André Kuipers & Ralph Van Raat

The pianist Ralph van Raat rockets through the atmosphere and takes you on a musical space trip in search of the harmony of the spheres. The theory that the harmony of the cosmos can be expressed in music originates with Plato and Pythagoras, who were convinced that the arrangement of the stars in the sky, the earth and music all ensue from the same numerical ratios. Quite a few 20th-century composers have attempted to capture the elusive cosmos in music. Scriabin was fascinated by unusual light phenomena in the sky. For his ‘Etudes Australes’, John Cage took inspiration from celestial charts and converted the distances between the stars into musical intervals. And in ‘Makrokosmos I-III’, George Crumb created a universe of his own.
The music alternates with unique images and stories by no one less than the astronaut André Kuipers. In 2004 he became the second Dutchman to journey into space. His second mission in the International Space Station in 2012 was the longest European space flight in history. He is not only an impassioned ambassador of space travel, but also devotes his energies to the WWF. In the TV documentary series ‘André on Earth’, he expressed his concern for our vulnerable planet and focused attention on several of earth’s endangered regions.