Excerpts from Mighty Muso - Musings behind Violetta's adventures for adult minds and readers.
So you probably already know, but Pythagorus and Plato weren't the only 'slashies' interested in the universe's music. There was a man named Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), a German mathematician/astrologist/musician (hence the term), famous in musical circles for his book Musica Universalis (1619). He believed each planet sings a song; they may have even formed their own pop group—The planets. Hang on, there was a pop group called the planets! You may even recognise their music. It is a little spacy, not in a Gustav Holst kind of way; but more like War of the Worlds. (The Planets - Contradanza).
That was a fun musical. I was lucky to play in the Australian tour, many years back in 2007. I met all kinds of cool people, like Lou Reed’s base player and this amazing percussionist who could flick her hair at the same time as playing… but what was I saying?
Oh yes, Kepler.
In L.S. Fauber’s slightly humorous account, Kepler sounded like a bit of an eccentric. He worried his views were a little askew, so he took to looking at the universe through the lens of his bifocals. Unfortunately, his health was quite bad, and in fact, he was almost blind; he had sores on his hands and feet, and as a boy at school he was compared to Faust (who we’ll talk about later). However, he became very interested in Copernicus (1473-1543), originally born Nicolaus Kopernigk from Poland. He was quite keen on God too, so Kepler was determined to become a priest—a priest who loved astronomy. And why not? Ignacio was a Monk with an alter-ego. The luchador, aqua-lycra-wearing wrestler; Nacho Libre. (Nacho Libre (2006) Trailer).
Anyway, Kepler and his cosmos had grand plans. His very first book titled: The Secret of the Universe, was quite ambitious and, like many of us, he had a slight wobble; writing to a friend to ask for help:
“‘You see me get bogged down... I’ve a hopeless lack of Copernican knowledge. I’m eternally grateful for anything you could possibly write. I may start to beg you, if you do not get back to me promptly.”’
Discovering the secret to anything would be unnerving, but the secret to the universe? Well, that’s pretty massive.
It does, however, remind me of a particular phase we went through, perhaps twenty years ago. My father-in-law had just passed away suddenly, and it naturally took some time for my husband to recover. We read all kinds of books, and one of them was The Secret (2006), by Rhonda Burn. It was also a film prior to that, about thoughts changing your life and the law of attraction.
Kepler also went through a number of tragic losses. One of them was his daughter, born with an abscess across her forehead, subsequently dying at thirty-five days old. Just before that, he lost his son. However, at that terrible moment in his life, he was inspired to write another book, describing it to his much loved professor Michael Maestlin: ‘The title is The Harmony of the World. Prickle your ears—eureka.’
It was a theory of harmony, but it was more than that. It was an ‘immense heavenly choir’. Unfortunately, when it was released in 1619, his mother was being trialed for witchcraft.
Really? I know. His life was immensely difficult. His own health was precarious, he’d lost half of his children, his first wife, his country was at war, and now his mother was on trial.
And we think we have it bad.
In the midst of it all, however, he received the spark of an idea. He, like Plato, had a sudden interest in world harmony, noting it was peculiar; ‘that the same thought about harmonic function had turned up in the minds of two men (though lying so far apart in time) who had devoted themselves entirely to contemplating nature.’
Perhaps he was interested in The Secret after all, and maybe there was some mysterious law of attraction that led him in that direction?
When troubled by the world, many of us go in search of harmony. I was only having this revelation last night at a rehearsal. I’d been having a particularly low day (nothing compared to poor Kepler) but I didn’t feel like going. However, once I was there, playing, I felt absorbed by what was happening around me. It was almost as though I was lifted from my troubles by sitting amidst the sound.
Kepler’s pursuit of harmony may have had a similar source when he wrote; ‘I feel carried away and possessed by an unutterable rapture over the divine spectacle of the heavenly harmony.’
Of course, as a priest, he would have been surrounded by sacred music, and music was thought of differently in those days. Not only was it important for worship, it was essential for the soul; and it was closely related to mathematics, science, and architecture. In fact, music was more of a science than an art, and his mysticism led him to link data from the ratios of the planets to a musical cosmos.
Kepler’s third planetary law, ‘somehow hit upon the fact that the square of the period of a planet is in a fixed ratio to the cube of the radius of its orbit.’ He also discovered the distance from the sun was inversely proportional to the speed a planet travels.
He also had a bit of a thing for polygons, and here are some pictures showing what he was up to.
I do like the nice pictures of dodecahedrons—another great word, but the important thing was that they had to be even sided (if you want to know which planet was which shape, check out the notes).
https://galileo.ou.edu/exhibits/harmony-universe
It’s all a little complicated, but Saturn as the slowest moving planet was assigned the lowest note (G in baritone clef) and Mercury being the fastest had the highest (E in treble clef). Although the generally held belief was that there were six planets (‘six’, being the sacred number), Kepler was convinced there were only five. Although, he did think the moon sang too—that’s the hicolocum habet etiam.
I think he was right, although, the list of songs to choose from the Karaoke reel might not have had the same ring in Latin; ‘Hicolocum Habet Etiam River’, ‘Blue Hicolocum Habet Etiam’,’Walking on the Hicolocum Habet Etiam’...
Anyway, Kepler reprinted his Harmonics book in five volumes, and by the time he got to the fourth book, he was quite passionate, writing:
‘Like one who listens to a sweet melodious song, and by the gladness of his countenance, by his voice, and by the beating of his hand or foot attuned to the music, gives token that he perceives and approves the harmony: just so does sublunary nature, with the notable and evident emotion of the bowels of the earth, bear like witness to the same feelings, especially at those times when the rays of the planets form harmonious configurations on the earth.’
He goes on to speak of the influence of the Zodiac on man, the Earth’s soul breathing, and that polyphonic music had finally been discovered by man to ‘taste the pleasure’ and experience ‘the very agreeable feeling of bliss, afforded him by this music in the imitation of God’.
We will explore music in the spiritual sense in part four (I know! There is more!), but Kepler, like the Taoists, Plato and Pythogorus, believed music existed in nature. He believed that harmony is physiological, and that we have a ‘sense’ of it because we are born with it. It existed in the universe first, as we are all part of the same circle—another of his favourite shapes, after the ellipses.
‘What the stick is to oxen, spurs or training to the horse, drum and trumpet to the soldier, a fiery speech to listeners, the rhythm of the flute, bagpipers or fiddle to crowds of peasants, that all the heavenly configuration of suitable planets is, especially if they are together. The individual is driven on in his doing and thinking, the whole becomes more willing to go together and lend each other a helping hand.’
And that, according to Kepler, was the true reason for world harmony.
33. “You see me get bogged down…”Kepler, J. Gesammelte Werke (1940) Comp. Antonio Favaro. Firenze: Barbera, v.13, p. 36 cited in Fauber, L.S. Heaven and Earth(2019) p 87.
33. “The title is…” ibid. V. 14 p. 46, In. 135-40, cited in Fauber (2019) Heaven on Earth p.94.
33. Hoskin, M. Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy (1999), p.110.
34. “That the thought… '' and “I feel carried away…” Caspar, M. Kepler (1959) pp. 266, 267.
35. “Somehow hit upon the fact…” Hoskin. M. The Cambridge Concise History of Astronomy (1999) p.110.
35.“Like one who listens…” Bryant W.W. (1920) Kepler: Pioneers of Progress, Men of Science. Chapter. 5 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12406/12406-h/12406-h.htm
36. “Taste the pleasure…” Caspar. M. (1959) Kepler. P.284.
36. “What the stick is to oxen…” ibid. p.279.
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