Monday, September 03, 2018

Music Monday ~ "A sympathy with sounds"




Are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar?

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music and astrology have quite a lot in common. Both rely on a limited but still potentially vast collection of possible content, based on a non-negotiable structure. In music it's notes on a stave; in astrology, it's planets in the zodiac. Both have a kind of mathematics at their core. In music it's the beat, the time, the rhythm - 3/4 time/ 4/4 time etc. In astrology it's 360 degrees split into 12 segments and aspects formed between them: 90 degree squares, 120 degree trines, 180degree oppositions etc. These mix with the rhythmic integrated waves of Fire to Earth, to Air to Water, to Fire....... Cardinal to Fixed to Mutable to Cardinal....

The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
~Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
There's a branch of astrology known as Harmonics, which I, being mathematically challenged, haven't as yet managed to master.
Astrologer Bob Marks says : (HERE)
"This has to be one of the greatest advances in astrological analysis of the last hundred years. What are "harmonics?" Just a mathematical rearrangement of the horoscope so that we can see particular features more clearly. It's something like taking a cross-section of a sample in biology and putting it under a microscope."
Pythagoras, an early Greek mathematician and astronomer was the first to discover a mathematical relationship in the frequencies of the various tones of the musical scale. In postulating the planets' orbits as bearing a similar relationship based upon the distance from the center, he characterized their interrelated orbits as "the harmony of the spheres." (Nicholas deVore - Encyclopedia of Astrology)

So, each human being could be seen, through astrological windows, as a piece of music, a song. Exact positions of the planets, and their arrangement in respect to one another as we came into the world, dictates our "tune". Our own unique "tune" has a bearing on which other "tunes", real and human, with which, or with whom, we will most easily harmonise.


There is in souls a sympathy with sounds:
And as the mind is pitch'd the ear is pleased
With melting airs, or martial, brisk or grave;
Some chord in unison with what we hear
Is touch'd within us, and the heart replies
.

~William Cowper

3 comments:

Twilight said...

Received by e-mail from "JD" in the UK :

Leibnitz almost got it right. Music is part of the Quadrivium - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium
:Arithmetic is the study of numbers
:Geometry is the study of numbers in space
:Music is the study of numbers in time
:Astronomy is the study of numbers in space and time
I think originally the fourth of those was astrology but it depends which source you look at.
And you're right to mention Pythagoras in relation to music, he it was who produced the musical instument known as the monochord - http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta19.htm

Clever chaps, those oldies. Much cleverer than anybody in Silicon Valley :)

Twilight said...

JD - Thank you - yes, agreed!

Twilight said...

More from "JD"

I knew I had this somewhere on the dusty shelves inside my computer :)

From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44185/a-song-for-st-cecilias-day-1687