Musica Universalis (n.) the music-like harmonic order produced by the movements of the stars and planets.
What if the universe was a heavenly orchestra?
What if each planet, each star, had its own note to sing, and the silver song of the cosmos-in-motion speaks to us through its order, beauty, and harmony?
The music of the spheres (or musica universalis) is a concept that was first written about around 500 B.C. by the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who believed that the celestial bodies—the planets, the stars, and the sun—made a kind of music.
This idea occurred to him one day as he passed by a smithy. The blacksmith was using multiple hammers, and when two were struck together, their ringing would sometimes create a harmony that was pleasant to hear.
It was generally accepted by the ancient world that moving objects created sound vibrations, so it wasn’t hard for Pythagoras to observe the vibrations of hammers and come up with the idea that the planets and stars (which were clearly in motion) may create a music by their own vibrations.
Plato, born a hundred years after, believed that music and astronomy were “twins” in a sense: music was for the ears, astronomy was for the eyes, and both required knowledge of numerical proportions. There was a universal logic to the beauty of both that united heaven, earth, and everything in the cosmos.
Plato’s student, Aristotle (about 350 B.C.), described the theory of the music of the spheres like this:
[W]hen the sun and the moon, they say, and all the stars, so great in number and in size, are moving with so rapid a motion, how should they not produce a sound immensely great? Starting from this argument and from the observation that their speeds, as measured by their distances, are in the same ratios as musical concordances, they assert that the sound given forth by the circular movement of the stars is a harmony.
Aristotle rejected this idea, believing that a music like this would have to be so loud, it would be shattering the universe to smithereens because of its sheer volume and intensity.
Believers of the theory suggested that the music of the spheres couldn’t be heard because human beings had been exposed to it from the beginning of time, and had become used to hearing it, just as a blacksmith’s ears would eventually get used to the ringing of his hammers and eventually ignore the sound.
But what if this music is the kind that isn’t heard by the ears but by the soul?
The 6th century Christian philosopher Boethius—who believed the theory—knew that this “music” or “harmony” isn’t discernible by the ear. He believed that while the movements of the planets and stars are directly observable, the harmonic order that governs these movements is a truth grasped by the mind instead of the ears or eyes.In other words, it was something one could logically deduce from looking at the ordered nature of the rest of creation, and extending that understanding of the world to how one understood the movements of the heavenly bodies. The music of the spheres was governed by the same order that governed human music, and both reflected the beauty of God.
The 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler was enraptured by musica universalis, so much so that he wrote multiple books about it, including Mysterium Cosmographicum(The Mystery of the Cosmos) and Harmonices Mundi (The Harmonies of the World), which reconcile the celestial order with what the Medieval world knew about astronomy and musical intervals and harmonies.
Harmonices Mundi is split into five books, and in the fifth, Kepler describes the elliptical orbits of the planets in detail and shows how they match almost perfectly with musical intervals.
You might be surprised to hear that, based on the orbital eccentricity of each planet (the degree to which each orbit doesn’t resemble a perfect circle) he was able to identify each planet’s musical tone.
For example, since Venus’s orbit is almost perfectly circular, it only produces a single note. Mercury on the other hand, has the most elliptical orbit, so it has the largest musical interval: a minor tenth.
Kepler demonstrated by reasoning like this that Saturn and Jupiter are basses, Mars is a tenor, Venus and Earth are altos, and Mercury is a soprano. At the beginning of time, before the Fall of Creation, these planets had sung in perfect concord, and by the grace of God, they could do so again.
Kepler echoes Paul’s words in Romans 8:20–21:
Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.
Kepler believed that human music is based on the music of the spheres, and that Man, being made in the image of God and seeking to imitate Him, created his own music so that he could hear “the continuous duration of the time of the world in a fraction of an hour.”
It doesn’t matter whether the details of Kepler’s astronomical observations are accurate. What does matter is that Kepler, Pythagoras, and others like them observed a fundamental truth, a truth revealed to us by Scripture and by nature itself. The human soul has always understood that order and beauty exist for a reason—they exist to point us to something beyond the visible horizon of reality.
Something that undergirds reality itself.
This is why the idea of the music of the spheres resonates so deeply with the human soul. It resonates because it is true, even if Kepler’s observations are technically not. The universe is marked by order and beauty. And in that sense, it is a cosmic orchestral suite sung into existence by the Creator.
And once we realize that, we can begin to sing in harmony.