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Bill Barclay's MUSE ON FIRE lecture
Tonight, Lis and I went to a lecture/show/thing in Davis Square. It started with a piece by Michael Anderson, which was originally going to be his "A Bloody Deed" piece, but he just didn't feel comfortable talking about kids and violence, even fake stage violence, so soon after Sandy Hook -- there's no connection or anything, but he just didn't feel quite right about it. So he did his Language of Shakespeare/Language of Baseball piece, instead, which is every bit as funny, and a perfectly acceptable substitution.
Bill Barclay is a Shakespearean scholar and musician. About ten years ago, when he was 26 or so, Tina Packard told him that he was going to do a lecture for their summer series at Shakespeare and Company on something musical -- how about the Music of the Spheres. A topic which he knew from nothing. So he crammed for two months, and found that this was a topic that fascinated him, and he's continued to poke at it ever since.
Let me give a couple-sentence summary of some of the most basic parts of his thesis -- the ones which I find easiest to go along with.
Item 1: The notion of the "Music of the Spheres" is that each planet always creates some sort of musical tone, which, together, form the most beautiful harmony that could be imagined. For whatever reason, we humans can't hear this music, but it's there constantly anyway.
Item 2: As Pythagoras elucidated, harmonies are based on simple integer ratios. If you take a chord and strum it, it vibrates at a certain frequency. If you take simple ratios of the length -- half the length, a third the length, a quarter the length, a fifth the length -- you get the intervals that give us our basic harmonies, octaves, major chords, and so forth.
Item 3: For most of human history, people assumed that the orbital mechanics and dynamics of the Solar System had to be based on some sorts of perfect ratios, and simple, perfect forms. When Kepler discovered that orbits are ellipses instead of circles, this was, of course, deeply distressing to him, and he looked for ways to work with the data to see if he couldn't prove that these ellipses were, on some deep level, even MORE perfect representations of Cosmic Harmonies than circles were. One of the things he did was to compare ratios of the speed of the planets at perihelion and aphelion with each other, and with the speeds of the adjacent planets at perihelion and aphelion. He found a significant number of integral ratios -- not all of them, but a lot of them. This is not simply coincidence: it's an artifact of orbital resonances. Repeating systems have a tendency to reinforce themselves in more and more regular patterns.
Item 4: Pitches are frequencies. Frequencies below about 20 Hz are perceived by the human ear as individual events; above 20 Hz but within human hearing are perceived as tones. Nonetheless, there's no real difference between frequencies below 20 Hz and above, theoretically. You could consider a frequency of 1/year. You could say that the Earth orbits at B flat 32 octaves below middle C.
Item 5: Because of orbital resonances, orbital phenomena happen at frequencies of simple integer ratios. Frequencies of simple integer ratios is another way of saying Platonic harmonies.
Therefore, the Music of the Spheres is a real thing.
Bill Barclay is a Shakespearean scholar and musician. About ten years ago, when he was 26 or so, Tina Packard told him that he was going to do a lecture for their summer series at Shakespeare and Company on something musical -- how about the Music of the Spheres. A topic which he knew from nothing. So he crammed for two months, and found that this was a topic that fascinated him, and he's continued to poke at it ever since.
Let me give a couple-sentence summary of some of the most basic parts of his thesis -- the ones which I find easiest to go along with.
Item 1: The notion of the "Music of the Spheres" is that each planet always creates some sort of musical tone, which, together, form the most beautiful harmony that could be imagined. For whatever reason, we humans can't hear this music, but it's there constantly anyway.
Item 2: As Pythagoras elucidated, harmonies are based on simple integer ratios. If you take a chord and strum it, it vibrates at a certain frequency. If you take simple ratios of the length -- half the length, a third the length, a quarter the length, a fifth the length -- you get the intervals that give us our basic harmonies, octaves, major chords, and so forth.
Item 3: For most of human history, people assumed that the orbital mechanics and dynamics of the Solar System had to be based on some sorts of perfect ratios, and simple, perfect forms. When Kepler discovered that orbits are ellipses instead of circles, this was, of course, deeply distressing to him, and he looked for ways to work with the data to see if he couldn't prove that these ellipses were, on some deep level, even MORE perfect representations of Cosmic Harmonies than circles were. One of the things he did was to compare ratios of the speed of the planets at perihelion and aphelion with each other, and with the speeds of the adjacent planets at perihelion and aphelion. He found a significant number of integral ratios -- not all of them, but a lot of them. This is not simply coincidence: it's an artifact of orbital resonances. Repeating systems have a tendency to reinforce themselves in more and more regular patterns.
Item 4: Pitches are frequencies. Frequencies below about 20 Hz are perceived by the human ear as individual events; above 20 Hz but within human hearing are perceived as tones. Nonetheless, there's no real difference between frequencies below 20 Hz and above, theoretically. You could consider a frequency of 1/year. You could say that the Earth orbits at B flat 32 octaves below middle C.
Item 5: Because of orbital resonances, orbital phenomena happen at frequencies of simple integer ratios. Frequencies of simple integer ratios is another way of saying Platonic harmonies.
Therefore, the Music of the Spheres is a real thing.
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