Music of the Spheres, part 2
Nature & Cosmos
In her book Earth’s Wild Music, Kathleen Dean Moore goes hiking with Gordon Hempton who has been searching the world for places where there is one square inch where you can stand and not hear any human-created noise for fifteen minutes. Doesn’t seem like it should be too difficult, does it? But, according to Hempton, in order for that one square inch to exist you need one thousand square miles of wilderness in every direction. The birds, for example, call out in the forest for many reasons: to find mates, to warn of danger, because they are birds. When their songs are drowned out by the sounds of civilization (planes overhead, traffic, construction, and so on) they can’t find each other, they can’t warn each other, it becomes very difficult to be birds. The same goes for whales in the ocean, singing their increasingly complex songs over years to each other, now competing with the incessant booming of sonar. This is one unsung (forgive me) part of habitat destruction - the destruction of a natural quiet, or maybe more accurately, a soundscape where danger and love can both be discerned by its inhabitants.1
The lyrebird of Australia has an uncanny ability to imitate the sounds it hears in the forest, which it has adapted to do in order to attract mates. In a poetry seminar, poet and professor Joyelle McSweeney played us a video of the bird’s incredible talent for mimicry. The bird perfectly imitates camera shutters, a car alarm, and then it begins to sing the sounds of chainsaws, cutting down trees in the forest where it lives. The biggest existential threat the lyrebird faces as a species is habitat destruction because it lives in very specific kinds of ecosystems that are being destroyed as human development expands. The lyrebird sings the song of its own destruction, Joyelle said, and so, too, do we. It is something I have never been able to stop thinking about.
This is something that Indigenous people around the world can teach us: the sounds, the orchestration if you will, of their environments. There are traditions of listening, traditions of attuning so deeply to sound that it becomes possible to discern the difference between what a maple tree sounds like and what an oak tree sounds like. Traditions like those of the Walpiri of tribe of Australia, who can identify different plants by their songs.2 This seems like an incredible superpower to me - it requires time and attention, and an unbroken tradition from which being able to deeply hear the landscape was necessary for survival. “Music is the trembling urgency and exuberance of life ongoing. Truly, if we can’t save the songs, can we save ourselves? In a time of terrible silencing, what can we hear if we listen carefully, and what can Earth’s wild music tell us about how we ought to live?” asks Kathleen Dean Moore.
Josh Schrei says, “We sing in a world that sings, and in singing together become instruments for the Great Song.”3 As we sing of our own destruction, what if - on the deepest level imaginable - every song were also a praise song? Even the most heart-rending ones. What would that feel like and what would shift if that were true?
The ideas that are the most appealing to me are the ones that are first seen in ancient religious traditions around the world and which are being confirmed with increasing clarity by scientists. One such idea is that the universe is entirely composed, at every level, of sonic resonances which harmonize with each other as they sing themselves into being - whether it’s DNA or the choir singing from the depths of a black hole. We see it in ancient ideas from the Indian subcontinent like the Nada Brahma, the transcendental or cosmic sound, the sonic vibrations that are the building blocks of the universe.4 By uniting the sounds of the inner and outer world, the listener can disappear completely. We see a reverberation of it at the beginning of the Old Testament: in the beginning was the Word and the Word was God. What if that Word was actually sung instead of spoken, is still being sung all of the time?5
In the sixth century BCE Pythagoras theorized his famous “music of the spheres” - the idea that each planet hummed a specific tone, and that all of the tones together played a harmonic chord. If you add in the music of the stars you’ve got the cosmic song, reverberating throughout the universe. Thousands of years later, cosmologists (the physicists who work to discover the material and nature of the universe from the Big Bang onward) have found that he was absolutely right about the music, even if he couldn’t have known the finer points of things like gravity. The sonic vibrations of the Nada Brahma, the fabric of the universe, are affirmed by the Quantum Field Theory textbook whose preface begins: “Quantum field theory, the unification between special relativity and quantum mechanics, states that all matter and its interactions are composed of harmonious vibrations of fields. One is left with the vision that the entire universe is a symphonic orchestra of these fields.”6
I have never stopped thinking about this one party at my college apartment, drinking 40s of malt liquor in the carpeted kitchen I’m sure, Ally asked an atheist friend, “Okay, you may not believe in the Christian God, but do you believe that there is a governing principle to the universe?” (This was what our parties were like.) “It could be a math equation or, I don’t know, corn dogs, anything - but is there a governing principle to the universe?” And that phrase has been stuck in my head all those years, a space opened up by the question that I was not been able to fill with any conviction for a long time, despite many years of searching, practicing, meditating in a variety of religious and spiritual traditions.
At this point in my life I just call myself, broadly, an animist. I believe that the world is alive, everything in the universe is alive, pulsing with life. And it seems so obvious to me now that the key to that aliveness is music; that music is the governing principle. It is vibration, it is resonance, it is harmonics. We know that there is a harmonic ratio that creates a chord played by colliding black holes galaxies away, the planets in our solar system, a harmonic ratio playing in our bodies through our DNA, a harmonic ratio that the leaves of plants sing as they unfurl. Music is what alives all of it, all of us. “We now, for the first time in history, have a candidate for the mind of God,” says cosmologist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander. “It’s cosmic music.”7
Flashing back again to poetry school, where I took a seminar called Poetry of the Occult with poet and professor DA Powell, which we all just referred to as Magic Class (this is what poetry school was like). We performed seances in class and for homework, went to the statue of the famous and allegedly cursed Black Angel in the local cemetery, read poems channeled by poets from somewhere else. In the class on Emissaries, Doug gave us the homework assignment to “dance to the music of the spheres. Dance until you can’t dance anymore, and then write until you can’t write anymore. Rinse and repeat.” And there was a party thrown that weekend like the town had never seen.
But I wonder what it would be like to attempt a subtler version of completing that assignment now. Standing ankle-deep in the flooded river near my house, listening to the high-pitched component of the song of the black hole that is the same pitch as my tinnitus,8 but many multitudes of octaves higher. Or noticing how two young deer galloping away from me at the nature preserve sync up perfectly to the 90s r&b song I happen to be listening to in my headphones at that moment. Listening intently for however long it takes, beyond the songs of the sycamores and the red squirrels and the freshwater mussels, until the vibrations become discernible and they move the dance through me. What if we tried that?
May every song, every vibration, be one of praise, even if we sing our own destruction and maybe, as Kathleen Moore Dean says, “We Will Emerge Full-Throated from the Dark Shelter of Our Despair.”9
If you made it to the end of this missive you are officially a real one and so I have a present for you - I made you a playlist! The Spotify daylist algorithms are fun and funny but I miss when we all used to burn mix CDs for each other that would get scratched up in the car or live in a CD binder (I was never organized enough for the latter). Apropos of the theme of this newsletter, the playlist has been curated entirely by ~*vibes, man~*. And a little bit of silliness. I hope you like it. Thanks for being here.
Leave No Trace recently put out Soundscape Guidelines as a result of research about this, which you can read here: https://lnt.org/research-resources/soundscape-guidelines/
Music: a Subversive History by Ted Gioia, 2019
Again, big thanks to Josh Schrei for the way he has influenced my thinking about sound and music, specifically the episode "All My Lessons Come in the Form of a Sound” of his podcast The Emerald, the beginning of which I can’t recommend more if you’re interested in these ideas.
According to Joachim-Ernst Berendt, in The World is Sound, Nada Brahma: Music and the Landscape of Consciousness (1991), Nada Brahma is often ‘understood as the primal creative word, source of the world and sacred knowledge…It is one with man’s inner consciousness’ . He concludes, ‘Nada Brahma means [therefore] sound is god. Or, vice versa...God is sound’.
If you are, like me, the kind of nerd who has read The Silmarillion, you may think of Tolkien’s description of the world being sung into being by Eru and the Ainur to be a particularly evocative example of this idea.
from The Physics of Jazz by Stephon Alexander, 2016. Lots of equations that were beyond my comprehension in this book but I still highly, highly recommend if you’re at all interested in this topic.
Ibid.
I have decided this based entirely on feeling.
From Earth’s Wild Music by Kathleen Dean Moore, 2021