Beautiful Choral Music on the Cosmos

Think you need to go to church to enjoy beautiful music? Try your planetarium.

Kenley Kristofferson has composed a piece inspired by Carl Sagan. Here is how he describes it.

A choral suite using the text of 20th-century astronomer and science popularizer, Carl Sagan.

There are three movements:

Mvt. 1 is about discovery (“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known”),

Mvt. 2 is about beauty (“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together).

Mvt. 3 is about space at large (“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”)

On a personal level, Carl Sagan has taught me how beautiful science and the universe can be, and that understanding something enriches the experience, but doesn’t take away from the mystery that draws us to the big questions of life. He taught me that the sciences are beautiful; the natural world is elegant; and for such small creatures as we, the vastness is bearable only through love 🙂

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