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.

Bach’s Cantata BWV 155 is an enigmatic cantata for the season following Epiphany that seeks to find hope in a dark world.

That theme extends into Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s talk where she will explore the poetic beauty we can find in the vastness of the universe. Constantly pioneering, her discovery of pulsar stars in 1967 changed the course of astrophysics.

Jocelyn is currently Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and recipient of the 2021 Copley Medal.

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