A Pythagorean doctrine postulating harmonious relationships among the planets governed by their proportionate speeds of revolution and by their fixed distance from the earth. Belief in a universe ordered by the same numerical proportions that produce musical harmonies is hinted at in surviving fragments of pre-Socratic Greek philosophers such as Anaximander and Parmenides. The Greeks attributed ideas about a harmonious universe to the ‘Chaldeans’ or Babylonians, from whom Jewish beliefs about an orderly cosmos hymning the praises of its Creator (expressed in the Psalms, the visions of Isaiah and Ezekiel, and the talmudic treatise Yoma) may also have been derived (for further details see Mesopotamia). The relationships of Indian and Chinese cosmologies to those of the ancient Near East have not been determined.
Pythagoras and his followers developed a series of analogies between musical consonances – derived from proportionate lengths of a stretched string – and natural phenomena. In Plato’s Timaeus the creation of the World-Soul, a model for the physical universe, is accomplished through the use of Pythagorean proportions; duple and triple geometric series are filled in with arithmetic and harmonic means, as a result of which one can see ‘the whole heaven to be a scale and a number’ (Aristotle, Metaphysics). The musical scale thus produced is that of Pythagorean tuning, and the World-Soul is created through the use of a kind of celestial monochord.
As described in the Timaeus the cosmic scale is not actual music but the foundation for the Greek science of harmonics. In the myth of Er (Republic, 617b.4–7) Plato described the universe as a set of concentric rings (planetary orbits) on the surface of each of which a Siren sits singing; together they form a harmonious sound, after Plato’s time interpreted literally as the music of the spheres – audible to but unnoticed by mortals who hear it from birth (see Plato, §2).
The influence of these two Platonic myths was great and long-lasting despite Aristotle’s rejection of a sonorous universe in favour of his own silent, frictionless spheres (On the Heavens, ii.9; see Aristotle, §2). In Neoplatonic commentaries, particularly those on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis (itself derived from the myth of Er), the planetary harmony of the Sirens was conflated with the Timaeus scale. Aristides Quintilianus extended cosmic harmony to include the sublunary elements (fire, air, water and earth), the seasons, the tides, the growth of plants, and – as a microcosmic mirror of the universe – man’s growth and behaviour. Ptolemy in his Harmonics distinguished between cosmic and psychic harmony; these categories became, in the Latin of Boethius, musica mundana and humana, to which was added the music played and sung by men (musica instrumentalis). The place of music in the medieval Quadrivium is a result of the central importance of neo-Pythagorean thought in late antiquity.
Jewish belief in angelic habitation of the universe, coloured by Gnostic angelology and given canonic standing in the 6th-century Dionysian hierarchies of angels (see Jewish music), led to a belief in musica celestis, the angelic music seen in countless medieval and Renaissance paintings and combined with musica mundana in the blazing vision of light and sound of Dante’s Paradiso.
Pythagorean ideas about cosmic harmony continued to be elaborated by Neoplatonists from Carolingian times until the end of the Renaissance. These ideas strongly influenced astronomers and astrologers, physicians, architects, humanist scholars and poets. There were occasional musical representations of planetary harmony; an example is the tableau L’armonia delle sfere designed for the Florentine intermedi of 1589.
Perhaps the last creative statement of the idea of the music of the spheres was made by Kepler (Harmonices mundi, 1619); but cosmic imagery of Pythagorean cast has persisted in the work of later philosophers (Leibniz, Schopenhauer), astronomers (J.E. Bode) and polymaths (Mersenne, Kircher). There are 20th-century writers such as Hans Kayser who might be called neo-Pythagoreans, and 20th-century musicians such as Hindemith for whom the music of the spheres has remained a vital if metaphorical concept.
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JAMES HAAR