What does “space” mean in music? Space, in its simplest and broadest terms, is crucial to the existence of music insofar as sound is a play of distances in frequencies and loudness. Space has always had its place in music, long before trends made it the well-known prefix of genres like space funk, space rock and so on. So there is more to the term “space” than glitter costumes and futuristic cosmic disco synthesizer sounds… there is the universe itself.
“Music of the spheres” is the contradictory link between the synthesizer and the universe. While good old Pythagoras is believed to have set this term, it seems like the old Greek had something different in mind to Sun Ra or your esoteric record shop owner. While there is something called Pythagorean tuning which a synthesizer can barely handle and there are scales named after ancient Greek tribes, Pythagoras only found out the relation in between intervals, an octave being 2:1 measured by the length of a vibrating string. But Pythagoras never notated a scale or even invented a tonal system. There simply was none. We don’t know what the music of the Greeks sounded like. Go, hack a branch of a tree and construct a flute with it and you will probably have yourself some Pythagorean music.
Pythagoras tried to lay down the world in mathematics, from planets to sounds, in the search of a cosmological order. He believed that the planets produce a sound while moving through space that we can’t perceive because our hearing isn’t acute enough and because it’s just always there. But this “music of the spheres” has no system or scale. It’s just there. It’s just sound. Comparable perhaps to the aftermath of the Big Bang still resonating across the universe. Furthermore, Pythagoras probably believed in a Babylonian-influenced astronomical model with the Earth as a stable center. So his “music of the spheres” would have already been outdated over 500 years ago.
Lux Vivens: „Ave maris stella”
The concept of a harmony of the universe was part of human thinking until the Middle Ages. Boethius laid down this philosophical concept with three kinds of music: musica mundana, which concerned the universe, musica humana, which concerned the human body and soul, and musica instrumentalis, the only one of these three concerned with actual sound. With ratios beginning to dominate mankind’s way of thinking and the emergence of Guido of Arezzo’s modern form of musical notation, the concept of philosophical and cosmological harmony became more and more obsolete.
It was Johannes Kepler who superimposed his freshly invented heliocentric astronomy into the tonal musical system of the European Middle Ages. Yes, if you break it down, Saturn, Pluto and Jupiter rotate in distant relations to one another like the musical intervals. But hey, a tree, a leaf, or a crystal are also built on structural intervals. This is where cosmology comes in. Fibonacci, the divine proportion and structuralism could fit everything into patterns if you just calculated long enough. But the planets don’t rotate exactly as they did in Kepler’s model, because it was just that: an idealistic model. The paths the planets take through space are riddled with discrepancies and idiosyncrasies of varying degrees. As a result, music composed strictly with Kepler’s model is idealistic from its very origin; pure tonal harmony which is too beautiful, like a rose drawn in golden ratio. It often simply sounds kitsch, as in Gustav Holst’s suite “The Planets”. So, using the model is like learning harmonics: with the pure form you get I-IV-V-I schemes. Calculate, transpose and invert and you’ve got the full harmonic spectrum.
Sun Ra: “Lights of a satellite”
In the twentieth century, composer Paul Hindemith combined the ideas of Kepler and of Boethius’s three “Musics” with his own musicology to create his symphony and opera “Harmonie der Welt”, where he ingeniously managed to add absurdity and horror to cosmology. This cosmo-harmonic perspective is also what inspired various musicians to create very versatile and open music; for example, jazz pianist and composer Sun Ra dedicated his whole life to cosmology, Kabbalism and numerology.
A contemporary composer of Ra’s, Karlheinz Stockhausen, was aiming at a different concept with his own “space music”. He created space in his music physically and psychologically by using sounds with a wide, “spatial” frequency range. He also kept an eye on space in performance, notably by spreading the speakers in “Gesang der Jünglinge”.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: “Gesang der Juenglinge”
The evocation of “mental space” is also what influenced New Age composers when creating ambient music, by providing space for emotions to unfold. Since rhythm in music exploits our bodies own internal rhythms and clocks, a lack of beats was aimed at creating freedom from limitations of such a physical reaction.
There is one other totally different aspect of space, the universe and music left to explore: that the planets and stars actually produce sounds themselves. For example, the sun is a really loud star which is exploding all the time. When you consider pulsars and comets and pieces of extraterrestrial rock traveling through the universe, bumping into each other every so often, then space quickly becomes a hell of noisy place. Fortunately we can’t hear it, because there is no air in space to carry the soundwaves.
Nowadays the term “space” points to this hell of noise where digitally generated sounds have come to represent futurism. Music with the prefix “space” often contains synthesizers and filtered sounds, not to mention the glitter costumes once reminiscent of astronauts. As musical genres emerge, they split in many sub-genres, “space” being one which suggests the future of a genre, just as mankind sees its own future in aerospace. However, this use of “space”, with all this noise, contradicts the harmonic “space music” and cosmological concepts conceived of in the Middle Ages and by the Ancient Greeks. Musically speaking, space is both the past and the future.
Illustration by Data Rusty.
