ROCKING SPACE

What if the Big Bang was a symphony of suave notes more than a deafening rumble? Hard to believe. But if life has surfaced from primordial soup, it may be a learned guess imagining that music, as we know and love it, has made its first steps coming out of that deafening jumble of cosmic clangs.

Otherwise, why should we even think of connecting ourselves with “alien” worlds and forms of life, using as our business card Golden Record, astrophysicist Carl Sagan’s gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth and carried on board the Voyager spacecraft?

Because music – that is sound, in its purest essence – is a direct, universal language. We just need to air a piece of music in a room to see someone tap their foot or be emotionally dragged into each state of mind that music can induce. Music doesn’t need a vocabulary, unlike any other language.

On one hand, Tommaso Ghidini, Head of Mechanical Department at ESA – European Space Agency, is an extremely gifted speaker and a skilled scientist and nobody better than him can give new value to each space mission and give back to those missions such human qualities at risk of getting lost in the aseptic mists of scientific determinism.

On the other hand, RAB4, an Italian rock band with unique international flair and experience, is the perfect match to Ghidini’s renowned knowledge. Their leader Seba Pezzani, a writer and journalist in his own right, has always aimed at bringing race, class, culture and nationality walls down. “No borders” is his favorite slogan. Those rubbles are the stepping stone to universal creativity.

An amusing exchange between “professor” Ghidini and “average man” Pezzani (with his apparently trivial questions and his earthly thirst for knowledge and truth) will lead to an endearing confrontation between science and music, free flying on some globally famous musicians who have shown a specific interest in outer space – Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Byrds, among others – trying to find the underlying theme of the human quest in creativity and especially in music. Therefore, spacemen are seen as the ultimate explorers and musicians as the representatives of the basic investigation carried out by human beings on their own role within the universe.

This show-speech aims at being all but boring and at culturally enriching the audience, which will carry home an interstellar bag of good vibrations.