Monthly Archives: October 2003

space music

Space Music

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A lot of folks like to listen to music when they stargaze or even while they’re reading on a cloudy evening. In some of the discussion groups I monitor, opinions about what music is appropriate for an evening under the stars can get pretty heated. There are the people who insist that only classical music can suffice, while others think that various rock music pieces are the perfect accompaniment. I don’t listen to music when I’m stargazing. I do listen to music when I’m writing — which would send my old music appreciate teacher screaming into her studio if she knew I said that. Sometimes I kick back here and just listen and don’t do anything, which is what she would have liked.

So, what do I listen to when I’m not stargazing? Obviously being married to a space music composer puts me in the way of some really nice “music for the stars.” (You can listen to samples here.) My favorite album of his is Fourth Universe — followed by Anasazi and West of the Galaxy. But there are other albums and styles that also put me in a space frame of mind — music by Mark Dwane, for example, or Steve Roach, or any of a number of artists that I hear in the “space” bins online. There’s a lot of really thoughtful music out there, just waiting to be heard.

I’ve often wondered about the link between music and science. There is one — in fact that are many! Perhaps it’s the mathematical precision required in both — the logical flow of thought that leads to beautiful sonic experiences with one and wonderful discoveries about the cosmos with the other. How about this: the technological advances that have powered so many of the new instruments and digital recording studios are a direct result of science. Some of the new keyboards require the musician to be a programmer of sorts, something a violin player for example, would not worry about. Yet, there’s a science behind the creation of a beautiful stringed instrument that requires as much technical understanding as musicality.

There was a reason that the ancients described the universe as a series of nested spheres, ringing in a music all their own — it combined the best of science and music into a celestial harmony humans could only aspire to in their dreams. Once the nature of the universe was found to be nothing at all like those spheres, it must have shattered the old idealist’s hearts. Their idea of perfection was gone — but in its place was a robust and ever-changing cosmos. Sort of like the history of music, which began simply and grew as technology did, embracing form and function, but always ready to strike out in new directions.

Think about the ties between music and science the next time you’re out observing. There’s more there than meets the eye — or the ear!

astronomy poetry, poetry

Astronomy and Poetry

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WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN’D ASTRONOMER

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired, and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Walt Whitman wrote that poem in 1865. Whenever I read it, I think of him sitting inside the stuffy lecture hall, waiting for some crumb of beauty to fall out from between the equations and Greek letters and the charts… but none did. And so he wandered outside to appreciate the beauty of the stars.

I admit I would be the first to tell you that to truly understand the whys and wherefores of astronomy and astrophysics, you have to do a little math. And learn a few Greek letters. And maybe work your way through some stuff that takes some skull sweat. But, there’s a time and a place for all that. Just as there’s a time and a place to leave it all behind as you wander on a darkened hillside late at night, with nothing more overhead than the infinity of space.

No numbers. No letters. No differential equations. No gas laws. No radiative transfer formulae. No Lorenz contractions blithering around in your head. Just the beauty of the stars and planets, all rolled up into some huge conceptual gestalt — some metaphysical awareness of the oneness of the universe and the realization of one’s own place some 1500 light-years from Orion, or 2.5 million light-years from the Andromeda Galaxy, or more than 12 billion years after everything got started in the Big Bang.

That’s Walt Whitman’s job, to take us out there in spirit. The learn’d astronomer inside us can wait a little while the poet that rules our hearts takes over and opens our eyes to the beauty of the cosmos. Besides, a little stargazing brings all the math and science to life in a way you never imagined!