Music of the Spheres - The Journey Begins (Becoming, Part 1)
Monday, November 30, 2009 at 01:08AM 
On one particular sunny weekday in the Fall of 2007 I ascended the subway staircase to the surface of Market Street at Powell and began my daily morning walk through Yerba Buena Gardens to the South of Market district of San Francisco where I work.
Maybe it was Mozart's Requiem blaring in my headphones, or maybe I was in a particularly placid mood that day, but as I walked on the street, it felt like time had slowed down just slightly. There was a light wind in the air and as I walked with my fellow downtown commuters around me, I started to feel this overwhelming peace come over me. I felt like I was part of this great organism that was San Francisco, floating along like a gentle stream. The light was beautiful. The cold air coming into my lungs felt somehow nourishing. I felt like I belonged there, and my whole existence harmonized with the city. It was as if I could feel myself moving through time.
When I got to work I immediately pounded out a quick email to myself describing my experience. I wrote things like "I walked in the sunshine, on stars, in harmony with the city." It was as close as I've ever been to what I guess you could call a "mystical" experience. And it wasn't just once- it started to happen more and more often. I decided to dig deeper.
My first instinct was to do internet searches, typing in things like "city harmony", "universal harmony" and "city symphony". Of course what I found were the usual suspects of bad Youtube video projects as well as squishy new-age message boards, boasting conversations about star constellation alignments and crystal energies, that as a rational person I couldn't bring myself to believe. Nothing I found satisfied me. Fearing that bringing it up in normal conversation would have the same airy backlash as my internet searches, I decided to keep my experiences a secret, and just enjoy them for what they were.
In January of 2008 I stumbled upon my first audio course from The Teaching Company, Intro to Greek Philosophy at the SF Public library. The lectures were fantastic, and totally eye opening for me. The philosophies that stuck out the most were those of Heraclitus of Epheseus, and Pythagoras of Samos, both of whom were philosophers before the time of Socrates, now commonly known as the Presocratics. The basic writings of the two philosophers were the closest I'd heard that could verbally explain the harmony I experienced while walking through the city.
Heraclitus, as I've mentioned many times in past blog posts, believed the fundamental nature of the universe was flux, ever changing and flowing like a river, which reminded me of the liquid-like sensation of my experience. Pythagoras on the other hand talked about something that was even more intriguing to me at the time, what he called "Music of the Spheres". He believed that the stars, the planets (the spheres), and everything on earth was "made of number," meaning the entire universe could be expressed most fundamentally in the language of mathematics, which to him was synonymous with the language of music.
I started checking out library books like "The Pythagorean Sourcebook", "The Music of Pythagoras", and "The Art and Thought of Heraclitus". While all of them were interesting, Pythagoras's studies of music and his experimentation with musical scales was more thoroughly engaging of the two. Most importantly, instead of off-handed metaphysical statements about the nature of the universe, Pythagoras's philosophies figured in directly with modern mathematics and music theory, fields that had developed over the last 2500 years, and were still heavily relevant in our culture and academia.
As the year wore on I started getting up an hour early to listen to the lectures and take notes. Eventually the lectures became a part of my daily morning routine, as regular as my cup of tea or my walk down from Powell Street Station into SoMa. I borrowed more and more from the library; classes on science, ancient history, and music. I eventually ended up exhausting the SF Public Library as a resource and instead had to resort to browsing The Teaching Company's website, and buying the classes directly from them, to quench my ever-growing thirst for knowledge.
As I progressed through the History of Science classes in particular, Pythagoras's ideas about the fundamental mathematical harmony of the universe came up again and again. As I learned, the idea was heavily influential to the philosophies of Plato around 350 BCE, rode the sharp upward and downward trajectories of the Roman Empire through the earliest parts of the 1st Millenium C.E, survived through the Dark Ages, was re-kindled during the Renaissance, and eventually became Rationalism, the base philosophies of Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant in the 17th and 18th centuries.
I ate all of this up, seeing it as the most logical explanation of the experience I'd had. And not only was this idea common- it was a major historical, philosophical, and scientific movement. Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Liebniz and Kant joined Pythagoras as my new league of patron saints. I read everything by them I could find, and even if I had NO IDEA what they were talking about, I was elated to read through and try to decipher them.
In the Fall of 2008, a full year after my first harmonic experience, my renewed interest in popular science led me to WNYC's Radiolab, a science-centric public radio show that "isn't afraid to ask the big questions". I downloaded podcasts about Time, Sleep, Music, Memory, Laughter, and Stress. But the one that really stood out from the rest was one called "Emergence". I'd never heard the term before used to describe a scientific phenomena, but the implications of Emergence really knocked my socks off. The first part of the episode was interview with a man named Steve Strogatz, a mathematics professor from Cornell University, who discussed how fireflies in certain parts of the world were able to somehow blink in synchrony, rather than the random on and off patterns those of us who have seen fireflies in North America are used to.
As the show progressed, the hosts described more and more examples group behaviors within nature that seemed to "emerge" spontaneously from the bottom up, rather than being commanded by some top-down over arching authority. They were like armies without generals. This podcast so profoundly interested me, it diverted me from my other studies of science and philosophy I had going on at the time. Eventually I discovered that Professor Strogatz had not only written an entire book on this spontaneous synchrony, but he had also just released a Teaching Company class on a field that tied in closely to emergent phenomena: Chaos Theory. (for more on my experience with Chaos and Emergence, please refer to my Chaos blog post)
I immediately bought the lectures on Chaos and completed the whole course in only two and a half weeks time. What I derived most from the course was a thorough analysis of various complex phenomena in our ever-noisy world, and the sense that within this seemingly chaotic behavior, discernible patterns tended to emerge. However, in chaos math, as the numbers of variables that describe this behavior increases, the system quickly becomes too complex to follow.
I slowly came to the realization that the natural world in general was far more complex that I had imagined, and that even our most advanced mathematics seemed impotent in the face of such complexity. The champions of Rationalism believed that the universe was built out of more simple things than our senses allowed us to see, and only through the divine language of mathematics could we rationally discover the more essential world that was beyond our perception.
Over the previous months, having closely followed the history of science throughout the ages, and learned of the multiple failures of mathematics to describe the natural world, it became obvious to me that the rational and idealistic philosophies that I was using to support my "harmonic city" theory had quite a few nasty holes in them. Was the experience I'd had the result of inherent mathematical harmony in the universe, or was it something completely different and unrelated? I was leaning more towards the latter, but either way, Pythagoras didn't seem like as sage-like as I had originally believed he was. Whatever my experience was, if mathematics weren't the answer, I still felt strongly that it had something to do with music.
So I rounded out 2008 with a 48-lecture series by the zany Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music called "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music." Oddly enough, in the first lecture of the class, Professor Greenberg clearly made his opinion known, that music and mathematics were unresolvable. To him mathematics was mathematics, and music was music. They were very separate things that took place in different realms, and never the twain shall meet.
This dealt the final blow to Rationalism for me, at least in reference to my experience. I decided to set aside my metaphysical inquiries and just enjoy the class. It was nice to kick back and end the year with such a rewarding introduction to great musical composers like Liszt, Haydn, Brahms, Mahler and Verdi.
As 2008 drew to a close, I was disappointed that I hadn't found my answers, but in the process I had been armed with enough general philosophical and scientific knowledge to continue the journey in the coming year. I felt like any future explorations would be a decidedly more rigorous and educated confrontation of this complex world we live in. But nothing I had learned in the entire previous year could have prepared me for what came next...
Reader Comments (2)
Ooh a cliffhanger!
Buckle your seatbelt, B. I'm just gettin warmed up. :-)