SERMON BY REV. SANDRA NIXON
September 22, 2024
The church held its monthly jazz vespers service this past Friday night. One of the things I do for each service, is I choose a quote about jazz and spirituality, to help set the frame for the evening. And usually it’s a quote from a famous jazz musician.
But this time, I chose something else - words from a hymn many of you will likely recognize:
This is God's wondrous world, and to my listening ears
all nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres. (Voices United #296)
This hymn (“This is God’s Wondrous World”) is in our Voices United hymnbook. It was written in 1901 by Maltbie Davenport Babcock - who until yesterday I didn’’t know anything about - I didn’t have a chance before the vespers service to look him up (but had idly wondered if he might have been a jazz musician).
So, along with being something of a charismatic, superstar clergyman in the Presbyterian church in New York, he was apparently also a musician of rare talent, according to Wikipedia. He wrote several hymns, although the words for this hymn were apparently from a poem he’d written, which his wife got published posthumously.
This is God's wondrous world, and to my listening ears
all nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
Actually - the original words, of the original poem, were: “This is my Father’s World” but it was revised to more inclusive language before being added to the hymn book.
I’ve known and loved this hymn for a long time, as I’m one of those people who experiences the divine presence in nature. And I’ve always just thought of that phrase “the music of the spheres” as a lovely what I’d call “quainitism” - until just a few weeks ago.
I was listening to an episode of the CBC “Ideas” podcast, which featured a lecture by a man named Stephon Alexander, who is both a physicist and an accomplished jazz musician. And one of the things he talked about was how many of the greatest scientific minds - not just of the past few centuries, but throughout human history - were also musicians.
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The first example is Pythagorus - the ancient Greek mathematician (500 BC), probably best known for that thing we all had to learn in school: “The Pythagoreum Theorem” - which I think had something to do with triangles?
Pythagorus
Well, Pythatgorus was also very curious about the universe.
And… he was also a musician.
And he developed a theory as to how the planets moved, and it was based.. on music.
And to test his theory, he created an instrument called a monochord.
The monochord was designed based on ratios - halfs, thirds, quarters, etc - and when played, it basically reflected what we now know as the modern western tonal system (a chromatic scale where an octave is divided into twelve pitches, a half (semi) tone apart.
Pythagorus' theory was that the movement of the planets was also based on ratios.
And that the planets were basically playing a harmony, each in proportion to their distance from the earth (back then, of course, the earth was believed to the the centre of the universe). And he called this phenomenon “the music of the spheres” - so that’s where the phrase comes from!
(Interesting fact: Pythagorus also coined the term “cosmos” - meaning “that in the universe which has order and harmony”.)
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With 2500 years of hindsight, we know Pythagorus wasn’t completely correct, but he was onto something, although it took many centuries - and minds like that of Plato, Aristotle and Copernicus to move the idea along - and for it to be discovered that, of course, the earth wasn’t at the centre of things.
Now, fast-forward about a thousand years, to the 17th century and a German astronomer by the name of Johannes Kepler.
Kepler, armed with the knowledge the planets in our solar system revolve around the sun rather than the earth, went back to Pythagorus’ notion of the “music of the spheres’, and rather than looking at the planets’ relative distance from the earth, he was looking at the ratios of the velocities the planets - how fast or slow they were moving, relative to the sun.
And lo and behold, this worked out! And he was able to demonstrate that the planets did play harmonies based on how fast they were moving relative to the sun (wouldn’t you know it, the earth is a perfect fifth!)
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Moving to the 20th century, we come to another notable scientist/musician: Albert Einstein. Einstein was trained in music theory and was apparently a pretty good violinist. And interestingly, when he got stuck on a problem, Einstein would sit down and improvise on a piano, even though he didn’t know how to play the piano.
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Ok, so I learned something else from this podcast that I need to tell you about.
It’s now believed that the early universe existed about 14 billion years ago. And at that time, there were no galaxies - this early universe was just a “vibrating ocean of plasma”, similar to the surface of the sun - a plasma ocean just undulating with tiny ripples (Stephon Alexander, CBC podcast “The Physics of Jazz”, based on Perimeter Institute Public Lecture, Aug.23, 2024)
Plasma ocean
And when the galaxies did form, then there were different kinds of waves; basically, different types of things (planets, black holes, supernovas, etc - produce different sets of vibrations.
Kind of like… instruments.
If you think about it, different instruments all play the same notes - but they sound different! For example, a flute plays and C and a trombone plays a C and you can tell it’s the same pitch but that it’s two different instruments playing the note. And that’s because, when an instrument plays a note, it actually generates not just the note, but a spectrum of vibrations at different volumes (amplitude).
The one we hear as the “note” or the “pitch” is simply the loudest vibration, while the other vibrations are perceived by our brains as the “tambor” or colour (ie, what give a sax its saxophone-ness).
It’s the signature of what gives the instrument its personality. And from those other vibrations that produce the tambor, when each of those vibrations is isolated or separated out, we can then figure out things like the shape of the instrument and what material it’s made from.
This “separating out” of the different vibrations or resonances being given off by an instrument is called “decomposing”. It’s the science behind creating synthesizers and synthesized music. And, it turns out - we can now do this with the vibrations scientists can now detect - which came from the early universe, just after the formation of the galaxies. And when these vibrations are decomposed (separated), it reveals both the geometry and material make-up of the universe, some 14 billion years ago.
And what it shows is that the early universe was basically functioning like a very simple instrument. Oh, and the loudest note? The one which on an instrument we hear as the note or pitch? Well, the pitch of the early universe was apparently an extremely low frequency “A”.
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So… music and our universe - there’s an undeniable connection or alignment between them. Each seems to have the capacity to illuminate the other; and it might not be that big a leap to imagine they are two phenomena originating from the same designing source.
And humans, with our capacity for imagination, have been, throughout our history, weaving these two strands together into a fabric of evolving understanding - not only of the universe of which we’re a part, but of the spiritual implications.
Some have suggested that just like with physics and music, there’s always been a fundamental relationship between science and faith - for scientific inquiry begins from the premise that everything in the universe is part of an integrated, designed and designing whole. That there is a fundamental unity to all reality. One only has to consider, for example, the images of both a human lung and a tree, to get the idea.
And that, it can be argued, requires a leap of faith: to imagine that there’s some kind of designing and unifying source, which many faith traditions identify in their own ways as God, and that unifying energy as Love.
I recently came across the writings of a Hindu monk, theologian and scholar by the name of Swami Padmanabha who is a monk, theologian, and scholar within the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism.
According to this tradition, divine love is “a force of constant expansion… and a God who is affected by ever-evolving and expanding love becomes equally ever-evolving.” In turn, this invites each of us to a continual and hopefully awe-inspiring journey of individual and communal evolution, under the influence of what Padmanabha calls “an ever-fresh love and an ever-fresh God” of love.
What a lovely parallel that is with one strand in particular of our Christian tradition, called “relational theology” - which also draws on this kind of language and concept of God as evolving with us, as we participate in God’s love and act as agents of Christ’s love in God’s emerging kin-dom of love.
And - if God can be described as ever-evolving love, then the music of creation, The Music of the Spheres, the divine music - is also the music of love.
And we and the earth are a part of it - each of us an instrument (a unique set of vibrational energy), contributing to the harmonies in God’s eternal and evolving song of love.
Thanks be to God!
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