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French composer Olivier Messiaen is famous for his love of nature, particularly birds and bird songs. His work From The Canyons To The Stars — which will be performed in Hill Auditorium this Sunday, January 29 by the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jeffrey Tate — shows a much grander side of Messiaen’s wondrous admiration of the natural world.

Leslie Stainton on Sunday’s Saturday Morning Physics event featuring physicists Sean Carroll and Michael S. Turner, and composer Philip Glass.

Olivier Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars), commissioned to commemorate America’s bicentennial, was inspired the by the American West. Conductor Jeffrey Tate and the Hamburg Symphony, in collaboration with Israeli filmmaker Daniel Landau, bring the piece alive in a new cinematic installation, where images of man’s impact on the environment create a counterpoint to sounds of untouched nature. UMS’s video producer and filmmaker Sophia Kruz interviewed Daniel Landau over Skype.

On January 29, UMS will present the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra who will perform French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles (From the Canyons to the Stars). From the Canyons to the Stars was inspired by the natural wonder Messiaen found in the landscapes of the American West. We put together a playlist of other music we love which was inspired by nature. Take a listen.

Excitement is brewing this week in Ann Arbor and seems about ready to burst. Einstein on the Beach is officially beginning again, for the first time in twenty years, and after much anticipation….tomorrow. All of our preview performances this weekend are sold out, and we’ve been told that people are coming from 30 different states to see what we have created. The thought is thrilling, humbling, and sobering all at once.

Mel Brooks’s “Producers” they’re not. “No way we’ll become get rich on this,” Linda Brumbach said yesterday at UM’s B-School in a 90-minute public conversation about the ins and outs of producing Einstein on the Beach. Brumbach is the head of Pomegranate Arts, the tiny production company that’s taken on the near-impossible task of bringing Einstein to the stage here in A2 and in 10 other venues around the world. The tour ends in Hong Kong in March 2013, and Brumbach says she’ll consider it an artistic success if “Bob, Phil, and Lucinda get the piece they want.” That’s Robert Wilson, Philip Glass, and Lucinda Childs, the artists who gave birth to the monumental opera in 1976 and have seen only two revivals since then.

Last night’s Penny W. Stamps Speaker Series featured a conversation with Einstein on the Beach co-creators Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. Anne Bogart, acclaimed theater director, moderated the conversation. Leslie Stainton (almost) live-blogs the event.

For a concept that underpins much of life as we know it—including, science historian Peter Galison reminded listeners yesterday, GPS and satellite technology—Einstein’s theory of relativity is hard to grasp, at least for this non-physicist. At yesterday’s Institute for the Humanities lecture in Rackham Amphitheatre, Galison laid out both background and context for Einstein’s radical rethinking of time as a relative rather than an absolute phenomenon.

A round-up of Einstein on the Beach coverage.