# Music of the Spheres.... what? how?



## Lenny (Jul 19, 2016)

Just bumped the other day (again) to "Music of the Spheres", meaning music that is based somehow on the celestial bodies, planets, the sun etc. This is very fascinating to me, but I never really knew who wrote this kind of music.

Example on this TED video: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_tilson_thomas_music_and_emotion_through_time#t-601131 (skip to 10 minutes). What is that music? Can you identify the composer? Sounds a bit like Palestrina... but I don't think it is. And how exactly it is based on the movement of planets etc?

Edit: found this: Earthly Music and Cosmic Harmony: Johannes Kepler's Interest in Practical Music, Especially Orlando di Lasso


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

It's what Oedipa Maas heard when she had her epiphany.

"San Narciso at that moment lost (the loss pure, instant, spherical, the sound of a stainless orchestral chime held among the stars and struck lightly), gave up its residue of uniqueness for her;"

Honestly, I've always considered it a metaphorical description of universal harmony. 

"When men ceased to believe the sun went around the earth, they gave up the music of the spheres." - Northrop Frye (who introduced me to the expression).

Edit - let me modify that - in ancient times through the Renaissance, there was a belief in actual harmony among the planets etc., best envisioned through the metaphorical expression "music of the spheres." In other words, the planets were obeying principles that were comparable to musical harmony.


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## Lenny (Jul 19, 2016)

jegreenwood said:


> It's what Oedipa Maas heard when she had her epiphany.
> 
> "San Narciso at that moment lost (the loss pure, instant, spherical, the sound of a stainless orchestral chime held among the stars and struck lightly), gave up its residue of uniqueness for her;"
> 
> ...


Interesting... What do you think about Kepler and his interpretation of music vs. movements of the planetary system? Do you think his thoughts had any impact on the actual composers?

I guess Kepler's system was in a way some sort of astrology, numerology, or "kabbala" - you get out whatever you want from the planets.


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## JACE (Jul 18, 2014)

Sorta related:

Danish composer Rued Langgaard (1893 - 1952) composed a work called _Music of the Spheres_.

Gennady Rozhdestvensky made an excellent recording with the Danish National RSO:


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

I am certainly no expert on Kepler, but as I understand what it, Kepler was trying to establish a relationship between the ratio of frequencies between two notes and the orbits of planets. Maybe he thought that the square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit, or mathematically, the total orbit times for planet 1 and planet 2 have a ratio a13/2 : a23/2.(that's a subscript 1 to the 3/2 power : a subscript 2 to the 3/2 power).






In music if you take the frequency of the tonic and raise it to the 3/2 power you get the frequency of the dominant.*

*subject to the tweaking of Bach and his buddies.


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

Lenny said:


> I guess Kepler's system was in a way some sort of astrology, numerology, or "kabbala" - you get out whatever you want from the planets.


Kepler actually worked as astrologer, though it is not clear how seriously he took it. He was an absolutely brilliant mathematician, but in many ways he was still mired in medieval thought, and had some weird mystical notions. He also fell into the trap many great mathematicians fall into: a lot of mathematics is basically patterns recognition, and recognizing subtle patterns that the rest of us would miss. The problem is, many mathematicians become so attuned that they begin to see mystical patterns where none exist.

In his day the model of the universe that had earth at the center, with the planets moving around, attached to crystal spheres, was still widely accepted. But because the planets' orbits are not in fact perfect circles, their positions could not be very accurately predicted. Kepler, as mathematician, knew that according to Euclidian geometry, there were five, and only five, "perfect geometric solids", i.e. 3-D objects, the surfaces of which are made up by identical two dimensional figures: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. He also knew there were five known planets (other than earth, of course).

In the above, he found special meaning, and he made the kind of assumption that no modern scientist would: there had to be some connection between the fact that there were five planets and five perfect solids. He then spent years and years battling it out with this idea, trying to create a model of the universe that would combine ratios derived from these solids with the standard model of crystal spheres.

Of course, he had no luck because his assumption was plain wrong. And then he did what a modern scientist is far more likely to do: he abandoned the model. Eventually, using very accurate (for the time) observations by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, he eventually worked out that the planets move in ellipses. And moreover, that there are elegant relationships, which eventually became known as Kepler's laws.

Either way, Kepler apparently had this semi-mystical idea that everything is connected to everything else through mathematics. I don't know what exactly his ideas about music were, but it is after all also a field with ratios and relationships and stuff. The music of the ellipses might be a better term. 

All of the above from memory and general knowledge and stuff Carl Sagan said in _Cosmos_, about a million years ago. Thus probably peppered with errors, so take it with a grain of salt.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Violinst Daniel Hope had an album a couple of years ago called "Spheres" that was mostly minimalist music, inspired by this notion:



> When I was in my teens, Yehudi Menuhin, who was at work on his project The Music of Man, introduced me to the great astronomer Carl Sagan. It was Sagan who first opened my eyes to the magnitude of the universe, and essentially to the notion of "music of the spheres".
> 
> In this album my idea was to bring together music and time, including works by composers from different centuries who might perhaps not always be found in the same "galaxy" but yet are united by the age-old question: is there anything out there?
> 
> It was probably Pythagoras who first expounded the idea that universal harmony may be rooted in mathematics, after his chance discovery that the pitch of a musical note depends upon the length of the string which produces it. But can something as magical and inexplicable as music ever be explained merely by a mathematical formula?


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