Image from Alexander Kluge’s short film, “The Galactic Year” (Alexander Kluge Archive, Cornell University)
Johann Sebastian Bach’s church cantata, Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben (Dearest God, when will I die?), BWV 8, was first performed on Sunday, September 24th—300 years ago this Wednesday.
Strains of the opening chorus of Bach’s (im)mortal work provide the soundtrack for a short film called Das Galaktische Jahr (The Galactic Year) collected in Cornell University’s digital archive holding just some of the vast output of Alexander Kluge, a cultural figure whose myriad contributions are not even adequately captured by the true statement that he counts as one of Germany’s greatest living authors, filmmakers, and intellectuals. At ninety-two, Kluge’s productivity and brilliance continue to shine like the sun seen sweeping through the Milky Way in gleefully naïve AI-generated animation at the outset of the “The Galactic Year,” one of the many short videos that make up his 90-minute Cosmic Miniatures, which premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year.
It could be said of Kluge and Bach that, in their respective centuries, both answer the immediate demands of production (in the composer’s case cranking out a cantata almost every Sunday in the liturgical year), while also pursuing a longer artistic mission whose findings extend far beyond a single human lifetime. In his quirky and often comic film, Kluge finds gorillas singing on Uranus, sends dogs into space, and puts Jacobins in a balloon on the way to revolutionize the moon.
At the start of “The Galactic Year,” we see a close-up of our sun and its planets orbiting through the Milky Way. Rough-and-ready intertitles with garish colors, goofy fonts and skewed orientations intermittently appear, their design concocted by computer. The first written announcement informs us that our solar system will take some 250 million years to complete one cycle around the galaxy’s core. Another intertitle tells us that astronomers call this lap a “revolution.” That word echoes through the other films, Kluge archly implying that the cosmos are inherently subversive: things get upended even if there is no up or down.
Looking down on —or is it up?—at the heavens, Kluge observes in one of his intertitles that the dinosaurs saw the center of the galaxy from the opposite side of where we are now. The head of a snake-like beast with gleaming green eyes emerges from the celestial soup to stare at us from across time and space to the accompaniment of Bach’s chorus.
Kluge’s computer-aided camera doesn’t zoom in closely enough on our patch of space to catch sight of either of the two Voyager Spacecraft that were launched from Earth in September of 1977. Voyager 1 departed our solar system in 2012 and is currently about 24 billion kilometers away and the human-made object farthest from earth. Voyager 2 lost contact for a couple of weeks in 2023 but is now, like Voyager 1, connected again through NASA’s Deep Space Network. Although neither Voyager is navigating towards any particular star, one of the spacecraft will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445, currently in the constellation Camelopardalis, in about 40,000 years. That’s just under a galactic week from now.
Both spacecraft carry identical Golden Records meant to demonstrate, if discovered and played, something of the diversity of terrestrial sounds and cultures. A salutation from United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim is followed by greetings in 55 human languages. Then come other animal sounds, including whale song and human music. The latter has been claimed as a universal language. The Voyager spacecrafts put that assertion to the test by sending musical recordings out into the universe. Over their journeys so far, the discs have been silent, but both include instructions on how to get them to sound should they be intercepted, the assumption being that the interceptors will be intelligent enough to decipher the schematics etched into the records’ surface.
The musical offerings of the Golden Record begin on track 5 with the first movement of Brandenburg Concerto no. 2 by Bach. Of the remaining 26 musical tracks, two more pieces are also by him. Beethoven has two; Chuck Berry and the Mahi musicians of Benin, one each; Handel zero. The NASA committee charged with selecting the repertoire was chaired by Carl Sagan, a Cornell Professor of Astronomy who also hosted the popular public television show of the 1970s, Cosmos.
Given that Bach’s music without words is hurtling through intergalactic space, I was delighted to hear a Bach vocal work on “The Galactic Year”—a period of time that amounts to some 250 million terrestrial years, Mr. Kluge tells us in the film.
In Bach’s chorus, various groups of instruments fit together like the gears of an astrolabe. Fluting puffs of the recorder tick out the seconds, marking the ebbing duration of human life, each one determined by God: “Meine Zeit läuft immer hin,” (my time runs away) the lyric intones in its second line. These are the first words we hear in the soundtrack of “The Galactic Year,” since Kluge picks up the music not at its launch but in the midst of its flight path. The dinosaurs were not in church that Sunday in September of 1724 in Leipzig.
The cantata’s poetry was written around 1690 by the Lutheran clergyman Caspar Neumann. Before Neumann became a pastor he had studied as a pharmacist and married a physician’s daughter. He first took up a preacher’s post in Altenburg, now famous for its fully extant organ dedicated by Bach, perhaps even designed by him. Neumann later returned to his native Breslau to become one of the city’s leading clerics, as well as the inspector of schools, and a professor of theology.
As we hear in this cantata, Neumann dedicated much of his poetical energy to the subject of death, his lyrics informed by his rigorous study of mortality rates in Breslau between 1687-1691, during which time he also composed the sacred text later set by Bach. Neumann sent his findings first to Leibniz, who posted the researcher’s tables on births and deaths to the Royal Society in London. They were then handed over to the astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley who, in 1685, the year of J. S. Bach’s birth, had taken over the duties of Robert Hooke as editor of the society’s journal, The Philosophical Transactions. The letters exchanged between Neumann and Halley were rediscovered in the nineteenth century.
Halley published his work based on Neumann’s statistical research in the Philosophical Transactions for the year 1693 under the title, “An estimate of the degree of the Mortality of Mankind, drawn from curious Tables of the Births and Funerals of the City of Breslaw; with an attempt to ascertain the price of Annuities upon Lives.” A seminal work of actuarial science, the article counts as the first monetary valuation of human life.
A dozen years later in his Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets of 1705, Halley would calculate the periodicity of the heavenly body now named after him. His predictions were confirmed by the comet’s return in 1758, by which time Halley had been dead for sixteen years.
Bach’s musical research based on Neumann’s work contemplates the ticking away of earthly time even while conjuring timeless eternity. Kluge’s film revels in the arbitrariness of time by sending this cosmic, chronological cantata into orbit in and around the imagination.
Bach’s “Liebster Gott, wann werd ich sterben” was born 300 years ago; Kluge is 92. Neither span amounts to even a nanosecond on the galactic clock. Yet with its inexorable, wondrously weightless metric progress, Bach’s cantata both calibrates earthly time and conjures timeless eternity.
What are the chances that the musico-actuarial spacecraft BWV 8, built by Johann Sebastian Bach and Caspar Neumann and launched into space in “The Galactic Year” will come within a parsec or two, or perhaps even collide with, Halley’s Comet, then wormhole its way into a trajectory alongside Voyager 1 as it transports wordless Bach works through interstellar space? Inspired by the imaginings of Alexander Kluge, I like to think that the likelihood is a lot higher than zero.
