Sacred Music
Palestrina sounds like planets. To me anyway. When I think of moving in space it’s never to 2001-type Strauss or Ligeti. Nor to the sucking, clanging sound effects of most scientifically illiterate movies. The grace, the slowness of space sounds, to me, like Palestrina. (It’s probably to do with some BBC2 astronomy programme from the 70s.) Anyway. This edition of Simon Russell Beale’s series on sacred music tells the story of Palestrina’s life, and the way his polyphony evolved in response to the architecture and attitudes of the church. It’s lovely telly. Proper ‘gather the family round BBC2′ stuff. Even if it’s on BBC4. Explaining music always seems to work well on TV, there should be more of it. (And it’s a co-production with the Open University, like Coast, there should be more of that too.)
That was really beautiful. And speaking of space sounds, I’m still in awe of this sound recorded during Huygens’ descent to the surface of Titan in 2005. I could easily be wrong but I reckon that’s the first sound ever recorded anywhere outside the earth’s atmosphere (apart from the artificial sounds from inside spacecraft and so on). The Huygens engineers knew Titan had an atmosphere so they attached microphones to the outside of the descent vehicle.