Black Hole Symphony

Sunday, November 5, 2023, 3 p.m. - 4 p.m.

NAS Building, 2101 Constitution Ave., N.W., Fred Kavli Auditorium

Free. Registration and photo ID required.

Experience the unfolding story of black holes as engines of gravity, light, and creation through a groundbreaking fusion of art, science, and music!

Black Hole Symphony — an immersive new production from the Museum of Science, Boston, and the Multiverse Concert Series, in collaboration with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Black Hole Initiative — takes you on a symphonic journey through space-time. The symphony is performed by a chamber orchestra and accompanied by stunning, immersive visuals by the Museum of Science, Boston’s Charles Hayden Planetarium animators. Composer David Ibbett has sonified the light of black hole galaxies as musical notes and chords woven into a dramatic electro-symphonic score that reveals a hidden universe beyond the scope of our eyes.

Audiences are plunged into deep space, riding relativistic jets of plasma, guided through the dense dust torus, broad-line clouds, and ultimately reaching the blazing accretion disk on the event horizon of a supermassive black hole.

Featuring David Ibbett, composer, and conductor; Johnny Mok, cello; Ryan Shannon, violin; Agnes Coakley-Cox, soprano; Dan VanHassel, electric guitar; Stephanie Ray, flute/piccolo; Anna Barnacka, scientist from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics; S. James Gates Jr., NAS member and theoretical physicist from the University of Maryland, College Park; Vince LeRow, audio engineer.

The concert is made possible by a generous gift from the late Ruth Roberts in memory of her husband, NAS member Eugene Roberts.