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Universal Harmonies
by Chet Raymo
Late night, candlelight, a glass of
wine. Outside, the stars of Orion are setting in the west. Mars and the
Moon, in Gemini, will soon follow. On the stereo -- Henry Purcell's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day 1692. The
overture begins in oboes and trumpets, followed by a lively dance of
strings. Then a duet of strings and oboes. The bass soloist intones
\"Hail! Hail bright Cecilia, Hail, Hail,\" and the chorus joins in. St.
Cecilia is the traditional patroness of music. Her feast, November
22nd, has long been celebrated with melody and song. On St. Cecilia\'s
Day, 1692, music-loving Londoners gathered at Stationer's Hall to hear
a program of new choral music by the most admired English composer of
the day, the royal organist Henry Purcell (with words by the
clergyman-poet Nicholas Brady). By all accounts the concert was an
stunning success, with the composer himself singing the alto solo "'Tis
nature's voice." A sip of wine. The candle sputters. It is of
music that the alto sings: "'Tis Nature's voice, thro' all the moving
wood, of creatures understood, the universal tongue...In unseen chains,
it does the fancy bind." Nature\'s voice. The universal tongue.
The words are much in tune with Purcell\'s time, and especially with the
beginning of the last decade of Purcell's century. Only a few years
earlier, in 1687, Isaac Newton had published what many consider the
greatest scientific book of all time, The Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy, better known from the abbreviation of its Latin
name as the Principia. In that book, Newton proposed an unseen
force -- gravity -- acting upon all objects in the universe, binding
the planets in their courses, bidding the tides to ebb and flow,
guiding the fall of the apple from the tree -- a universal harmony. Purcell
can hardly have been unaware of Newton\'s work. He was an acquaintance
of the architect Christopher Wren, who was himself a friend of Edmund
Halley, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and others of a
circle of scientific geniuses who together helped create modern
science. It is not improbable that some of these men were in the
audience at Stationer\'s Hall for the 1692 performance of Purcell\'s St.
Cecilia ode. Newton's Principia created a sensation
among the London intelligentsia. Here was convincing proof that the
world was ruled by mathematical laws, not by the whims of gods. The
laws of gravity and motion bound all things with unseen chains. In
Newton\'s theory, scientists of the late-17th century believed they
heard the voice of nature\'s universal tongue. Saturn is high in
the south, keeping company with Regulus in Leo. On the stereo, soprano
and bass voices begin one of the most beautiful of Purcell\'s choral
movements, "Soul of the World." Altos and tenors take up the lyric,
weaving together a perfect hymn in praise of music: "Soul of
the world, inspired by thee, the jarring, jarring seeds of matter did
disagree. Thou didst the scatter'd atoms bind, which by thy laws of
true proportion joined. Made up of various parts, one perfect harmony." It
is not hard to detect the spirit of Newton moving in these lines.
Purcell was not the first to describe nature's scattered parts bound
into a harmonious whole by the power of music. The idea originated with
Pythagoras, 2000 years earlier. Johannes Kepler, Newton\'s predecessor,
struggled all his life to discover the musical harmonies that guided
the planets in their orbits. Kepler's laws of planetary motion were the
basis for Newton's work. What most impressed Purcell's
contemporaries about Newton's achievement was its completeness. From a
handful of simple mathematical laws Newton derived the orbits of
comets, the motion of the moon, the sweep of the planets in their
courses, the flight of earthly projectiles. This all-embracing harmony
of stars and atoms finds expression in Purcell\'s ode. An andante in
oboes, then the soprano soloist sings: "Thou tun'st the world, this
world below, the spheres above, who in heavenly round to their own
music move." Music and mathematics have much in common, but
seldom has music so explicitly captured the spirit of scientific
achievement as in Purcell's composition for St. Cecilia's Day, 1692.
The music rapturously celebrates what Halley, in his prefatory poem to
the Principia, called "the Laws which God, framing the universe, set not aside but made the fixed foundations of his work." The Principia
was the culmination of the Scientific Revolution, a triumph of law over
miracle, of reason over subservience to chance or the whims of gods.
Newton convincingly demonstrated a truth that would transform
civilization: Nature is ruled by mathematical harmonies, and the
harmonies are at least potentially discoverable by the human mind. Eye-lids
droop, candle gutters. Mars and the Moon sink toward their western
setting. The bass soloist begins a magnificent song in praise of the
organ, the king of musical instruments, which is also a song of praise
for the universe revealed by Newton: "Wondrous, wondrous, wondrous
machine." Discuss this essay and more over on the Science Musings Blog
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Photo courtesy of pingnews.com at flickr.com. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0
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