I come late to this discussion, but recently I performed a work by Graham
Treacher (the conductor of a choir I sing in), written a few years ago
called 'Galileo and the Queen of the Stars'. It's for unacc. choir and
two soprano soloists (situated some distance away). The text is from
Brecht's 'Life of Galileo', the Psalms, the hymn 'Ave Maris Stella' and
an Italian poem in praise of Galileo (I forget the poet). The piece
deals with Galileo's punishment by the Church for attempting to discover
astronomical truth and reflects on how sad and unnecessary religious
hostility to science can be. So a slightly different take on astronomy
from most of the other works mentioned so far in this thread.
Virginia Knight
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Personal homepage: http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/~ggvhk/virginia.html