The Music of the Spheres. Why is the universe singing our song?

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:18]There is a question that music poses to each of us. It's so fundamental that few musicians stop to ask the question and not many of the rest of us do either.

[00:00:30]Why does music feel like anything at all? Not why is music pleasant or why do minor keys make us sad? Or why does certain songs detach themselves to memories and refuse to let go? Those are perpetually provocative questions, but they're downstream from the deeper one.

[00:00:49]Why should organized sound, air pressure, vibration, ratio, if we're going to talk empirically, reach inside a human being and touch something that feels unmistakably like meaning, like something we can never escape from.

[00:01:06]The answer to this may be that music doesn't merely produce meaning, but it reveals it. It's a window, maybe a map.

[00:01:14]One of the most extraordinary maps of reality that we as human beings have ever stumbled across.

[00:01:21]And what it maps is not territory we discover from the outside, but territory that somehow we already obscurely know.

[00:01:31]We respond to music the way we respond to a language we were born speaking but have forgotten. Something in us recognizes it. Haptip to Plato, Platinus and Neoplatanism.

[00:01:43]The instinct is very old. The Pythagoreans believed that the planets in their orbits produced a sound inaudible to human ears, but real anyway, a cosmic harmony that governed both the heavens and the soul. Kepler 2,000 years later were still chasing the same intuition, mapping the movements of the planets onto musical intervals and finding in his barely contained astonishment they fit. The medievals called this a musica universalis the music of the spheres. It was less a theory more a conviction that the universe is not merely ordered but it's melodic. that beneath its mathematics lies something that can only be described as music or song.

[00:02:31]What I want to do in these two pieces in one sense is a search for what those thinkers intuited, not a nostalgic retrieval of pre-scientific cosmology, but a serious question. Were they on to something? Is there a harmonic logic woven into the structure of creation itself? And if so, what does it tell us about the mind that structured it? So, this is part two of an exploration of music theory as spiritual grammar. The idea that the deep structures of music are not arbitrary cultural conventions, but vestigia dei, the footprints of God pressed, molded into the fabric of creation.

[00:03:14]So, in my earlier piece in part one, we hear those footprints in the physics of sound. itself in the overtone series in the way harmony is not invented so much as discovered. But I want to go further with the second piece. We are going to follow two threads that turn out on close inspection to be one thread really. The first is the Fibonacci sequence. That mathematical pattern woven into the growth of living things, the proportion of human body and the architecture of the galaxies, the cosmic macro and the nano and its surprising beautiful appearance at the heart of musical structure, what we sing. And the second is the circle of fifths. 12 keys arranged in a circle, each a fifth away from its neighbors, which turns out to be something much stranger and more resonant than a piece of technical machinery for music students to help them understand harmony.

[00:04:17]What these two threads share, what unites the spiral of the nautilus shell, the spacing of our finger joints, the four chords that have carried every human grief and celebration in song, and the ancient theological concept of pericurasis as we apply it to the holy trinity is a single quietly astonishing idea.

[00:04:40]Relationship is not something that happens to reality. It is what reality it is what reality is. The music of the spheres was never silent. We're only just learning again to hear it. So let's go back to the circle of fifths. There's a diagram that every music student encounters early in their training. 12 keys arranged in a circle. Each one a fifth apart from its neighbors. It looks at first glance like a piece of useful technical machinery. a tool for remembering which keys are related, which chords belong together, which modulations feel smooth, and which will feel like stepping off a curb and being hit by a car you hadn't noticed was coming.

[00:05:25]It's all of those things, the circle of fifths, but it's also in the context of our looking for God's fingerprints in creation, one of the most extraordinary maps of reality that human beings have ever stumbled across.

[00:05:38]Because what the circle of fifths actually shows us, if we're willing to follow it far enough, is that relationship is not something that happens to notes. It's what notes are.

[00:05:49]No note is an island with apologies to John Dunn because we look at the circle of fifths. Before we look at it, we ought to look at the Fibonacci principle since it also works as one of the fingerprints of God's mind with which he constructed the rules and patterns of his creation.

[00:06:07]Well, some of those who are reading or listening will know a great deal about the Fibonacci principle more than me.

[00:06:15]Others might need a brief remembrance or introduction.

[00:06:19]So, the core connections to make are that the Fibonacci sequence is everywhere in nature. It's in the spiral of a nautilus shell. It's in the wonderful arrangement of sunflower seeds. It's in the branching of trees.

[00:06:34]It's in the curl of a galaxy. It's in the proportions of a human hand. The same numerical sequence. Each number the sum of the two before it keeps appearing in living things completely independently of each other. It's ingrained in a pattern of everything we encounter.

[00:06:55]The Fibonacci sequin converges on the golden ratio and composers sometimes consciously sometimes apparently by instinct keep arriving at it. Debus's lauti bartok string quartets even the architecture of many of Bach's fuges show golden radio ratio proportions in where climaxes fall where themes return where the structure turns. The most naturally satisfying musical forms tend to mirror this proportion found in living things.

[00:07:31]Here it gets exquisitly interesting and exquisitly beautiful. The intervals that appear earliest and most strongly in the overtone series, the octave, the fifth, the major third, correspond to the simplest whole number ratios. And these ratios are deeply connected to Fibonacci convergence.

[00:07:55]risking being anthropomorphic. We might say the universe isn't just singing.

[00:08:00]It's also singing in a very particular mathematical language. A language that governs the growth of living things.

[00:08:09]Consider Fibonacci in the human body. We are constructed along the same principle. The ratio of our forearm to our hand, the spacing of our finger joints, the spiral of our inner ear, the coccleia, the very organ by which we hear music is in itself a Fibonacci principle. Spiral. We are physically built to the same proportions as a music we find beautiful. The listener and what we listen to are made of the same or in the same or by the same mathematics.

[00:08:43]So here's a theological punch. This is where what we observe built into the mathematics and physics of the universe becomes the evidence that we have been created with careful exquisite deliberation as an act of conscious beauty and proportion.

[00:08:59]If the golden ratio governs as it does the growth of living things, the structure of the human body, the proportions of musical music and the spiral of the galaxies. We are not dealing with coincidence, chance, randomness or cultural preference. We're dealing with what the medieval theologians called vestigia, the footprints or if you like the fingerprints of God.

[00:09:27]Let's go to the circle of related fifths. Move one step around the circle of fifths and we journey from C major to G major. We find that these two keys share six of their seven notes. The relationship between them is one of close connection. The ear doesn't really much register the shift. Move further to the key of D and then to A and then to E. The kinship is still there, as you might say, but it's much more stretched, more interesting, carrying a faint sense of distance traveled. Move all the way to the opposite side of the harmonic circle from C to F sharp, the interval that the medieval theorists called Diablo in music, the devil in music, because it wants to resolve so very badly. And you have arrived somewhere genuinely vertigenous, relationally, maximally far from home.

[00:10:22]This is more than music theory. It's also a map, you might say, of belonging.

[00:10:27]In the gospels, for example, we find narratives which contain the same elements. Home, travel, discovery, distance, tension, conflict, return, and resolution. An archetypal pattern, one might say, written not only into our spirituality of who we are and how we get there, but also into the journey of musical progression itself.

[00:10:51]The parable of the prodigal son, for example, has always been read as a story about geography and broken relationships. The son who goes into a far country, but it is equally a story about journey constituted and reflected by the same principles that we find in harmony.

[00:11:12]He is modulated into the most remote possible key. Everything familiar has receded. The tonic, the father's house, the ground of his identity, is still there, technically reachable, but so distant he can no longer be in touch with it or hear it. What brings him home is not an argument, but dissonance that becomes unbearable in its detachment and distance from home. It's something more like the leading tones ache. that almost the almost unbearable pull of the note that is only a half step from resolution cannot rest until it turns home and arrives home at the tonic.

[00:11:57]The circle tells us every key is reachable. No note is stranded beyond exploration or return. But the further you travel around the circle from the tonic, the greater the longing and consequently the more glorious when it comes home to the homecoming.

[00:12:16]What are the four chords and the whole of human longing?

[00:12:20]The vast majority of western pop songs, ballads, hymns, and folktunes are built on just four chords. There's some wonderful YouTube videos of people playing the four chords and then singing about 50 songs that everybody knows.

[00:12:34]Different melody, same progression. In the key of C there, C, G, A, M, and F.

[00:12:41]Actually, Leonard Cohen in his wonderful um song about David looking for a chord explores exactly this sequence.

[00:12:53]Anyway, move them to any key and the relationship remains identical. These four chords account for an enormous number of the songs that have moved us.

[00:13:02]We wept them when we sung with them every stage of life in the dark at funerals, danced at weddings. The tunes were different. The chords, the progression was exactly the same. Let it be someone like you. No woman cry with or without you. Thousands of songs, just four chords, the same gravitational dance, a graven harmonic progression.

[00:13:22]never exhausted. Why don't we tire of it? Because we're not responding to novelty so much as responding to shape.

[00:13:30]The shape of departure and return, of leaning out, being caught, of tension, finding its resolution, being brought home. The four chords are the skeleton of the journey home. Dressed each time in different melodic clothes. The circle holds them all.

[00:13:50]In his master classes, Jacob Collier, whom we talked about in the last piece, traces harmonic threads across centuries, not to show how composers differ, though they do, but rather to show how they all in their different ways navigating the same territory, constrained and energized by the same rules, the same harmonic structures.

[00:14:12]Park understood the circle is as as musical architecture. His fugues and his corrals are journeys of extraordinary precision. Moving through related keys like a traveler who knows exactly which road connects and why before arriving home with a cadence of such certainty it feels like the closing of a very long discursive argument.

[00:14:37]What unites them all in Collier's interpretation is a particular relationship with tension, a willingness to sit with dissonance long enough for it to become interesting rather than merely uncomfortable.

[00:14:51]The great musicians, whatever their tradition, are people who have learned to explore and incorporate the far side of the circle without losing their sense of where home really is.

[00:15:03]The pericurasis of sound, a rather posh Greek word applied to the trinity. The circle of fifths has no beginning and no end. You can travel its full circumference, 12 steps, 12 keys, 12 fifths, and arrive exactly where you started. It's a structure of infinite return, of movement that is also rest, of going out that is always already a coming home. The eastern and particular the particularly eastern Christian theological tradition has a word that keeps coming back to me here because it works so well. Pericarasis.

[00:15:37]I mentioned it in part one but belongs even more fully to this discussion here.

[00:15:41]It means well all kinds of things but mutual inddwelling the eternal circling movement of the trinity father son and holy spirit. each living in and through each others. Each defined not before but within the relationship interpenetration also John of Damascus who along with the Capidosian fathers gave us a term in the 8th century understood that God is not a noun more God is a verb. God is the dancing.

[00:16:13]There's a rather charming idea that arrives with the Greek word koreah or it rather that it derives from the Greek word kareah and whether or not this is actually true it certainly spiritually and poetically the connection has proved to be very valuable.

[00:16:32]Many contemporary theologians talk about the trinity as an eternal dance of love with overtones of mutuality and as I said interpenetration in the context of our exploration of har of of harmonic of harmony sorry the circle of fifths it's pericurasis is pericurasis made audible it's what s what it sounds like when being in where where being is relational all the way down to its center and core. And here's what follows from that. What I find myself con constantly returning to that in this harmonic universe, it'd be better not to describe a note as being wrong so much as unresolved.

[00:17:21]There are keys that are far from home.

[00:17:24]There are passages of such harmonic complexity and stranges that the ear loses its bearings entirely. But even then, the atonic is not destroyed. It's just solidly waiting. The distance is real. The dissonance costs a lot. But resolution is not merely potential and long for it is in some sense structurally guaranteed.

[00:17:48]Whether can I go from your spirit? Asks the psalmist. Whether can I flee from your presence? The answer he discovers is nowhere. Even in Shaol, even the uttermost parts of the sea, the circle is closed. You can't get off the map.

[00:18:05]And every key has its own face, its own character. This takes us to something that musicians have known for centuries, and scientists have never been quite able to explain. But each key has a different character. It feels different.

[00:18:18]Not just higher or lower in pitch, obviously that, but different in personality, its emotional color, something that functions almost like personality. D minor has long carried the weight of lamentation. Mozart reaches straight for that in his recquam. E major has a a brightness, a radiance, a triumph. a key of heights and clarity at its most extreme something approaching almost unbearableness like Bach's violin concerto in number two in E major B flat major carries a warmth and a declaration that made it Mara's key of heroic struggle Beethoven has a piano snout number seven number 30 Brookner has a symphony number seven C major the easy key for beginners with its clean absence of sharps and flats has an openness that can either feel innocent or a bit stark depending on what you want to do with it. Christian Fred Daniel uh described C major as well completely pure. Its character, instance, simplicity, naivity, children's talk. It is the key of beginnings. Bark's prelude in C major. Highland's surprise symphony number four, Proopiovs, Peter and the Wolf.

[00:19:44]F minor has historically been the territory of suffering, held with some dignity. Why should all this be? After all, an equal temperament tuning system we've used since Bach. The intervals are mathematically identical in every key.

[00:20:00]There isn't any obvious acoustic reason for D minor to carry more weight than C minor. Yet somehow it does. Everyone who spent time inside music knows that some scholars point to the memory of older tuning systems. Before Equal Temperament standardized the intervals. In those systems, each key genuinely was tuned differently with slightly different intervals, slightly different colors.

[00:20:24]The suggestion is perhaps that the emotional association survived even after the acoustic differences were ironed out. I'm not sure that's true, but that's a suggestion made. We remember the idea is in our musical bones a bit like the way in which birds navigate what the keys used to feel like the previous journey perhaps. I'm not so sure. Don't we don't have an explanation really. Jacob Collier uh is offers vivid lucid exposition of this. He suggests that a key carries the accumulated weight of everything written in it.

[00:21:00]Pcel's Daido's lament carries also the Mozart Reququum, a hundred eleies and laments added to it over centuries. When a composer chooses D minor, they're stepping into a conversation that was already centuries old before they ever arrived on it.

[00:21:19]This is quietly a theology of tradition.

[00:21:21]Traditionio handing over meaning is not made fresh by each individual in isolation. It's received, deepened, entrusted, passed on. We're not in music anymore than in faith the first to have felt this. The circle was here before us. We've received both what was engraved into the universe and has been handed down tradio to us.

[00:21:46]There is a homecoming then built into the very structure of reality of the matter of the universe, of the mathematics of the universe, of the music of the universe. The circle closes. The fifth resolves. The wandering key finds its tonic. And in that moment, that arrival, the whole harmonic journey was already moving towards. Something in us recognizes that's the way things are.

[00:22:14]The great musicologist Donald Francis Tuvi wrote, "We don't expect to return to the home tonic to be associated with the theme we've never heard before any more than we expected at any of my the end of any of my holidays to find a house completely redecorated and refernished and inhabited by total strangers.

[00:22:38]We might describe the musical journey in Augustinian terms and say that every musical journey begins at home. The tonic ventures into distance, tension, and uncertainty and finally discovered at its deepest. Its real meaning lies in returning. Tonic is not only the first note. It's a note for all the others.

[00:23:01]It's a note for which all the others secretly yearn and need to return to.

[00:23:08]Western music then is built on a metaphysical intuition. The departure is mainly because a return is possible.

[00:23:19]One might say predicated. Every modulation is an exile but a temporary exile. Every cadence is a homecoming.

[00:23:26]The tonic waits patiently at the end of the journey as God waits patiently at the end of ours.

[00:23:37]We began with a diagram, 12 keys in a circle, a piece of technical machinery for music students. We end somewhere rather different. What the circle of fists turns out to be when followed far enough, when held alongside the Fibonacci spiral, in the nautilus, the coccleia, inside the four chords that have carried every human grief and celebration, alongside the pericoretic dance of the trinity, is nothing less than what we might call a grammar of the universe. A grammar whose deepest rule is this. Departure is always and already orientated towards return. The medieval theologians spoke of the fist vist jade, the footprints of God pressed into the fabric of creation. They looked for them in proportion, in beauty, in the ordered movements of the heavens. We too have been looking for them, but in music and sound. Now, we found them not merely in the prettiness of a resolved chord, but in something more structured, more inescapable. The fact that music at its very foundations is a story about home.

[00:24:46]Every note exists in relationship. Every tension leads towards resolution. Every exile, however remote, however harmonically vertigenous, carries within it the gravitational memory of the tonic. You can't travel so far around the circle that return becomes impossible. The map closes. The circle holds.

[00:25:08]Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. He might just as well have been writing about the leading note, that half-step ache, that note which by cannot by its very nature remain where it is, which must resolve or remain forever incomplete.

[00:25:25]We are, it seems, constructed for homecoming, in our bodies, in our music, in our longing. The Coxa spiral inwards in the shape of a Fibonacci sequence.

[00:25:39]The songs that move us most are tracing the oldest journey that there is. And somewhere beneath it all, beneath the theory and the theology, beneath the mathematics and the mystery, something is singing. It's been called the music of the spheres. It's always been singing. It's just that we're only just some of us getting to learn to hear it.