Tag Archives: music

Music Inspired by Astronomy, Part 1

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This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Music Inspired by Astronomy

Andy Fraknoi is a well-known astronomy popularizer and friend of Br. Guy Consolmagno. Andy has an astronomy education website, on which he has compiled the “New Annotated Catalog of 250+ Pieces of Music Inspired by Good Astronomy.” Andy’s music list is rather extensive, and is split into multiple astronomical categories; Andy also includes links to YouTube videos so you can listen to his music selections. I will post each category individually in a series, starting with asteroids: Gloria Coates Among the Asteroids on At Midnight (on Tzadik). A 1962 piece for string quartet, written for a production of The Little Prince; she has other music with science titles, so we took the liberty of including this. Kaija Saariaho Asteroid 4179: Toutatis (with The Planets by Holst, conducted by Simon Rattle, on EMI Classics CD). Short piece based on the complex rotational motion of this near-Earth asteroid. Brett Dean Komarov’s Fall (with The Planets by Holst, conducted by Simon Rattle, on EMI Classics CD). … Continue reading →

Moonlight to Debussy

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This visualization attempts to capture the mood of Claude Debussy’s best-known composition, Clair de Lune (moonlight in French). The piece was published in 1905 as the third of four movements in the composer’s Suite Bergamasque, and unlike the other parts of this work, Clair is quiet, contemplative, and slightly melancholy, evoking the feeling of a solitary walk through a moonlit garden. The visuals were composed like a nature documentary, with clean cuts and a mostly stationary virtual camera. The viewer follows the Sun throughout a lunar day, seeing sunrises and then sunsets over prominent features on the Moon. The sprawling ray system surrounding Copernicus crater, for example, is revealed beneath receding shadows at sunrise and later slips back into darkness as night encroaches. The visualization was created to accompany a performance of Clair de Lune by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, led by conductor Emil de Cou, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on June … Continue reading →

On Operas and Stars, Aliens and Refugees

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I was recently in correspondence with Carl Pennypacker at Berkeley. To quote Wikipedia: “Dr. Pennypacker has spent much of his career as a research astrophysicist, receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1978. His principal research was the studying of supernovae and the building of techniques for their automated discovery. With Rich Muller, he co-founded the Berkeley Supernova Search, which later became the Supernova Cosmology Project. He shared the 2007 Gruber Prize in Cosmology and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the Supernova Cosmology Project’s discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.” All true. But in addition to that, he has a deep interest in science outreach… and music. When he shared with me a video he’d been involved with (see below) I asked if I could post it here, and if he would give me a few words of introduction. He graciously agreed to both. He writes (edited from a couple of emails): I was part of “The Global Skylight” opera, as part of the IAU’s … Continue reading →

Beneath the Aurora Borealis

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I have seen the Northern Lights in Naperville, Illinois.  Sort of. Not long ago, at a meeting of the Naperville Astronomical Association, I attended a terrific talk by Dr. José Salgado of the Adler Planetarium.   He began by describing a series of astronomy films he and the Adler have made.  Each film has been set to music in a live summertime outdoor performance by an orchestra in downtown Chicago. For his next film in the “Science and Symphony” series, Dr. Salgado wanted to capture the Northern Lights.  The colorful glow of the Aurora Borealis is rarely seen in Chicago.  It’s much more common at higher latitudes, since the Earth’s northern “auroral oval” is a ring, thousands of kilometers across, approximately centered on the North Magnetic Pole.  (There’s another one in the south, but the Antarctic is much less convenient to visit.) So he packed up a lot of camera equipment and flew to Yellowknife, in Canada’s Northwest Territories.  It’s a … Continue reading →