Fast forward twenty years.

Studying Sixteenth Century Literature in University this year, I learn that the poets I was studying held a different idea of how space sounds. Everyone from Milton, to Donne, to Byron was writing about the “music of the spheres,” a thought which my Norton anthology noted in a footnote, originated from a Pythagorean theory in which each of the nine planets sounds a particular note. John Milton’s “On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity” is a fine example of how this idea inspired the poets.

  9

When such music sweet
Their hearts and ears did greet
As never was by mortal finger struck,
Divinely warbled voice
Answering the stringed noise,
As all their souls in blissful rapture took;
The air, such pleasure loath to lose,
With thousand echoes still prolongs each heavenly close. […]

12

Such music (as ‘tis said)
Before was never made,
But when of old the sons of morning sung,
While the Creator great
His constellations set,
And the well-balanced world on hinges hung,
And cast the dark foundations deep,
And bid the welt’ring waves their oozy channel keep.

13

Ring out, ye crystal spheres,
Once bless our human ears
(If ye have power to touch our senses so),
And let your silver chime move in melodious time,
And let the bass of Heaven’s deep organ blow;
And with your ninefold harmony
Make up full consort to th’ angelic symphony.

Planets aligned in polyphonic obits, creating unheard music in their motions. It's a profoundly beautiful idea—the planets, spinning instruments of cosmic worship surrounding us in ceaseless praise. I want it to be true, I want to believe it, but I never gave it much of a chance. I dismissed it without serious consideration as a romantic idea from an artistic, yet scientifically ignorant age.

The idea stuck with me though, and a few months ago, between classes at the Festival of Faith in Writing at Calvin College, I scribbled out a poem about this tension between the early poets' conception of the music of the spheres (which is reverent, romantic, and inspiring), and the rational, calculated, scientific view of silence in space (a view which I believed because I’m a rational person who puts much faith in the words of scientists). Here’s the poem:

The Silent Space

The poets once mused of
Music in the spheres of
Planetary orbits all
Held in singing courses by
Divine will, each
Passing us round in
Ceaseless unheard song.

But science proves a silent space
Measures the force that
Holds each planet in orbit that
Keeps these feet stuck on
This mortal ground.

Today I read this headline:

"Scientists Say The earth is humming. Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music."

From Rense.com:

Indeed, scientists now say the planet itself is generating a constant, deep thrum of noise. No mere cacophony, but actually a kind of music, huge, swirling loops of sound, a song so strange you can't really fathom it, so low it can't be heard by human ears, chthonic roars churning from the very water and wind and rock themselves, countless notes of varying vibration creating all sorts of curious tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the surface of the planet in strange circular loops, "like dozens of lazy hurricanes," as one writer put it.

It all makes for a very quiet, otherworldly symphony so odd and mysterious, scientists still can't figure out exactly what's causing it or why the hell it's happening.

Pythagoras's Big Idea

Having no tools to listen to space, I wondered how Pythagoras (580-490 BC) arrived at his ideas. Pythagoras, I found, is a surprising character who out had more to contribute to the world than a method to calculate the length of a triangle’s hypotenuse (A² + B² = C²).  Pythagoras discovered the relationship between music and mathematics, perhaps our most important link between science and art. In Christopher Riedwig’s Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence, Pythagoras is said to have noticed a surprisingly musical quality in the sound of Blacksmiths striking anvils as they worked. Borrowing the Blacksmith’s tools, he found that the size of the anvils could be expressed as simple ratios. One was perhaps two thirds, or two times the size of another. “[Pythagoras made] the discovery that music has mathematical foundations, most notably that the perfect intervals of an octave, a fifth, and a fourth can be reduced to simple numerical relations. (Christoph Riedweg, Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching and Influence, Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2005. page 27)”

Pythagoras, being a scientist and musician, observed the same mathematical ratios of  musical scales in planetary orbits about the sun. Why would the planets be aligned according to a musical scale if not for the purpose of making music? The theory of the music of the spheres was inevitable.

Kepler

Pythagoras’ ideas on the music of the spheres were advanced two thousand years later by Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) whose calculations on planetary orbits were instrumental to Newton’s theory of universal gravitation (cite).

"Kepler also attributes the planets, as much as possible, speeds whose proportional numbers correspond to those of simple musical intervals. From the various orbital values he calculates the tonics, scales, melodies, and harmonies. Triple harmonies of Mars, Earth, and Mercury would still appear relatively often, Kepler tells us, while four or even five-voiced harmonies would be produced much more rarely. In his view, the most perfect harmonic polyphony of all six planets might have rung out at the beginning of the Creation." (Reidwig 132).

Not surprisingly, 500 years before science came to the idea of planetary music for a second time, a poet, John Milton, heard the music of the spheres and found it in scripture too:

Job 38 (God speaks to Job from out of a storm)

"Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?

1. World Monetary Systems
2. Disaster Increase
3. Wars and Rumors of Wars
4. End of the Third Great Empire
5. Family Breakdown (The Rise of Self)
   
6. The Rise of Post Moral Culture (as in the days of Moses)
   

1. World Monetary Systems
2. Disaster Increase
3. Wars and Rumors of Wars
4. End of the Third Great Empire
5. Family Breakdown (The Rise of Self)
   
6. The Ris of Post Moral Culture (as in the days of Moses)