Composed by Henry Dehlinger in 2022-23 and commissioned by National Philharmonic conductor Piotr Gajewski, this epic suite of seven symphonic poems showcases the Sun, Earth, Moon, Planets, and beyond. Stunning new imagery from the Webb Space Telescope takes audiences on a sublime voyage through the Cosmos, while offering a glimpse of the beginning of time.
NASA created a stunning visual canvas of astronomical images—unfathomable cosmic figures such as the Orion Nebula, Pillars of Creation and supermassive black holes captured by Webb—and visualizations representing scientific data to serve as inspiration for the composer. Especially poignant is the depiction of Earth’s fragile beauty and how a century of climate change has affected the biodiversity of our home planet. These are projected on a giant screen above the orchestra.
“You can have majesty, wistfulness, and ethereality coexist,” Dehlinger comments in “Looking for Art in the James Webb Telescope,” the September 2023 piece in The New Yorker that spotlights Cosmic Cycles. “You know you’re dealing with wonderful material when it can elicit more than one emotion.”
Cosmic Cycles emerged from Maestro Gajewski’s long and successful partnership with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and its production team of animators, data visualizers, video producers, web editors, and science writers, which had previously created multimedia content to pair with space-themed concert programs that included Claude Debussy's La Mer and Gustav Holst's The Planets.
For this collaboration, Gajewski turned the tables. Instead of asking NASA to provide content to pair with an existing work, he asked NASA executive producer Wade Sisler to create a fresh multimedia experience, one that would inspire a brand new seven-movement symphony. This provided NASA’s production team the freedom to share NASA's most exciting science stories about the Cosmos without the need to adhere to specific musical cues. To compose the original music, Gajewski turned to Dehlinger, a NatPhil audience favorite whose works he had premiered before with great success.
Cosmic Cycles drew a sellout crowd when it premiered on May 11, 2023 at Capital One Hall in Northern Virginia and was presented again on May 13, 2023 at The Music Center at Strathmore. Agence France-Presse called it “the ultimate blend of art and science.” The Washington Post described it as “a harmonically rewarding wander through the stars,” in which, “A grand seven-movement narrative arc emerges from the sequence of images and music.”
The May 10, 2026 presentation included three of the seven movements, as follows:
1. The Sun
2. Earth, Our Home
3. Echoes of the Big Bang
1. The Sun
Visual Content by Scott Wiessinger
The first movement is a celebration of the life-giving star at the center of our Solar System. Born from a swirling cloud of dust and gas some 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun seethes and boils like a living thing. The opening sequence is heralded with a crash of the gong supported by sustained double low Cs on the double basses, contrabassoon, bass and contrabass trombones, tuba, and pipe organ. A closeup of the Sun’s fiery surface with its enormous loops of plasma stretching into space fades into view. As the din subsides to a quiet rumble, the horns introduce the solar theme, a leitmotif that will recur throughout the movement and echo throughout the heliosphere.
Explosions of brass burst through as a coronal mass ejection—large expulsions of plasma from the Sun's corona—slams into Venus, which doesn’t have a magnetic field to protect it. Then, the barely visible black dot of Mercury makes a playful transit across the fiery canvas, while Dehlinger spins a whimsical motif that alludes to Gustav Holst’s depiction of the tiny planet.
The solar orb is revealed as the orchestra, dominated by brass and pipe organ, heralds an epic musical "sunrise" with a majestic chord progression that resolves in C major. Meanwhile, the coronal mass ejection reaches our home planet. Unlike Venus, Earth is protected by the magnetosphere, a strong magnetic field that makes life here possible. The Sun closes with the solar winds continuing their futile bombardment. The magnetosphere stretches out into a long tail behind Earth, as if to announce the next movement.
"Throughout the work, Dehlinger effectively builds atop the foundation of a searching four-note motif that echoes other monolithic melodies we’ve come to connect with the cosmos, including the clarion dawn of Strauss’s "Also sprach Zarathustra" or John Williams’s five-note hello from the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
2. EARTH, OUR HOME
Visual Content by Lauren Ward
In our journey through the Cosmos, Earth is our most important stop. It is the only planet that we know possesses life, and it happens to be our home. Earth, Our Home opens with a blend of strings, flutes and oboes, played pianissimo. The woodwinds amplify the resonance of the strings, while the strings soften the woodwinds. Together, they create an atmospheric mood that underscores our home planet's fragile beauty, especially from space.
A prominent aspirational theme—“a searching four-note motif that echoes other monolithic melodies we’ve come to connect with the cosmos, including the clarion dawn of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra or John Williams’s five-note hello from the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” (The Washington Post)—is revealed as the empyreal tapestry transitions to the view below from the International Space Station. Emerging from the “four-note motif” is a heroic theme, carried by the trumpets, which produces a thrilling sense of action punctuated by syncopated rhythms and colorful harmonic textures.
One especially poignant moment: using the same NASA data that scientists use to track ecosystem changes, we experience a century of climate change and how it affects the biodiversity of our home planet, before closing with the peaceful idyll of Earth from space.
"Dehlinger looked at the Webb’s version of Pillars of Creation...When that image appears during “Cosmic Cycles,” the sound ceases...The strings and woodwinds [then] play off each other, creating a moment that’s both ethereal and empyreal.”
3. ECHOES OF THE BIG BANG
Visual Content by Scott Wiessinger
Featuring breathtaking images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, Echoes of the Big Bang is an exploration of the universe and its origins, from the Pillars of Creation and the Orion Nebula to the M87 Supermassive Black Hole.
To complement the symphonic soundscape, the composer introduces a synthesized data sonification of a black hole at the center of the Perseus galaxy cluster, which was captured by NASA scientists. The black hole sends out pressure waves that cause ripples in the cluster’s hot gas that can be translated into a note—B flat to be exact—one that humans cannot hear some 57 octaves below middle C. The sound waves have been re-synthesized into a range we can hear. We also experience binary star colliding winds, merging neutron stars, gamma-ray bursts in distant galaxies, and much more.
For the finale, everything comes full circle. Dehlinger reprises the solar theme as we approach a distant exoplanet system with a star that resembles our Sun. Cosmic Cycles closes with a soaring fanfare, comprised of the same “searching four-note motif” introduced earlier in the work. It heralds the musical “sunrise” of a different star before fading to white and resolving, one last time, in a magnificent fort-fortissimo C major chord.