I bear in mind singing Beethoven’s “Ode to Pleasure” within the choir of the Bulgarian Math Academy as a baby. I bear in mind my awe at studying that throughout centuries of warring nationalisms, this piece of music, primarily based on an outdated Schiller poem and born of Beethoven’s unimaginable trials, had change into the official Hymn of Europe — a bridge of concord throughout human divides. I bear in mind questioning as I sang whether or not music is one thing we make or one thing we’re product of.
That’s what Pythagoras, too, questioned when he laid the foundation of Western music by discovering the arithmetic of concord. Its magnificence so staggered him that he thought your complete universe have to be ruled by it. He known as it music of the spheres — the concept that each celestial physique produces in its motion a novel hum decided by its orbit.
The phrase orbit didn’t exist in his day. It was Kepler who coined it two millennia later, and it was Kepler who resurrected Pythagoras’s music of the spheres in The Concord of the World — the 1619 e book through which he formulated his third and last legislation of planetary movement, revolutionizing our understanding of the universe. For Kepler, this notion of celestial music was not mere metaphor, not only a symbolic organizing precept for the cosmic order — he believed in it actually, believed that the universe is singing, reverberating with music inaudible to human ears however as actual as gravity. He died ridiculed for this perception.
Half a millennium after his demise, our radio telescopes — these immense prosthetic ears constructed by centuries of science — detected a low-frequency hum pervading the universe, the product of supermassive black holes colliding within the early universe: Every merging pair sounds a special low notice, and all of the notes are sounding collectively into this nice cosmic hum. We have now heard the universe singing.
To me, that is what makes music so singular — the way in which it bridges the cosmic and the human, the ephemeral and the everlasting. It’s without delay essentially the most summary of the humanities, product of arithmetic, feeling, and time, and essentially the most concrete in its inescapable embodiment — we sing as a result of we now have a physique, this bittersweet reminder that we’re mortal, and we sing to have fun that we’re alive. Alongside love, music could also be our greatest manner of claiming “sure” to life, and to our life collectively — I do know from essentially the most etymologically passionate particular person in my life that the Latin root of the phrase particular person means “to sound by,” in flip implying a listener: We sound by to one thing aside from ourselves. After we communicate, after we sing, after we channel this sound wave of the soul, we attain past the self and partake of the good harmonic of belonging.
That harmonic comes alive with unusual magnificence and ecstatic tenderness in Marie Howe’s poem “Hymn.”
Present in her altogether magnificent New and Selected Poems (public library) and animated right here by the gifted Ohara Hale (who has beforehand animated Patti Smith reading Rebecca Elson and Joan as Police Woman singing Emily Dickinson), the poem is an “Ode to Pleasure” for our personal time and for the epochs to come back, sonorous with what’s finest in us, sounding by the attainable.
HYMN
by Marie HoweIt started as an virtually inaudible hum,
low and lengthy for the photo voltaic winds
and much dim galaxies,a hymn rising louder, for the moon and the solar,
a track with out phrases for the snow falling,
for snow conceiving snowconceiving rain, the rivers dashing with out disgrace,
the hum turning once more increased — right into a riff of ridges
peaks onerous as consonants,summits and reward for the rocky faults and crust and crevices
then down right down to the roots and rocks and burrows
the lakes’ skittery surfaces, wells, oceans, breakingwaves, the salt-deep: the nice and cozy our bodies transferring inside it:
the chilly deep: the deep beneath gleaming: a few of us rising
because the planet became daybreak, some mendacity downbecause it became darkish; as every of us rested — one other woke, standing
among the many cast-off cartons and cars;
we left the factories and stood within the parking tons,left the subways and stood on sidewalks, within the brilliant places of work,
within the cluttered yards, within the farmed fields,
within the mud of the shanty cities, breaking intoharmonies we’d not identified attainable. discovering the chords as we
discovered our true place singing in one million
million keys the human hymn of reward for eachone thing else there may be and ever was and shall be:
the track rising louder and rising.
(Pay attention, I too believed it was a dream.)
Complement with Marie Howe’s beautiful poem “Singularity,” honoring Stephen Hawking, then revisit the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on music and the universe.
