Sunday Feature: Harmony of the Spheres

Author Jerry Brotton goes in search of the ancient and very beautiful idea that places music at the centre of our universe: the Harmony of the Spheres. With its roots in Pythagoras and Plato, energised by Renaissance astronomy, the thought that the stars, suns and planets of the cosmos resonate to a harmony too beautiful and too powerful for human hearing has inspired composers and musicians for many hundreds of years, from Purcell and Handel to the present day, with Tarik O'Regan's rapturous 'The Ecstasies Above' and former Pouges Jem Finer's Long Player project, a millennium-long loop of celestial music. Music was once a science as well as an art, joining with astronomy and mathematics to unlock the secrets of the heavens, a great celestial harmony ordering the cosmos. And now it is again: across the globe telescopes like the Lovell at Jodrell Bank look up to the night sky and listen, turning stars into music through the new science of astro-accoustics and what astronomers are calling sonification. Composers are again tuning in to the cosmos as a song. But the Harmony of the Spheres has always been a moral idea as well as a musical one: that we should live in better harmony with one another here on the Earth, itself a beautiful and precious sphere. In an age of ecological discord, political cacophony and division, do we need to hear the Harmony of the Spheres - has its time come again? Talking to musicians, artists, composers and astronomers including Jordi Savall, Erykah Badu, Tarik O'Regan, Jem Finer and Anish Kapoor