‘Misery and Famine’: do the planets in the solar system form a choir?
One of the reasons that we connect with music on such a deep and persistent level is because sweet sound already forms such a big part of our everyday life. When you walk the streets, you hear birds chirping, and industrial life has a chaotic rhythm. It’s everywhere we go; as such, when messages come in the form of sound, we tend to listen. When The Beatles, Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen all create music that speaks to a specific part of us, it’s easy for us to connect with the concept of sound because we already do it on a daily basis.
Have you ever considered that maybe our ability to connect with the sounds around us isn’t a coincidence? It could well be the case that the world is trying to communicate something to us in this endless pursuit of sound. While that may feel like a stretch, some artists have claimed to be from other planets, sent to deliver a message to the world through their music.
One of the most famous artists who came with such a message was the legendary jazz musician Sun Ra. He was always adamant that he wasn’t from Earth and insisted that he had been sent here in a bid to deliver messages from The Creator. He didn’t know what his message was and believed it flowed through him through music. While some saw Free Jazz as rebellion and protest music, Sun Ra saw the disconnected notes as a complicated language that we weren’t ready to translate yet.
“You got to be ready when you play with this band,” he once said to his trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah. “When the harmonies move in a direction that they seemingly are not supposed to move in and still fit, you got another message from another realm from somebody else, and Superior Beings would definitely speak in other harmonic ways because they’re talking to something different.”
Karlheinz Stockhausen is another artist who liked to incorporate the idea of space in his music, trying to send a message. His compositions were experimental, sometimes taking over 24 hours to perform, but they were strangely enticing. He claimed to be from an unnamed planet orbiting a star called Sirius, which is why he was so obsessed with incorporating the sounds of space into his music.
While this sounds incredibly far-fetched, the same trumpeter that Sun Ra spoke to, Ahmed Abdullah, defended musicians who claimed to be from other worlds. He highlighted that if a supreme being were going to send someone to Earth, they would send a musician.
“It makes sense to me that if the Creator sent anyone here, it would be a person who had mastered music, the planet’s universal language,” he said. “Sound is the beginning of all creation, the Nomma, the Om, and the Nam that direct our lives.”
So, if we listen to the natural sounds of the universe, is it trying to tell us something? If you were to ask the astronomer Johannes Kepler, then yes, they were. He wrote in 1619 that, based on some of his calculations, every planet in our solar system had its own unique voice that all formed parts of a choir. Earth was an alto, Mercury a soprano and Mars a tenor. Each planet was singing a variation of the two same notes, Mi and Fa. According to Kepler, the message conveyed within these two notes isn’t as joyous as one might think, as he determined they meant “Miseriam and Famem”, which translates to “Misery and Famine”.
