America 250 in the Planetarium - Glass Astronomers: Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler in American Opera

Celebrate American discovery, innovation, and values through topics in astronomy, history, art, music, and more in this special nine-part series in the BGSU Planetarium. This America 250 in the Planetarium series of programs will take place on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays starting at 7:30 p.m. July 13 - 31. All America 250 in the Planetarium programs are free and open to the public. This seventh talk in the series, Glass Astronomers: Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler in American Opera, will be presented by Ryan Ebright, Associate Professor, BGSU College of Musical Arts. The American composer Philip Glass is perhaps most famous for his bicentennial opera Einstein on the Beach, a groundbreaking collaboration with avant-garde director Robert Wilson that was loosely inspired by the life and ideas of physicist Albert Einstein. Among Glass's more than two dozen subsequent operas, scientists are recurring subjects, including two seventeenth-century astronomers whose work revolutionized humanity's understanding of the universe. In this multimedia presentation, we will discover how space and those who study it are dramatized musically in Glass's operas Galileo Galilei (2002) and Kepler (2009). The talk will be followed by the planetarium show DAWN OF THE SPACE AGE at 8:45 p.m.