The Music of the Spheres

Harmony is a happy blending. In music it is a mixing of tones that make a new sound. A synergy, the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Webster says that it is also a pleasing arrangement of parts. Harmony is something special.

In Ancient times, the best science of the day came up with the concept of celestial spheres. Ancient astronomers knew that the stars moved across the sky each night in a fixed relationship to each other. They did not know that the Earth was turning which caused the apparent motion. They thought the stars must be fixed to a giant sphere which slowly rotated. But there were a few things in the night sky that did not move with the other stars. These things appeared in a different position each night in relation to the stars. They just wandered through the stars on a course of their own. So they called them planetes asters which means wandering stars in ancient Greek. The name “planet” stuck. Since the planets moved independently of the stars and of each other, the ancients reasoned that each planet must be on its own sphere. Each sphere nested inside each other like Russian dolls. Actually, given their observations and what they knew of the world, this was not an unreasonable idea. Pythagoras did a lot of work on music and the mathematical underpinnings of music. He posited that since bodies in motion produce sound, the stars and planets must also produce a sound. Thus was born the “music of the spheres.” This was a blending of Philosophy, mathematics, astrology, music and astronomy. The music of the spheres is a beautiful concept, that there is an ultimate celestial harmony that perhaps governs all things. Unfortunately, as beautiful as it is, it is completely untrue. The idea that the stars and planets were affixed to spheres was accepted for a thousand years. In the 1500’s more accurate observations of planetary motions as well as observations of comets put serious cracks in the idea of celestial spheres and scientists abandoned the idea. Eventually the theory of spheres was completely replaced by Kepler’s and Newton’s laws. The music of the spheres had to go by the wayside as well.

But harmony (musical and otherwise) has not left us. It remains a goal in music, as in life, to find the harmonies, the connections, the congruences, that make everything feel just right.

Star Liner

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