Music of the spheres

The Sounds of Space Project harvests found sounds and signals from Earth and way beyond, and gathers them into evocative sonic compositions.

Reflection III

By the beginning of the seventeenth century speculative music, the branch of musical thought the origins of which can be traced back to Pythagorean and Platonic concepts of the ordering of the cosmos through the proportions of musical intervals and of the music of the spheres, had diverged completely from practical musical performance and composition. Thomas Morley, in his ...

“Melodious Madrigals”: A Study of Animal Musicians in Early Modern England

In early modern England, people believed in the music of the spheres, the notion that the foundations of cosmic order were a result of musical principles. The importance of music in early modern English society encouraged Renaissance thinkers to hear music in a variety of places, even within the noises of animals. I argue that numerous early modern literary texts, including works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Milton, indicate that animals are capable of hearing celestial music and that they are imitating the heavenly music through their own musical performance. Animals' imitation of celestial music raises the following questions: Could animal-created music be a kind of divine language? Do animals' natural musical capabilities indicate that they are more connected to the divine than human beings are? Such questions matter because animals were seen as expendable in early modern England and, therefore, this view of animals as possibly closer to the divine than human beings problematizes the widely held early modern belief that men are superior to beasts. This article contributes to the rapidly growing field of early modern animal studies by creating a connection between Renaissance views of animals and the conceptual basis for environmental stewardship in our own time.

Harmonic Spirits and the Music of the Spheres

Chapter 2 traces harmonial ideas from the end of antiquity through the metaphysically based religious and mind cure movements of the nineteenth century. It begins by briefly surveying developments in the early Islamic world and medieval Europe before proceeding to explore astrological medicine and theurgy in the European Renaissance, focusing primarily on the spiritus theory of Marsilio Ficino. It further argues that the legacy of astrological medicine on the one hand and theurgy on the other can be found in the eighteenth-century movements founded by Franz Anton Mesmer and Emanuel Swedenborg, respectively. It concludes by examining the reconvergence of these two strains of thought in the New Thought movement of the late nineteenth century, focusing chiefly on the work of Warren Felt Evans, which synthesizes Swedenborgian ideas with contemporary medical thought, including the importance of breath and physical culture.