In Our Time - The Music of the Spheres

Episode Date: June 19, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the music of the spheres, the elegant and poetic idea that the revolution of the planets generates a celestial harmony of profound and transcendent beauty. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice the young Lorenzo woos his sweetheart with talk of the stars: “There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’stBut in his motion like an angel sings,Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;Such harmony is in immortal souls;But whilst this muddy vesture of decayDoth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.”The idea of music of the spheres ran through late antiquity and the medieval period into the Renaissance and its echoes could be heard in astrology and astronomy, in theology, and, of course, in music itself. Influenced by Pythagoras and Plato, it was discussed by Cicero, Boethius, Marcello Ficino and Johannes Kepler It affords us a glimpse into minds for which the universe was full of meaning, of strange correspondences and grand harmonies.With Peter Forshaw, Postdoctoral Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London; Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford and Angela Voss, Director of the Cultural Study of Cosmology and Divination at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

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or wherever you get your pods. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the young Lorenzo wooed his sweetheart with talk of the stars. There's not the smallest orb which thou beholds,

but in his motion like an angel, sings, still quiring to the young-eyed cherubines. Such harmony is in immortal souls. This is the music of the spheres, the idea that the stars and planets as they travel through space make beautiful music together. The music of the spheres

played out of the ancient classical world through the medieval period and into the Renaissance. It affords us a glimpse into minds for whom the universe is full of meaning of strange correspondences and grand harmonies. With me to discuss the music of the spheres at Jim Bennett,

director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford, Peter Forshaw, postdoctoral fellow at Birkbeck University of London, and Angela Voss, director of the cultural study of cosmology and divination at the University of Kent Canterbury. Peter Forshaw, the starting point for all this is the Greek philosopher Pythagoras in the 6th century BC, who spotted a relationship between mathematics and music. Can you explain how he is said to have arrived at that?

Yeah, the story goes that Pythagoras one day was wondering how he could discover something useful for already something existed, the straight age existed for the eye. He wanted to discover some sort of instrument that was useful for the ear. And basically, he was walking past a blacksmith shop or a smithy, and he heard the clanging of hammers on the anvil. Suddenly he realized, ah, the gods have given me a clue.

He went inside, listened to the hammers, and recognised some consonants between the sounds. The story goes that he weighs these hammers and discovers that it's something to do with the weight of the hammer that is responsible for the sound. He goes home and stretches gut strings from a rod adds weights to the bottom of them and then plucks these strings and experiments.

And through that, we are led to believe, he discovers the basic consonances of the octave, the perfect fifth and the fourth, and the fourth of music. And the idea, the notion that music has a mathematical foundation to it. And so the idea that musical has a mathematical foundation to it is the sum of that, whether he arrived at that by this folk myth, which could be true, or whether it didn't, it's slightly beside the point.

I mean, he arrived there at that notion. Had it been hinted out in Babylonia or Egyptian ideas before then? You'd always got a mathematical basis to, for example, astronomy and astrology. And these are areas that Pythagoras is tapping into really with his work because what he does is he extrapolates from the fact that mathematics

is a basis for music to the idea that there are underlying harmonies in everything, both the microcosm man and the macrocosm. And particularly takes it from this idea of music with hammers and anvils to the idea that there is an underlying harmony astronomically and astrologically

through the heavens. As I understand it, it takes the idea of what is discovered mathematically into music, takes him into the spheres and takes him back into the way the human soul operates. So he has, as it were, the whole thing comes out of this mathematical discovery of the correlation between. And in doing so, he discovers the diatonic scale, which is the basis of Western music, Doremi Faso, I T. Yes, yes. That's right, is it? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, in fact, some of his biographers say he, He goes from the diatonic scale to chromatic scales and harmonic scales as well. So it develops through the whole tonal series. But one of the most significant things in Pythagorean philosophy is this idea of a tetractus, which is a triangle of ten dots, one dot at the top to four at the base. And that is the symbol of everything in many ways for Pythagoras. For a start, 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4 equals 10, which is the perfect number. but also the ratio is 1 to 2 is the ratio of the octave in the lens of strings.

2 to 3 is the ratio of the perfect 5th and 3 to 4 is the ratio of the perfect 4th. So number for Pythagorean is the principle, the source, the root of all things. Can you explain how Pythagoras envisaged the harmoniousness of the universe? He has, this is slightly difficult. He has this idea that there is, okay, a set of nested spheres. You've got the Earth at the center, and then you've got the seven planets of the traditional cosmos, go from moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,

and then you've got the fixed stars, which is where the zodiac is. And each of these has its own different tonal sequence. Of course, there's also the problem, as people who study Copernicus know, that there's the possibility that actually the earth is not the only model as the stable earth at the centre. You've got a fire at the centre, and then the earth and the counter-earth that Aristotle discusses in his metaphysics to do with Pythagoras.

Let's come back to this notion of spheres. I think we're getting there, Jim. We're not quite where I want to be at this stage, but we're getting there. Implicit in this Greek idea, let's say it is Pythagos, and he's got his mathematics, and he's discovered this musical relationship between mathematics and music,

and then he takes it out there. Now, he's helped by a coincidental development, as I understand was almost entangering, the development of the idea of the sphere. Is that right? And if that's right, what did that help him? How did that help him? There's a certain coincidence there, but the Pythagorean's also arrived at the conclusion that the earth itself is a sphere.

So if you think of the geographical earth as spherical, then it's natural to imagine how the geometry of the heavens relates to this ship. That's a consequential question, if you like. so it's not entirely coincidental. And there are two ways of thinking about how the heavens come to be spherical. It might be a matter of principle or it might be a matter of practice, let's say. Most, I think, historians of science would probably think it's, well, it's principle. Plato comes along and says, well, the sphere is the most perfect geometrical form.

So therefore it's suited, uniquely suited, to the spherical heavens. or you might think of it more as a practical matter. That's to say, society is organized often in relation to motions in the heavens. So many of the things that we do and organize in civic society and religious society depend on motions that we observe. And the agriculture does. Exactly. The agricultural year, the seasonal year depends on the position of the sun in the heavens, in the heavenly sphere and so on. So we begin to observe that and regulate our lives in relation to that. And we might even begin to measure it.

And if we start to measure it, then we think about an. arc of motion. And as we measure the motion along this arc and the arcs might be the motion of the sun, the circle that the sun makes in the, at the equinox, the equator, it might be the topic of cancer, the

circle that the sun makes in the day during the summer solstice and so on. And then we think particularly about the ecliptic Peter mentioned the zodiacal signs. So the circle, in other words, that the sun makes in its annual path through the celestial sphere.

And astronomers rationalize that system of circles into, in fact, into an instrument that they call the armillary sphere. So there are a set of circles that are made in brass. And in Renaissance paintings and medieval paintings, if you don't say someone's an astronomer, you give them an armillary sphere to hold, which is a sphere made of circles. And that can be rationalized into a single sphere. And in this in-practice story, which seems to be more plausible, frankly, the philosopher comes along later on. and with a sort of after the fact rationalisation of the sphere being the perfect geometrical form suited to the heavens. But however we get there, whether it's in principle or in practice, the celestial sphere, the idea that the heavenly bodies that we see at night are all on a single sphere

and we sit at the centre of that is absolutely fundamental to traditional astronomy. And the clusters of crystal around what we would call the planets are supposedly perhaps the thing which makes the sound as they move. and each at cluster, you're half nodding, so if I'm not, let's put me right. It makes a sound, and these sounds add up to the diatonic scale. I'm not so sure about that, but from astronomical point of view, of course, the story that I told you about a single sphere isn't going to do the business, because it isn't that the great majority of objects in the sky are indeed all moving around together,

but there are these funny things that aren't behaving themselves sensibly and properly and regularly. the fixed stars are all keeping the same orientation with respect to each other as they turn around once a day. But these other things, these wandering stars are planets and in this system, the moon's one of those and the sun's one of those, as well as Mercury and Venus and Saturn and so on. They partake of this motion once a day, but they're also moving in this counter motion,

not from east to west but west to east. And on top of that, they have these funny idiosyncrasies. So you need more spheres in order to cope with, Udoxas said they were 27. Well, Udoxas has an interesting system where he has usually four spheres for each planet and how that adds up depends on how you count them.

But essentially he has a very flexible system where the spheres that are associated with individual planets turn at different speeds and in different orientations and so on. Very complicated. Yeah, I want it to be a simple at this moment. So Angela Voss, will you nail for the listeners who have had a lot of information which they have patiently listened to,

all of which they've enjoyed because of its erudition. Will you say what Pythagoras and those forth thought the music of the spheres was, how was it produced? Okay, well, I think there are two strands here. First of all, this is the mystical visionary strand. I mean, Pythagoras is obviously a mystic of some sort, who was a visionary. He had the kind of experience in which he heard in some inner way this music,

and in fact he believed that he was the only one who heard it, and then he had to convey it to his disciples through earthly music, which couldn't really quite get there. Where's it coming from? Well, this is a very good question, and I think we have to, this is one of the big questions to ask, is how we differentiate between theoretical measurements of planets and velocities and movements and actually hearing.

We're using the phrase of the spheres to discuss, that's a catch-all-hole or something. I still think we haven't actually said to people, where is this music coming from? Okay, well, I think it's coming from two places. Right. And I think to look at that, we have to look back to the... Or said to it's coming from.

Yes. I think there's a kind of perhaps more spiritual mode of understanding it, and then there's a scientific mathematical mode. But coming up through Plato, we find the Pygothoian ideas presented quite poetically. And in Plato's dialogues, whenever he wants to express some kind of metaphysical truth, he'll usually do it through a poetic image, a narrative of some sort. So when he talks about the music of the spheres, we are given this, beautiful story and image of the cosmos singing

which takes us straight to the heart of the imaginal cosmos, the cosmos of the imagination, and the story which I will briefly tell of the myth of air really gives us the idea that only when the soul leaves its body, can it really hear this music,

the true music. Shall I tell the myth of air? No, I think we're just, he explained it in the myth about hearing the sirens singing on the planet. Each siren had a single note and each are different notes and together they made the diatonic scale. Yes, so the planets are actually represented by beautiful women,

seductresses who sing this beautiful music and make up a scale, which in Greek is called harmony, but not harmony as we know it. Harmony is fitting notes together in a scale to make up a sequence. So we are aware we are. I'd just answer one more question, unless you want to sort of clarify this even climate. I just wanted to say that I think part of your frustration is

that this notion of harmony is more general than music, so it feeds into a sense. astronomy in the sense that there is a system, there's a structure, it is a cosmos, things are related to each other. So the harmony isn't necessarily in every sphere of its appearance musical. It can be something to do with relationship and a coherence and design and so on. So the astronomers tend to use it in that more metaphorical sense. We're looking for design and structure and relationship and harmony, but it isn't necessarily something you can listen to. Well, that's what I wanted to ask you next, Andrew.

Who is listening to this? So we've had this myth in Plato. This man is resurrected. He said, I've been to another life, seen the planets. I've seen the sirens on the planets. Each one has a different note, and that's what the music comes from. But he's heard it because he's being dead and come alive again. Nobody else can hear it save Pythagoras.

So what did they do about that? And yet people are talking about it and saying it is there. Yes, and there are various theories about why other people can't hear it. some theories are that it's so loud that it's just beyond our capability of hearing. Other theories are that it's actually been in our ears since birth, so we're so familiar with it. We can't actually differentiate it.

But, well, yes, I think that there really is a sort of hidden dimension to this music which is perceived by the mind, as you two were saying, and then the audible version of it, we start to get a bit hazy. How do you actually hear it? Do you actually hear a planet moving around and creating some of a note? Do you actually create notes on musical instruments which will somehow correspond to these planets?

And here we have like a symbolic, metaphorical way of listening to it, which I think is the way that musicians began to work with the disc. I think so we've sort of got some grasp of Pythagrhus and Plato. How did Ptolemy take this on, Peter Fawc. How did Ptolemy take it on? Yep, that's a question. Second century ADA. Yes. Yeah.

Tolemy, well, I'll leave the more technical. a cowardly way to Jim in Tonomies harmonics. But in book three he takes it on an interesting way that he uses harmony as a metaphor for various psychic states. So first of all he's introduced

very much the astronomy, which I hope Jim is going to go lose his day. But on the more metaphorical level, he, for example, equates the harmony's existence in the macrocosm in the greater universe with the microcosm man. One, for

example, he has a harmony of the power of thought, where just as you've got seven planets, so you have seven states of thought, which are, well, for example, imagination, understanding, reflection, meditation, opinion, reason, and then knowledge, for example. And he draws parallels between these. He has another set of seven for reasons specifically, and so on and so forth. So then you've got this idea that here you've got a hard science astronomer on one level, but he's also incorporating the more religious tones to it, which is very much part of Pythagoreanism. You can't separate Pythagoras as natural philosopher from him as metaphysician.

Yes, I think one thing we need to point out is that for these early thinkers, science and religion were not separate. The spiritual perception of the archetypal perception, if you like, of the cosmos was the scientific one. And it's only since the Enlightenment these two things have become separated into different strands. Can you take us into the Ptolemaic world? Yes, as Peter says, Ptolemy is a man of different levels and different interests and so on, and he doesn't necessarily bring them all together into a coherent whole.

And the Ptolemy that I work with, so to speak, as a historian of astronomy, is much more of a pragmatist. And he is a problem for this idea of harmony in the heavens for the astronomers, because what he wants to do is to produce a system that will predict, because he's an astrologer as well. He needs to really know where the planets are and where they have been and where they are going to be. So he needs a system that works.

And frankly, that you doxin spheres, that's all very well to sit around and think about it. But it isn't going to really help you if you want to know where the pollinants are going to be. You need a much more flexible system. And you need a fudge. Ptolemy is quite prepared to fudge all this harmony and structure and so on. In order to get the movement of the stars accurate.

Exactly. So he moves away from spheres, frankly, I'm sorry. And he moves to circles because they're much more flexible. And he has circles, planets turning around on circles, and then he has little circles on top of those circles which themselves turn, little epicycles which produce even more complicated motions. And worst of all, he has the circles not turning uniformly.

He has this dreadful thing called the equant point, and I won't labour it, but essentially the planetary circle is turning about a point which isn't uniformly about a point which isn't at the centre of the circle, which is a geometrical device for making it turn non-uniformly. And that is unharmonious in the platonic sense, but it's required as a pragmatic astronomer to get the planets, your predictive vehicle, to tell you where the planets are

and to do that accurately. So Ptolemy's a pragmatist. He works in practice in his mathematical astronomy, and frankly he presents a number of problems to the people who are looking for ultimate design in the cosmos. Because he complicates it simply because of his observation, not simply, because of his observations, because he was looking for a different sort of accuracy.

Exactly. Angela Vos, I'm sorry to move on, but we are moving on. Beothius in the 6th century, he brought it back to music, didn't he, talked about the three different divisions in music. That's right, yes. Boefeus was the chief transmitter of Pythagorean harmonic theory to the West in Latin, and his treatise of music was influential the next thousand years, in fact. And he is a music theorist.

He's much more interested. in the actual kind of theoretical, harmonic appreciation, intellectual understanding of these ratios, and instrumental music. And he divided music into three types, musica instrumentalis, musica humana, and musica mundana, the music of instruments and voices, music of the human being, and the music of the spheres,

following Pythagoras, who did this too. And, yes, the early medieval and medieval theorists were much more interested in real music, being the intellectually appreciative music. So to actually play an instrument, was the kind of lowest of the low in a way. And this changed in renaissance, and we had music coming back as being more important.

So, yes, music instrumentalis, the sounds of music, the sounds of voices, musica humana, how the soul mingled with the body, how you deal with humours, psychological temperaments, how you balance the body in the platonic sense, how you straighten it out after its turbulence of being incarnated. That's all musica humana. And then musica mundana, the perfect model,

how you can actually bring that human music, into alignment with the perfect model. So it does become like a sort of three-tiered system of working. I think one of the reasons that my questions might seem a bit crude and I accept that is because perhaps I'm going for the wrong sort of thing in the sense that we're looking, brought up in ages of specialisation, increasing specialisation. I'm not taking account of the fact that at that time things were not mixed up, but they were part of a whole, weren't you?

You're talking about music, mathematics, mathematics, spirituality and so. As you said earlier, they don't think in terms of divisions, if you said one thing, or they wouldn't, people then would not know what you were talking about. Right, can you develop that, Peter? Ooh, yes. One thing I should say with Boethius is that he also transmits a lot of the received law. For example, you get, with Boetheus and then people who are later in the Middle Ages,

they pass on, for example, the ideas of Cicero, who also wrote a republic, influenced by Plato. And again, in that has a dream of Scipio at the end of it, where he's, Scipio has a dream. He again hears about the music of the spheres. And there, just sort of returning to this audibility. He, for example, is one of the people who mentions that he can hear it. He says, what is this agreeable sound that I can hear? So there we get a sort of concrete instance of someone who's suggesting that you can hear the music.

And actually, it made me think when Jim was talking about Ptolemy, a contemporary of Ptolemy, Nikarmachus, who wrote a manual of harmonics, talks about the whistling of the planets in the spheres, even if it sounds a bit like steamboat, Willie and Mickey Mouse to me, but nevertheless, this splits that you've got people who are actually suggesting that there are

real musical consonances. I mean, Boethius talks about this. He has musical tones assigned to each of them. I was just going to say that. But then also you get these arguments of which is the high note, which is the low note we haven't touched on. And this

Perhaps in... Why does that... Can we move over to the gym from the high note and the long note? The high note and the low note. This is where... You don't talk about that. Well, in astronomy, that doesn't really figure. So it doesn't... But what I did want to say about your idea of coherence in learning

is that it's due to behetheus that we have this division of mathematics into arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. and that becomes part of many people's lives by being taken up in the medieval university curriculum so that those four aspects that we might think would be quite separate in fact are part of the quadrivium course that you do after the trivium in the medieval university syllabus so the idea that music and geometry and astronomy

are related to each other through this overarching idea of harmony and structure and design are just part of the educated person's take on things. When you tell us, I interrupted you. I thought Jim wanted to answer. Remember what I thought. You're going to tell us about the different sounds. Okay, that's because I was being long-weeded.

Basically, the question of, for example, where is the high note, where is the low note? Cicero, for example, suggests that the high note is the fixed stars, the sphere for the furthest away from the earth, and that the low note is the moon. and he says because the fixed stars must be to get back to the same place the following day, they must be moving at a hell of a rate. And because they're moving at a very high speed,

around the earth, we're still talking about around the earth. It's a geocentric perspective. So it must be a high note. Others have exactly the opposite of that. I mean, John Scota Theriogena says exactly the opposite. He said the outer spheres, because they're farther away, are the low notes, and the moon is the high note. And this gets taken up by, for example, people like a gripper in the 16th century.

I'm leaping a bit here. Well, I don't want you to leap yet. Okay. Just finish the gripper, and I want to go back a bit. Because he talks about harmony in his books on a cult philosophy, where he equates different qualities to the planets, which are associated with their tones. For example, Saturn is slow and morose, whereas something like Jupiter is, which is slightly closer to. to Earth is more stately and so forth.

The sun is quite majestic in its tones and has a sweeter tone. And so musical tone and quality that affects human life astrologically are related conceptually. Angela, this wonderful thing called the Islamic School of Musical and Astrological Therapy. We can't pass it by, although it's not quite about the main story we're telling this morning, but we have to touch on it because as in many, many, many areas, the, let's call me, the Arabic scholars took up the running. Yes, yes.

Well, in fact, the Arabic scholars took the neoplatonic and hermetic traditions of these symbolic correspondences, the Pythagorean working with them in some way, therapeutic way, took them, and they were really like the stepping stone between the Alexandrian hermeticists and the Renaissance. So, yes, they actually devised all sorts of methods of bringing together medicine, music, astrology, healing, herbal medicine, all these things.

And these texts were then gradually translated in the Middle Ages and brought through into the Renaissance and informs the hotch-potch, the melee of texts, traditions available in the Renaissance. So, yes, they're very important in that respect. As a Jim, Jim Bennett, there's a historian of astronomy. Do you find any value? I mean, there are obviously of intellectual importance,

and we're always talking about brilliant people who, with the available instruments, literally, and the available store of knowledge were making magnificent, often imaginative guesses, but sometimes wonderful and sometimes they come back to haunt us because they're so plausible. So that's not they're ignorant and we're not far from it. But what do you find of these attempts to bring the cosmos together in musical terms?

What do you think of them, sorry, of these attempts? Well, in astronomy, I don't think they have, until we get to Kepler, and I know that's later in the programs, that's further down the line, But until Kepler, I don't think the idea of musical notation actually gets cashed out into hard astronomy. But there is that more general notion of harmony and relationship. I mean, if I'm allowed to talk about Copernicus at this stage, for instance,

Copernicus is one of those astronomers who are deeply unhappy, deeply unhappy about Ptolemy. He says that Ptolemy is like a sculptor who's taken a head from one model and an arm from another and a leg, from someone else and ends up making a monster. So for him, Toméyak astronomy is a monstrous creation because there's no harmony, there's no relationship in it. And what he wants to do is to get back to that platonic idea

of relationship, cosmos, unity and harmony. So again, it's the metaphorical sense of a musical informing of the cosmos rather than a direct use of musical notations. I think if we're talking, one thing if we're talking about astronomy, I mean, you can't divorce it from astrology in the Middle Ages. One thing that Angela touched on, really, astrology is used by physicians who are healing. And really the link with the music of music anyway

and music of the spheres tangentially goes right back to Pythagoras. I mean, the story, one of the stories there is that he comes across a youth, a Taorminian youth who's drunk, who's jealous of girlfriend, who's in the house of someone else, is threatening to burn down the house. and he's been inflamed by hearing a Phrygian melody, a tune in a Phrygian mode. And Pythagoras suggests play a different modal tune

related to a different planetary sphere, and that will calm him down. And lo and behold, it does calm him down. So that brings in this idea of musical spheres as having beneficial qualities for calming the human soul in a way. and medical ramifications. In the 15th century, Angela Voss, this became increasingly complicated,

I mean there are eight modes or scales of medieval church music, for instance. Can you develop that a little? Yes. Well, what happened in the Renaissance was that we began to have the practising sort of philosopher Magi who wanted to find a way

in which he could actually read, he or she could recreate the music of the spheres in some way for healing in true Pythagorean fashion. And theorists began to find that just having single notes for planets or single pitches or this theoretical advice that they had from treaties wasn't enough. How could you compose a piece of music that would actually have an effect?

So they, in 1484, for example, Ramos de Pereja, who was the first one to do this, devised a system whereby each planet related to a musical mode. And these were actually the eight medieval church modes given Greek names. So it's a sort of mishmash of traditions here. And if you think of the white notes on a piano, without playing out, any accidentals, you know, you've got seven different scales with different combinations of tones and semi-tones. And these different combinations were found

to have very subtle effects, different effects. We now just have major and minor as our two modes, and we all know they have different effects, sad and happy. We'll imagine having seven of those, all with different effects. So we've lost quite a lot there. We have lost a tremendous amount with our... Can you give listeners some idea of the modes we have lost? Because we always think we've advanced, don't we?

We seem to have lost quite a lot here. Well, what we have basically is the mode on C and the mode on A, the major scale on C and the mode on A, but all the other ones too. So, for example, the mode on B, which would be the hyperfrigion mode, according to the 15th century theories, has a very strange sound because you have a diminished fifth between B and F. You don't have a perfect fifth. And they associated that with the planet Mercury,

which is very interesting, a sort of very mercurial, sort of otherworldly kind of feel to it. And similarly, the other modes, the Dorian Mode Ande does have a very stately grand feeling to it. And they took this up in the Renaissance, and Marcellio Ficino, who was obviously working with this system, developed a very complex, an interesting astrological kind of music therapy in which he would use the modes to relate to the different planets

in order to bring influence to somebody. Marcelio Ficino's an extraordinary man, extraordinary translator, polymath, a musician himself in the church. of course, in Florence, late 15th century, what did he bring to this discussion, which is about to go through to Copernicus, and change its basic nature,

to this discussion of music and the stars and the influences and interconnections? And we're still talking over an era of massive interconnect in this, aren't we? People are not allowing, not even seeing distinctions. What do Pichino bring? Ficino is really important, because he is the person who translates Plato and brings platonic ideas to the West.

So, for example, the Republic and the myth of Err is one example of that. He also translates a lot of the Neoplatonists who are passing on these ideas about Pythagoras. Ayamblicus, for example, who talks, I mean, he's one of the people who writes a biography of Pythagoras. Plato translates here, and Iamblicus specifically says, Pythagoras extends his ears and hears the sublime harmonies of the heavens. But also, Fichina himself, he's an astrologer, he's a musician, He's a music therapist in very many ways. He's influenced by people like the Arab astronomer Al-Kindi

and brings in his ideas of radiation, either sound radiations or planetary radiations and makes concordances between them. What was Vuccino's theory for the idea that music had power to move the mind? Do you want to say that, Angela? Yeah. Well, he bases his music therapy on a neoplatonic framework. He says that this is platinous.

And one of the things he stresses is this is natural magic. This is all about connecting with natural forces in the cosmos. So we must remember that he was a Christian as well. And this kind of pagan magic didn't sit easily with some of the Christian, condemnations of such practices. Neo-Platonism was quite near Christianity in many ways. Yes, there are many ways in which it did overlap. But when you're talking about invoking planetary demons,

it begins to get into diocese territory and creating talismans and things like that. So he bases it on platinus, And the theory is that the world's soul, which sort of informs the whole creation, sows bates in the world from the divine mind. And these bates can be images, music, plants, colours, anything to do with natural creation. So if you're working with them, you're actually finding a way to tap in through the soul to the divine mind. So in working with music, which he felt was the most powerful way of doing this,

you're actually connecting with a music spirit, which will tap in directly to the world's soul and then directly to the divine mind. So the planet is just an archetype. It's not a physical planet. It's an archetypal property, which is being a pattern, if you like, which is being activated as a symbol, as a metaphor, to enable someone to go through to something deeper.

And that's what he experienced the music doing for himself, his friends, or whatever. I mean, he's influenced by the Orphic Hymns as well. And the sentence is that you can attune yourself to different levels of the, universe, each planetary sphere relates to a different part of the psyche.

The intellect, for example, or the intuition, whatever, and the musician in theory, the practicing musician, and Ficino was one, was trying to attune himself and other people to these different levels. That's very much Fichina. In 1543, Copernicus published

on the revolution over the heavenly spheres and in a way, this was a revolution of 1500, about 2,000 years on, Pythagos, where what we have been talking about and what you've been so generously trying to put into, caught into a symbol of all that was going on because there's mystical, there's magical, there's mathematical,

there's all this. Become something different, something that we in the West now would recognise that's the world we now in habit. Can you tell us what we know, go over what he did and say how that changed matters? Well, Copernicus is certainly influenced

by the kind of things we've just been hearing. He's certainly influenced by a platonic thought. He spends time in Italy, but when he goes back to the colder northern regions where he has to live and make his living, reality is harder. His life as an astronomer is tougher. He has to make these aspirations work in relation to serious astronomical work and empirical astronomical work. In other words, he has to cope with that old Talmeic problem.

This is all very well, but how do we make it work in relation to the motions that we observe? in the heavens. But he's nonetheless very strongly influenced. And as we know, his principal idea for a solution there is to move the earth from the centre of the cosmos, make it a planet, replace it with the sun. And putting the earth out among the planets gives him the possibility of explaining a number of Ptolemaic problems in a more rational way, the retrograde motions of the planets and so on, fall out much more rationally from. his system. He can get rid of that non-uniform motion,

that equant point. He can get rid of that. But what he's particularly pleased about, and this works well in relation to the spheres and the idea of harmony, is that in Ptolemy, you can't calculate the distances of the planets. You can't even put them in an order that you can

be sure about. You put them in an arbitrary order. But once you have the Earth as a planet, you can calculate, by observation and calculation, the relative distances of all the planetary spheres. And what do you find when you do that, absolutely delighted Copernicus, because what he finds is that the innermost spheres are moving more quickly, and as you go out, and there are speeds.

This is not just the period. The speed is less. So they go slower and slower until you get to the fixed stars, which are stationary. And at that point, it's almost an exclamation. There he says you have the harmony of the cosmos. That's where it lies. And he thought he was the first person to see it. this and to imbue that notion of harmonic relationship and cash it out into astronomical terms.

So in a way, although he radically changed what Pythagoras had thought to be the case and what Plato thought to be the case and Cicero and Ficino, though radically changed, he came for conclusion which were not dissatisfied Pythagos idea of celestial harmony. That was the motivation. And that's what gave him most pleasure, I think, in finally nailing down that notion of harmony in the cosmos and making it work astronomically. Peter? I was going to say, I mean, some of this resonates with Pliny, the elder, whose natural history goes back to what, the first, second century AD,

where he talks about the distances of the planets from each other. I mean, he says, for example, from the earth to the moon is 126,000 states, doesn't he? Italian miles. But nevertheless, Copernicus puts it on a far more mathematical basis. Did Kepler, Peter, he was a devotee of Copernicus, the German astronomer, Johannes Kepler. and he's famous for the three laws of planetary motion. But he also was holding on, although they were, like Copernicus,

there were changing things radically. He was holding on or wanting to hold on to the idea of the musical nature of the cosmos. Can you explain how his notions of planetary motion kept the idea of musical harmony alive? Yeah, again, holding on. He was a natural philosopher, he was an astronomer. He was also incredibly devout. So for him, you know, observation of the heavens is observation of God's work and God's harmony at work.

And really, he was looking for mathematical proofs again of the existence of this harmony. And he has various ideas. I mean, some of them he's trying to fit in platonic ideas. In the time a, as we haven't mentioned, I think, this idea of the five platonic solids, the tetrahedron, the cube and so forth. He speculates, oh, well, maybe between Mercury, for example, and Venus, we can put one of these platonic solids. Between Venus and the Sun, we can put another platonic solid.

And he finds that works quite well. That's an earlier work, but then in the harmonica is Mundi, he comes up with wonderful calculations. I won't try and mangle Kepler's third law. I'll leave it to either Jim or Angela. Angela doesn't want to mangle anything, but she's wagging her finger at me or you, so here we go. Well, it's just that with Kepler, we find

we come to a point where the two worlds split apart, the magical and the scientific, and particularly interesting is the debate between Robert Flood, the Renaissance hermeticis and Kepler, which somehow epitomises this split that we've come to, this point of splitting, where for Flood, the symbolic image is everything, the microcosm, macrocosm relationship, these wonderful complex diagrams showing proportional relationships between light and dark, it's a revelation, it's a visionary, imaginable, poetic experience and he said that's the real cosmic music

that's the real way we get into it. Yes but he was also involved in esoteric philosophy and Kepler was the scientist and they argued vehemently about the nature of what was true. So this is where we read Jim and we're coming to the end of the programme I'm sorry to brush you all but I'm sure

this is where we begin to split apart yes I'm not sure that the split comes quite with Kepler but Kepler is where the story of astronomy really has something to say here because Kepler can make this musical notation mean something in astronomy. He says that the angular speed,

the speed of the planet with respect to the sun, furthest from the sun, the planet moving slowest, closest to sun moving fastest, are all related in whole number ratios, in harmonic ratios. And he draws these out in musical notation. So he has

a music of the spheres in astronomical time, if you like. But the funny thing, the odd thing about Kepler 4 hour plus, object of the music of the spheres is that he has no spheres. So there are only orbits. It's finally with Kepler to get the idea of planetary orbits, which are related harmonically because God has a grand design,

and that can be expressed musically. But that also has an astronomical system which can be used empirically. But from the late 16th century, the idea of the music of the spheres began to lose its potency. Indeed. And although I wouldn't have called, for example, flood and astronomer. Flood doesn't say anything that matters in astronomy as a magician.

Yes. So although he talks about the cosmos, Kepler talks about the cosmos, talks about music and so on, not as spheres, but he really matters in astronomy. By the time you get to flood, no, there's nothing more to say to astronomers in relation to the harmony of the spheres. Someone who does try and still hold things together is the encyclopedist Athanasius Kierker in the 17th century.

He's read Flood, he's read Kepler, he's very interested in astronomy. and he responds to Galileo, for example, and tries to integrate Galilean telescopic observations into his music of the spheres. He says, for example, Jupiter, with its four satellites, becomes one choir, one musical choir, and the sun has its equivalent four satellites of the Earth, Moon, Venus and Mercury.

So he's really trying to hold on to this idea of the music while responding to new observations. Briefly, Anne. Yes, well, just to point out that we do now, have NASA spacecraft exploring planets and sending back vibrations, vibrational patterns, which can be translated into music, and some of them are extraordinarily beautiful, strong rhythmic patterns. And we also have Gustav Holtz, but no more time.

So Peter Faw, Jim Bennett, Angela Vos, thank you very much. Next week, the Arab conquests of the 7th and 8 centuries. Thank you for listening. Few. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy, at BBC.co.uk 4.org.

4. What makes people want to believe in aliens? I'm Tristan Redmond, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. Donald Trump last week announced that he'd be releasing the US government's UFO files. So why the renewed interest in life out there? And what deeper spiritual meaning might people be searching for? Check out the global story. We are serious journalists on BBC.

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