Music of the Spheres / Documentary
The movement of the stars and planets was for the ancients the image of perfection: to see celestial harmony was to hear it and to hear it was to understand it. This religious and philosophical vision reappears in our conception of art. Pictures and sculptures are not, for us, beautiful or ugly things but intellectual and sensitive entities, spiritual realities, ways in which Ideas are manifested.
Octavio Paz
The harmony of the spheres is an ancient theory of origin Pythagorean idea that the universe is governed according to bb3b-136bad5cf58d_proporciones numéricas armoniosas y que el movimiento de loscuerpos celestes según la representación geocéntrica del universo — el Sol, the Moon and the planets — is governed by proportions musical; the distances between planets would correspond, according to this theory, to the musical intervals.
Ode to Salinas by Fray Luis de León
the air calms down
and dresses in beauty and unused light,
Salinas, when it sounds
extreme music
by your wise hand governed.
To whose are divine
my soul, which is submerged in oblivion,
return to charge the tino
and lost memory
of its origin first elucidated.
And as it is known,
in luck and thoughts it improves;
gold unknown
that the blind common people adore,
deceptive expired beauty.
air passes through everything
until reaching the highest sphere,
and hey there another way
non-perishable
music, which is of all the first.
See how the great teacher
applied to this immense zither,
with skillful movement
produces the sacred sound
with which this eternal temple is sustained.
And how is it composed?
of matching numbers, then send
consonant response,
and both of us stubbornly
They mix a sweet harmony.
Here the soul sails
through a sea of sweetness, and finally
in it thus drowns,
that no accident
stranger or pilgrim hears or feels.
Oh blissful swoon!
O death that gives life! O sweet oblivion!
last in your rest
without being returned
never to this base and vile sense!
To this good I call you,
glory of the apollonian sacred choir,
friends, who I love
above all treasure,
that everything else is sad I cry.
Oh! ring continuously,
Salinas, yours are in my ears,
by whom to the divine good
awaken the senses,
leaving the rest asleep.
