The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe

The Music of the Spheres is a not-completely worthless history of the inter-relation of music (and to an extent, art in general) and science. If James had stopped at providing a simple survey of his materials, he might have done well in providing a brief history of Western civilization's evolving attitudes toward music and science up to the 18th century. James, unfortunately, fails to prove his thesis, and as science becomes more complex, shrinks from that part of his discussion.James posits that science has failed modern society in a way that it did not fail ancient civilizations through the Romantic era. Philosophy and science, bound together, provided mankind with a sense of place in the universe, and this was not only reflected in the development of art, but this philosophical understanding derived, in portion, from understanding of music. While that may be true, the understanding that the ancient philosophers gathered from their musical experiments was the foundation for centuries of fallacious thinking about the nature of the universe which, when it clashed with empirical observation during the Renaissance, led to the arrest of Galileo, among others. In defending this short-sighted view of the importance of music, James is left in the awkward position of supporting a philosophical view of the world that is not supported by our observations of the world. James never gives us this defense, and instead discusses the elevation of the status of the artist as the meaning-maker in the Romantic era at length, without ever really stopping to consider that science's contributions to society since the mid-1800s could be anything but a bad thing.All this seems to be because James has fundamentally misunderstood the project of philosophy, and the project of science as a sub-discipline of philosophy. Philosophers have been tasked for millennia with helping us understand everything from the best form of government to our place in the universe, and in the 1660s, the "experimental program" of philosophy began diverging into modern science: a form of philosophy that examines the world around us the way it actually is, and attempts to draw conclusions from observations.The experimental program of philosophy was a marked difference from the inductive approaches that led the ancients to rationalize about the music of the spheres, but just because the work of science has branched off from the work of philosophy does not mean that philosophers have stopped asking questions of grand importance. James here seems to be lamenting the passage of an era when it was possible for someone to make wild rationalizations about the function of the universe from the banging of pots.While it is not clear that James does not understand modern science well enough to discuss it in relation to music, he refrains from that discussion as his history approaches the modern day. He shifts the conversation away from his original theme by simple dismissals that theories of evolution and quantum mechanics have left us nothing but a spiritual sense of ennui as the universe ceases to have any inherent meaning. Even as James discusses more recent musical developments (like 12-tone composition) and the increasing diversity within musical tastes, he fails to grasp that our rich musical landscape is possible, in part, because science has helped give us the philosophical means to understand that we all get to decide what the universe means for us.Unable or unwilling to engage with poly-structuralist modes of meaning-making, James leaves the reader with a wish for a moment of silence in a cacophonous landscape. Unable to perceive the singular song that would give us all meaning in the noise, James covers his ears, and invites the reader to do the same.James' reach exceeds his grasp in The Music of the Spheres. While James' understanding of music history is beyond dispute, this book would have been much better had he as complete an understanding of science or philosophy. Instead, The Music of the Spheres reads like an undergraduate essay on a complex topic. James is capable of telling part of the story, and if he stuck to the part that he knew about, this would have been a much better book.

Buen material informativo y educativo. Contenido adecuado y

Excellent book, filled with knowledge and goodness and from a place of well-informed rationality and intelligence and rhetoric. Satisfied with my purchase and reading of this excellent book for any musicians collection.

Wonder collection going back into early and mid century and how was music brought to life and how it intergrates with numbers and science.

Good info. Book as promised.

The Music of The Spheres is a Classic and must-have for those interested in the fields of Music, Physics, Mathematics and those in related fields. I got this book at a great price and very fast delivery.

I began reading this book with the highest of expectations, based both upon the credentials of the author and the reviews contained herein. However, now that I have completed it, I must rate it with some personal disappointment. Although the book is some 230 pages long and covers several millennia worth of history, its structure lends the feeling that it is a collection of condensed articles taken from the pages of periodicals. Anyone who reads Discovery Magazine will immediately recognize this factually succinct trait.And succinct is what best describes the depth of information presented by this book. It provides a very thorough lineage of relevant historical figures throughout the ages, but sadly it only gives the majority of them a cursory mention. While he devotes alot of attention to the specific numerological devices of Pythagoras and such, very little of their ideas are easily comprehendible according to his fragmented explanations, and the reader must go to an outside source to grasp their true mechanics. The passages concerning musical scales suffers especially from a lack of explanation, and if I had not already possessed an insight into their nature, I would have been utterly befuddled about what Mr. James was trying to tell me.Further on, the author begins to insert his personal opinions about the people he is describing. In an interesting chronicle of a minor feud between Kepler and Fludd, Mr. James draws sides immediately and nearly dismisses Fludd as a mystic who merely regurgitated archaic knowledge, but only after slight after slight does he admit, seemingly regrettably and with an apologetic tone, that the very crux of Kepler's argument was wrong. And worse still, near the end he offers the opinion that Brahms was the `most cosmic' composer of all time, and then in no way supports his conjecture. It is incredibly frustrating to try and figure out why the author feels the way he does about almost every subject he brings up, an obstacle made even more difficult given the author's semi bombastic, abstruse sentence structure. A notable exception to this is his chapter on Newton, which was the most thorough and intelligible character description offered.In summation, the phrase `A brief and cursory history of' should be inserted before its title to give any potential reader an accurate idea of what this interesting-yet uneven and biased-account of the dissolution of and between science and music achieves. It mentions fascinating concepts and ideas, but altogether it does little more than refer to them with a glib capacity.

A very interesting read, if you are into mathematics, music and history you will enjoy this. Originally bought it as a bit of research into mathematics and music for a module I was doing at university.

This is a complicated but interesting book. If you are into music and physics then give it a go. It is certainly not for the faint hearted, but it certainly makes you think.

Very good

A fantastic book. Love it!

Great book!