Symphony for the History of Time

World Premiere 7 May 2026,  St John's Cathedral, Brisbane

A new Australian symphony composed by Eve Klein, presented by the School of Music, The University of Queensland, conducted by Paul Dean and featuring the UQ Symphony Orchestra, UQ Chorale and UQ Singers.

Symphony for the History of Time is a programmatic symphony telling the story of our universe as we currently understand it based upon the cosmology research of Professor Tamara Davis and her research collaborations with The Dark Energy Survey (DES) and The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).

Audiences will be surrounded by 172 musicians in motion in a darkened St John's Cathedral lit by wonderous projections of the distant reaches of our universe. Starting before the Big Bang with current scientific theories of how our universe may have come into being, then progressing through the Big Bang, to the formation of galaxies and stars, Symphony for the History of Time is a musical translation of this science, using the symphony orchestra as a palette to understand the infinite complexities of the history of our universe, and our fragile human perception within it.

Duration: 54 Minutes.

Programmatic Description

Symphony for the History of Time is a programmatic symphony telling the story of our universe as we currently understand it. The music explores the following scientific concepts.

The Big Bang is a theory of how our universe formed which is commonly accepted in the scientific community. It has become the working basis of most modern cosmology . Scientists can’t directly observe what came before the Big Bang but by mapping and observing the universe today they have developed snapshots of the early universe which enables them to make informed suppositions about how the Big Bang occurred.

Before the Big Bang, scientists speculate that materials existed in a vacuum (Movement 1) and were excited by energy fluctuations (Movement 2). One of these fluctuations was so irregular that it caused the Big Bang to occur (Movement 3).

The Big Bang triggered successive energy transformations which subsequently transformed into matter which formed plasma. The extreme heat of the Big Bang left this plasma glowing, but it was too hot and dense for photons (light particles) to travel through it, except in short bursts (Movement 4). As the plasma cooled interactions between normal matter and photons created sound waves which pulsed through the material and redistributed it. The shape of these early sound waves is imprinted on how galaxies are distributed across our universe today (Movement 5).

With cooling, the afterglow of the Big Bang changed in colour becoming translucent from the perspective of human vision. The universe entered a period of complete darkness known as the Dark Age. Redistributed material clustered together forming the first stars and galaxies approximately 3 billion years after the Big Bang (Movement 6). The successive birth and death of stars caused further transformations establishing the elements which make up our current universe, including a planet called Earth and all the life it contains.

Scientists can directly observe with telescopes only 5% of what makes up our universe (called ordinary matter). The remaining matter cannot be observed by light. Recently scientists have begun measuring the influence of the remaining matter only through its gravitational effect. Using gravity’s fingerprint scientists have found the other 27% of what makes up our universe (called Dark Matter) and describe the remaining 68% of what makes up our universe as Dark Energy. The expansion of our universe is speeding up and Dark Energy is thought to be causing this acceleration (Movement 7). However, scientists don’t yet know what Dark Energy is, with this understanding likely sitting beyond the boundaries of standard physics.

Ripples in space and time are created by the acceleration of massive objects. In 1916 Albert Einstein predicted them in his General Theory of Relativity and in 2015 scientists observed them directly when the U.S. National Science Foundation Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory captured the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. Scientists think that by studying Gravitational Waves, they may better understand the expansion of our universe and the nature of Dark Energy driving it (Movement 8).

This knowledge is only possible through large-scale human scientific enquiries and collaboration. In the next twenty years, these efforts will have produced a complete map of the observable universe from Earth. Beyond these limits, the universe will remain a mystery, being slowly revealed to us as we wait for light from more distant reaches of space to arrive here (Movement 9).

Scientists are speculating that our universe may continue to expand until it ceases to exist, and that this process could be cyclic, with materials from our universe eventually clustering together, fluctuating and causing a new Big Bang, and with it the formation of a subsequent universe. They extend this idea and wonder if our universe may have formed out of the remnants of a previous one, and all it contained (Movement 10).

Symphony for the History of Time depicts ideas emerging from astrophysicist Professor Tamara Davis’s research collaborations with The Dark Energy Survey (DES) and The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). In her words, this research aims “to make precise maps of dark matter, determine whether dark energy changes with time, measure the mass of the neutrino, and provide the anchor by which gravitational wave studies can measure the expansion rate of the universe”. Symphony for the History of Time is my translation of this science, using the symphony orchestra as a palette to understand the infinite complexities of the history of our universe, and our fragile human perception within it.

-- Eve Klein, 2026.

Movements

1. Particles in the Dark
2. An Aberrant Oscillation
3. Big Bang
4. Afterglow
5. Frequency of the Universe
6. The Beginning of Starlight
7. Dark Materials
8. Gravitational Waves
9. Unity, Infinity
10. The End is the Beginning