William Shatner & Ben Folds: Planet Earth and Beyond

In 2021, William Shatner, actor and erstwhile Captain of the USS Enterprise, ventured into space aboard Blue Origin’s rocket New Shepard. For him, the voyage brought the vulnerability of Earth into sharp focus—his experience, he tells Apple Music Classical, was “profound, it was religious, it was ecclesiastical.” Soon after landing, Shatner was invited by Ben Folds, the singer-songwriter and artistic advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., to collaborate on So Fragile, So Blue, an album of orchestral music and spoken word which would accommodate Shatner’s thoughts, both on the flight itself and on the future of our planet. This playlist, chosen jointly by Shatner and Folds, features tracks from this album, alongside music from across the centuries inspired both by the cosmos and by our own natural world. “People have asked me a great deal about the flight I took into space and the emotions it caused,” says Shatner. “It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to sum up the complexity of what I felt when I landed, but music is a good means of expressing something so vast.” We begin our journey with perhaps the most recognizable work in all classical music—the sunrise from Richard Strauss’ tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra, music that will forever be associated with the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and our exploration of space. We glimpse the spirit of Jupiter courtesy of Holst, and bathe in Debussy’s depiction of the light of the Moon. But most of the music is earthbound: magical descriptions of natural wonders. Wagner’s murmuring forests, Mendelssohn’s evocation of a stormy Hebridean Sea, Vaughan Williams’ haunting portrait of Antarctica’s frozen wastes. Many of these phenomena are brought to breathtaking life by the majestic sound of a symphony orchestra. “I always liken the orchestra as the greatest symbol of civilization,” adds Ben Folds. “It organizes people to be something greater than all of the parts. “We hope this playlist gives you a sense of the awe William Shatner felt in space,” adds Folds, “but also the joy that classical music brings to us here on Earth.”