Reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time inspired Elisabeth Schimana in 2009 to compose Sternenstaub (Stardust). That we are made of stardust is not merely a beautiful poetic image. The building blocks of which we are composed were formed either in the Big Bang or through nuclear fusions inside stars, which then hurled them into the universe in supernova explosions. The human microcosm is directly connected to the macrocosm. “pulsate_implode_explode_and sheltered we are in the particle wind of the sun,” reads an accompanying text.

A book also provided the initial spark for In die Sonne in 2016: Die Sonne – der Stern von dem wir leben by Styrian astronomer Arnold Hanslmeier. Reading it gave rise to the image of the sun “as a vast resonating body for acoustic oscillations that propagate towards the solar interior and are reflected there.” The title is to be taken literally: In die Sonne invites the listener on an imagined journey into the centre of this gigantic, luminous body of gas, without whose radiation there would be no life on Earth.