Music of the Spheres

I live in a remote part of New Mexico, and the night skies are truly stunning here this winter. One night this past week I awoke to a bright glow building in my bedroom. Turned out, It was the moon reflecting off snow in the clear night air. Our skies are truly magical, as this video demonstrates. And it makes me feel more connected to Beethoven, knowing that he too was inspired by the sky at night.

The first time I heard the phrase “music of the spheres” I was a young philosophy student learning about that mathematical and philosophical genius, Pythagoras. What a satisfying thought, that the planets and stars and moons all have their own musical hum across the universe, and together they make one massive composition of harmony and beauty. Just as each note has its own vibration and numerical identity, so goes all of creation.

Whether this whimsical idea is factual or not is not relevant to this topical exploration. Imagine for a moment that this is reality, and that the entire cosmos is singing in a beautiful harmony. What would it sound like? Well, to Beethoven, it sounded like his String Quartet No. 8 Opus 59 No. 2 – (2) Molto adagio. One of his students famously claimed that Beethoven said he composed this section “when contemplating the starry sky and thinking about the music of the spheres.” Here is a lovely video with ancient astronomical images to partner with the music.

As I listen it sounds like slow, peaceful awakening to the beauty of the night sky. An unfolding, with a slow clock-like rhythm. Listen! The birds have stilled their singing. Look at the orange glow on the western horizon. Look, there is Venus shining, while the stars are slowly building themselves. They glow brighter and brighter, and then the Milky Way in its vastness grows overhead. Shooting stars and satellites. Simply life beyond our daily daytime experiences. The music of the spheres.

For a suitable poem, I was drawn to a piece by someone not known for his poetry, Carl Sagan. When one is deeply moved, art is often the response. Carl Sagan was a scientist who was passionate about the universe, and upon seeing an image of the earth transmitted from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft as a tiny blue dot among many stars, he penned this piece. To me, it is a prose poem. Here is the image that moved him so. Earth is in the upper portion of that ray of sunlight.

From “Pale Blue Dot”

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves…

… There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Contemplating big things is humbling. I am grateful for the brave contemplation of Pythagoras, the vivid interpretation of Beethoven, and the sensitivity to humanity while fully immersed in the cosmos, of Carl Sagan. And I am so thankful for your spending a few minutes with me today, and for reading The Tone Poet.