Harmonices Mundi

Liner notes:

Rocketed into space on board the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 as the opening cut of the Golden Record’s “Sounds of Earth,” was a music-science crossover piece that had been imagined but never heard for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks’ vision of a “harmony of the spheres,” a celestial harmony of the planets’ relationships, had been updated by Johannes Kepler in 1619 after his discovery that the true paths of the planets around the sun were elliptical. But the means of making these ever-changing relationships audible to man would not exist for hundreds of years more, until the advent of the computer as a musical tool.

Enter Laurie Spiegel, an acknowledged pioneer of the use of computers in music starting several decades ago. Intrigued by the idea of expressing natural phenomena in sound, she set about realizing Kepler’s poetic vision of a “God’s ear” view of the cosmos. According to Kyle Gann of the Village Voice,

“Laurie Spiegel is one of those rare composers in whom head and heart, left brain and right brain, logic and intuition, merge and even exchange roles. Though she is one of the highest-tech computer composers in America, Spiegel is also a lutenist and banjo player, and sees the computer as a new kind of folk instrument. She makes her most intuitive-sounding and melodic music from mathematical algorithms, and her most complex computerized textures by ear and in search of a desired mood. Form and emotion are as difficult to separate in her music as they are in that of J. S. Bach.”

Although long available in outer space, this recording is the first release of Spiegel’s realization of Kepler’s 1619 “Harmonices Mundi” to be available to us mere earthlings.

  “Kepler was enamored of a literal ‘music of the spheres,’ and I think he would have loved their haunting representation here.”

                             — Carl Sagan