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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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The
Planets by Dana Sobel |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Lyrical Dana Sobel
shares her passion for science again with her latest book, The
Planets. She combines technical information with personal passion and
uses often lyrical language to tell the story of the solar system. Here’s an
excerpt, from the beginning of the chapter titled, “Music of the Spheres,”
pp. 161-165: Between 1914 and 1916, the English composer Gustav Holst created the only known example of a symphonic
tribute to the Solar System, his Opus 32, The Planets, Suite
for Orchestra. Neither
Haydn’s “Mercury” (Symphony no. 43 in E flat major) nor Mozart’s “Jupiter”
(no. 41 in C; K. 551)
had attempted as much. In fact, the title “Jupiter” did not attach itself to
Mozart’s work until decades after his death. Similarly, Beethoven’s
“Moonlight” Sonata was known for thirty years as Opus 27, no. 2, before a poet likened its melody to
moonlight shining on a lake. The Planets suite contains seven movements, as
opposed to nine. Pluto had not yet been discovered at the time Holst was writing, and he excluded Earth. Nevertheless
the piece persists as musical accompaniment to the Space Age, partly because
people still like it, and partly because nothing else has supplanted it. To
make up for its lacks, contemporary composers have augmented it with
occasional new movements, such as “Pluto,” “The Sun,” and “Planet X.” Holst grew interested in
planets through astrology. In 1913, after a burst of reading on the subject,
he began casting friends’ horoscopes and thinking of the planets in terms of
their astrological significance, such as “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity,”
“Uranus, the Magician,” and “Neptune, The Mystic.” His daughter and
biographer, Imogen, also a composer, recalled that
her father’s “pet vice” of astrology led him on to study astronomy, “and the
excitement of it would send up his temperature whenever he tried to
understand too much at once. He was perpetually chasing the idea of the
Space-Time continuum.” A
natural affinity between music and astronomy has prevailed since at least the
sixth century B.C., when the Greek mathematician Pythagoras perceived
“geometry in the humming of the strings” and “music in the spacing of the
spheres.” Pythagoras believed the cosmic order obeyed the same mathematical
rules and proportions as the tones on a musical scale. Plato reprised the
idea two centuries later, in The
Republic, introducing the memorable phrase “music of the spheres” to
describe the melodious perfection of the heavens. Plato spoke also of
“celestial harmony” and “the most magnificent choir”—terms that imply the
songs of angels, though they referred specifically to the unheard polyphony
of the planets in their gyrations. Copernicus
cited the “ballet of the planets” when he choreographed his heliocentric
universe, and Kepler built on the work of
Copernicus by returning repeatedly to the niajor
and minor scales. In 1599 Kepler derived a C major
chord by equating the relative velocities of the planets with the intervals
playable on a stringed instrument. Saturn, the farthest and slowest planet,
issued the lowest of the six notes in this chord, Mercury the highest. As Kepler developed his three laws of planetary motion, he
expanded the planets’ voices from single notes to short melodies, in which
individual tones represented different speeds at given points along the
various orbits. “With this symphony of voices,” he said, “man can play
through the eternity of time in less than an hour and can taste in small
measure the delight of the Supreme Artist by calling forth that very sweet
pleasure of the music that imitates God.” For his
1619 book, Harnionice Mundi (The
Harmony of the World), Kepler drew the five-line
musical staff with key-signatures for the several parts, and set down each
planet’s theme in the hollow, lozenge-shaped tablature of his time. Mercury’s
highly eccentric, high-speed, high-pitched refrain
ranged seven octaves above Saturn’s bass-clef rumbling from low G to low B
and back again. “I feel
carried away and possessed by an unutterable rapture over the divine
spectacle of the heavenly harmony,” said Kepler.
“Give air to the heaven, and truly and really there will be music.”* The two
Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 and currently headed for the outer
boundaries of the Solar System, further this musical heritage. As potential
envoys to extraterrestrials, both craft carry a specially engineered golden
record (complete with its own playback equipment) that expresses the music
of the spheres as computer-generated tones designating the velocities of the
Sun’s planets. The Voyager Interstellar Record also says “Hello” in
fifty-five languages and plays music selected from numerous cultures and composers,
including Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Louis Armstrong, and Chuck
Berry. *Paul
Hindemith’s 1956—57 opera, Die Hannonie der Welt (The Harmony of the World), dramatizes Kepler’s work on the planetary order. Sobel shares her wonder about the scientific
data on the pages of The
Planets, and some readers will be drawn to her enthusiasm. Steve Hopkins,
December 22, 2005 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Planets.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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