Harmony of the Spheres

The doctrine of the harmony of the spheres holds that the heavenly bodies, moving at speeds proportioned to their distances, sound together a vast and perpetual music. The teaching descends from Pythagoras, who alone, tradition says, could hear it; Aristotle reports the school's elegant answer to the obvious objection — we do not perceive the sound precisely because it has rung in our ears from birth, and a noise never absent is never noticed.

Plato set the doctrine at the heart of his cosmology. In the Myth of Er a Siren stands on each whorl of the spindle of Necessity, each uttering one note, and the eight together compose a single harmony; in the Timaeus the Demiurge divides the World Soul itself according to the harmonic ratios, so that the music of the heavens is the audible shadow of the soul that moves them. Philolaus and Archytas worked out the mathematics of consonance that underlies the whole conception.

The image proved imperishable: Cicero's Dream of Scipio carried it to the Latin West, Boethius enshrined it as musica mundana — the music of the world, of which instrumental music is only the lowest echo — and Kepler was still seeking the planets' polyphony in the seventeenth century. To hear with the mind what the ear cannot is, for this whole tradition, the very definition of contemplation.