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The Scientific Revolution and the Music of the Spheres
The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
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Music is today considered as an aesthetic discipline based on the subjective principles, clearly distinct from science having mathematical rationality. But it was a branch of science and held a place among the quadrivium beside arithmetic, geometry and astronomy until the 17th century of the Scientific Revolution. The connection between music and science forged by the Pythagorean school’s discovery of the relation between the length of a vibrating string and pitch. By extending the discovery to the motions of the celestial bodies, they invented the celebrated doctrine of ‘music of the spheres’. According to this, the velocities at which the planets circle the Earth, as well as the distances from the Earth to them, are in the same ratios as various musical intervals, especially those of the diatonic scale. This musical theorizing which was crystallized in the conception of the music of the spheres was a kind of proto-science, and thus the starting point of cosmology and astronomy as well as music theory. The doctrine of ‘music of the spheres’ has served as a strong impetus for the next generations of scientists in their exploration of the laws governing the universe. The last and the most earnest attempt to find musical harmony in the motions of the heavens was that of Kepler. He believed that the principles governing the motions of the planets could be expressed in the same ratio as found in music. He held firmly the Pythagorean conception of ‘the universe governed by musical harmony’. But he was confronted by a new circumstance in aspect of science and music. He accepted the Copernican heliocentric astronomy, and lived in an age when polyphony was the musical norm, and thus the planetary music must therefore be polyphonic, too. He tried to reconstruct the conception of ‘music of the spheres’ on the basis of musical polyphony and heliocentric astronomy. He compared the angular velocities of the planets based on the heliocentric system, and expressed these ratios as musical intervals in just intonation, not Pythagorean scale, that is, the harmonies which he found are polyphonic.
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