Music – that is to say, vocal and/or instrumental sounds that combine to produce recognizable form, harmony and emotional expression – has provided the soundtrack to civilization. From ancient tribal music to sacred choral music, music to inspire soldiers in battle and the music of high opera and the great composers, through to the popular forms of jazz, rock, pop, rap and dance – it is an extraordinarily democratic art form and one that often defies intellectual analysis. Nonetheless, the idea of the Music of the Spheres (or Musica universalis) has proved an enduringly appealing way to attempt to understand the pull that music has over us.
It is likely that humanity’s relationship with music began via drum-like percussive instruments, which were probably used in rituals. But by 4000 BCE the Egyptians were playing music on harps and flutes, with the trumpet following about 1,500 years later, and the guitar (invented by the Hittites) about another thousand years on.
Celestial bodies and musicality
The idea of the Music of the Spheres suggests that there is a relationship between the movement of celestial bodies and musicality. Specifically, the proportionality of their movement has a mathematical correlation to the production of perfectly harmonious ‘tones’ inaudible on Earth. The idea stems from the work of Pythagoras in the 6th century BCE, among whose achievements was establishing that the relationship between the pitch of a note and the length of a string that produces it may be represented as a ratio of whole numbers. He came to regard music as one of the universal ordering principles, believing that the Sun, Moon and planets each emit a unique hum related to their movement in orbit, which in turn impacts on our experience of life on Earth even as we are unaware of it.
Human-made music, Pythagoras thought, was a sort of approximation of the Music of the Spheres and also an audible manifestation of number – number being that which defines the universe and everything within it. The idea of music as an expression of the universal was a potent one, prompting Plato to observe that ‘rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful’.
In the 6th century CE, the philosopher Boethius arrived at three classifications of music in his De Musica. The first of these was the Music of the Spheres, the second the harmonious internal music of the human body, and third the music of singers and instruments. Music, he said, is ‘so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired.’ His ideas proved influential through to the Renaissance and beyond. Even now, there is a sense that what makes great music so profoundly affecting cannot be decoded and replicated, since it is hardwired into something elusively fundamental. Arthur Schopenhauer put it in these terms: ‘The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.’