanani is one of the UK’s most innovative astronomy communicators through her work for the Royal Astronomical Society, as a comedian and speaker, and as an author of children’s books.

Duration: approx. 1hr without 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