The Music of the Spheres
Don Lago
Like Henrietta Leavitt, Cannon was deaf… The following week she and a
friend invited Shapley over for dinner, and they all went to the symphony.
—George Johnson, Miss Leavitt’s Stars
Yes? And what kind of symphonies do deaf astronomers enjoy?
The Cannon in question was Annie Cannon. She and Henrietta Leavitt worked together at Harvard Observatory early in the 20th century, under director Harlow Shapley. Even today, when more women find more open doors to careers in astronomy, Cannon and Leavitt remain two of the most famous women astronomers in history. Curiously, both were deaf.
I like to imagine Henrietta Leavitt and Annie Cannon sitting together in a concert hall, perhaps with Harlow Shapley sitting between them, watching the performers move their bows back and forth on the strings, move their fingers up and down on the horns and barely move anything else. I’ve always wondered why concert audiences sit there for two hours watching motions so undramatic. The musicians who pound on the drums and crash the cymbals can be pretty dramatic, but you usually have to wait a long time for them to have their brief turn. If you look around a concert hall, you can usually see some audience members with their eyes closed, and more would like to close their eyes, but they are afraid of being mistaken for being asleep. Surely they have the right idea. They are giving all their attention to their hearing. If there are any blind people in the audience, they may be hearing the music better than anyone.
When humans lose one of their senses, other senses often become more acute. This isn’t just a matter of attention either, but of physiology, of neural compensation. Deaf people sometimes develop a keener sense of vision. Perhaps Henrietta Leavitt and Annie Cannon saw the performers’ hand motions more sharply than anyone else. Perhaps they were fascinated by the same process they saw in a weaver’s hands playing a loom: the emergence of meaningful patterns out of numerous little events. In the same way, cosmologies emerged out of thousands of photographic light-notes. Perhaps they were living in a world where sound just didn’t matter very much. In space, no one can hear the symphony.
It’s hard to find much reliable information about the deafness of Annie Cannon and Henrietta Leavitt or much else about them. Both have faded into biographical silence. When science journalist George Johnson was researching the book quoted above, he gave up trying to make it the first biography of Henrietta Leavitt, for he could find only scraps of information about her. He also found that much of what had been published about her was wrong. One book about deaf scientists suggested that Leavitt was deaf by the time she enrolled in Oberlin College, but Johnson found that Leavitt had enrolled in Oberlin’s conservatory of music. Many sources repeated the statement that Leavitt was “extremely deaf” a few years later when she entered Radcliffe, but Johnson found a letter from over a decade later in which Leavitt expressed concern about her faltering hearing.
Annie Cannon lost her hearing while in college, but even those who worked with her left different impressions about the extent of her deafness. Harlow Shapley said that Cannon’s hearing was “pretty much lost,” while Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who would benefit from the careers of Cannon and Leavitt by becoming the first female chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, reported that Cannon wore a hearing aid, which she would remove when she wanted to be undistracted. This leaves open the possibility that with her hearing aid Annie Cannon could have had some sort of musical experience. If the gentle string music was lost on her, perhaps music with loud horns, drums and organ could have gotten through. Also sprach Zarathustra would have been perfect. Did Annie close her eyes to concentrate and see the blackness and imagine this to be the blackness of space and the music of space?
Annie Cannon and Henrietta Leavitt took part in the most ambitious sky survey attempted at the time, a census seeking to catalog every observable star according to location, brightness and color. Cannon and Leavitt and a staff of other women, called “computers,” studied tens of thousands of photographic plates and measured every dot of light. They were paid as if this was clerical work, but it gave them the chance to be the first to notice important patterns.
Cannon noticed that stars belonged to distinct types and devised a classification system still used today, a system that pointed to the stellar life cycles astronomers would later discover. Leavitt was studying Cepheid variable stars, which vary in brightness, when she noticed that the brighter a star was, the longer its cycle of variation lasted. Leavitt published a paper about this period/brightness law, and Harlow Shapley, then at Mt. Wilson Observatory, realized that this could be the key to mapping the universe.
Astronomers had never had any reliable gauge for determining cosmic distances because they didn’t know how intrisincally bright stars were. Was the brightness a function of distance? Did the star vary in brightness? Was the star dimmer because of intervening clouds of dust and gas? However, with Cepheids, if two stars with identical periods were different in apparent brightness, it was definitely due to distance, and you could calculate exactly how much distance.
Shapley wrote to Harvard Observatory’s director William Pickering: “Her discovery of the relation of period to brightness is destined to be one of the most significant results of stellar astronomy, I believe.” Shapley used Cepheid variables to map our galaxy. Edwin Hubble used Cepheids to prove that there were galaxies outside our own and to start to prove that we were part of an expanding universe, expanding from a Big Bang. Shapley’s work with Cepheids won him the directorship of Harvard Observatory, where he became Henrietta Leavitt’s boss, at least for the final year of her life. As Leavitt lay dying of cancer, Shapley visited her and expressed his appreciation for her work.
On his first day at Harvard Observatory Shapley started appreciating Annie Cannon’s “phenomenal memory.” He told her that he wanted to see a photographic plate with a particular star on it, and she knew the five-digit plate catalog number from memory, out of many thousands of plates. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin decided that Cannon possessed an uncanny visual sense that served not only as a photographic memory, but as an ability to see subtle details where others saw almost nothing. In her autobiography, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin recalled her own impressions in looking at Cannon’s photographic plates:
It seemed impossible that anyone could see enough in those tiny smears to classify the spectra… In the last years of Miss Cannon’s life, Henry Norris Russell used to say ‘Someone ought to find out from Miss Cannon exactly how she classifies each spectral type.’ I argued with him that she would not be able to tell them because she did not know. She was like a person with a phenomenal memory for faces. She had amazing visual recall, but it was not based on reasoning. She did not think about the spectra as she classified them—she simply recognized them.
Cannon’s visual powers were probably due to her deafness. In his autobiography, Through Rugged Ways to the Stars, Shapley recognized another way in which Cannon’s deafness had encouraged her astronomical talents: “Miss Cannon had the disadvantage—or advantage—of having had some sort of infection while she was in college, and as a result her hearing was pretty much lost. That handicap took her out of the social life and put her into science. In some ways I feel rather grateful to that particular bug.”
I don’t want to leave Shapley sounding insensitive about Cannon’s deafness, so it should be noted that quite a few prominent deaf people have indeed considered their deafness to convey advantages. Thomas Edison almost celebrated his deafness for enhancing his powers of concentration. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian pioneer of rocketry, found social life so awkward that “this caused me to withdraw deep within myself… My deafness made me ridiculous. It estranged me from others and compelled me, out of boredom, to read, concentrate and daydream.” Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s partial deafness encouraged him to shun society and embrace nature, an orientation he codified into Romantic philosophy. Gilbert White, in The Natural History of Selborne, bemoaned a deafness that prevented him from hearing the birds singing, but it also probably encouraged the immersion in nature that made White an inspiration for generations of naturalists. We don’t know how Cannon and Leavitt felt about their deafness, but they certainly didn’t miss the birds singing in space.
It was an odd coincidence that two deaf women not only worked at the same observatory at the same time but made important discoveries there. Leavitt didn’t owe her job to Cannon’s precedence or mentoring. Leavitt started her association with Harvard Observatory as a volunteer at age 25, before she lost her hearing. In an even odder coincidence, the English astronomer who had first discovered Cepheid variables in 1784 was also deaf.
John Goodricke was born deaf but was enrolled in one of the first institutions devoted to educating the deaf, Braidwood Academy. One day when Goodricke was nine years old, Samuel Johnson, who was himself partially deaf, visited Braidwood and was amazed to see deaf children doing challenging math. Goodricke developed acute visual sensitivity. As a teenager Goodricke met astronomer Edward Pigott, who was interested in variable stars. Pigott put Goodricke to work observing the variable star Algol, and Goodricke conceived the idea that Algol varied because it was actually a system of two stars, with a dimmer star regularly eclipsing a brighter star. This concept explained a large proportion of variable stars, but not all of them. Other astronomers had never even noticed that the star Delta Cephei was variable, but Goodricke not only noticed this, he found that Delta Cephei varied in a pattern that couldn’t be explained by the concept of eclipsing binary stars. Delta Cephei had to vary because some internal process actually made its brightness fluctuate. Goodricke found more stars that fit this pattern and called them Cepheid variables. Goodricke’s discoveries won him membership in the Royal Society at age 21, but only two weeks later he died of pneumonia.
Adding still more to the connection between deaf astronomers and variable stars was Robert Grant Aitken, who spent 40 years at Lick Observatory in California. Aitken was once injured by a car on a Berkeley street because he couldn’t hear its approach or horn. At the same time that Henrietta Leavitt was working on Cepheid variables, Aitken was preparing his 1918 book, Binary Stars, based on his study of 3,000 binary stars. Aitken, Leavitt and Cannon each got moon craters named in their honor. Moon craters like giant ears listening to the silence of space.
The many connections between deaf astronomers and variable stars might leave you thinking that there must be many deaf astronomers, but in fact this essentially completes the list of prominent ones. We are invited to indulge in the notion that variable stars must have some special attraction for deaf astronomers. Variable stars are all about rhythm, and rhythm is the backbone of music. Variable stars are playing a silent music, a music of long vibrating strings of light, of gravity horns, a music that contains a far deeper structure and harmony than merely human music. In finding the relationship between Cepheid periods and luminosity, Henrietta Leavitt had found the same kind of law that inspired Pythagoras to proclaim that the cosmos was filled with the music of the spheres.
The Greeks became enthralled by the idea that behind the confusing phenomena of the world lay a hidden order, a natural order. Thales suggested that the whole cosmos was made of water, which took on various forms and actions. Other Greek philosophers tried to build the world out of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Music gave Pythagoras a revelation that the deepest order of the cosmos was mathematical. Legend says that Pythagoras was walking past a blacksmith’s shop when he noticed the varied sounds of the hammers striking anvils. He went inside and studied the hammers and realized that their weights had an exact mathematical correlation with the musical intervals they produced. Pythagoras then went home and stretched out gut-strings and plucked them and heard them announcing mathematical ratios. If music was math and if the sky showed mathematical order, then the sky must be musical. For Pythagoras the sky consisted of giant crystal spheres one inside another, revolving spheres with holes that allowed you to see the cosmic fire beyond, see it as stars and planets. The stars and planets moved in reliable ratios that were just like musical intervals. This must have meant that the crystal spheres were musical, giving out great tones, tones adding up to a vast harmony. The cosmos was like a giant lyre playing beautiful music.
Pythagoras’s vision would cast a long spell. Plato turned the music of the spheres into a math-obsessed Demiurge who created a cosmos of math-filled order. Cicero turned the music of the spheres into popular literature in Scipio’s Dream. Early Christians like Clement of Alexandria used Pythagorean imagery but replaced the Demiurge with Christ. Tycho Brahe incorporated Pythagorean ratios into the architecture of his mansion-observatory. Kepler became so obsessed with the idea that the solar system displays geometrical perfection that he ignored his own discovery that the planets move not in circles but in ellipses, and in his The Harmony of the Universe he indulged in a Pythagorean quest for the musical codes in the sky. Newton believed that he had merely rediscovered knowledge that Pythagoras had kept obscured within his mystery cult. Mozart turned Scipio’s Dream into The Magic Flute, which sings of “the unwonted harmony of the moving spheres you hear.”
Could it be that if Annie Cannon and Henrietta Leavitt and Harlow Shapley went to a musical performance together, they went to The Magic Flute? Then they would have heard Scipio asking why, if the heavens create such magnificent music, humans are deaf to it. The goddess Costanza replies, echoing Aristotle’s answer:
It too far exceeds the perception of your senses.
The eye that turns upon the sun
cannot see the sun at which it gazes,
dazzled by that same
excess of splendor.He who lives on the banks
of the tumbling waters of the Nile
does not notice the noise
of the raging torrent.
Compared with not being able to hear the music of the spheres, not being able to hear a symphony or opera could have been too trivial for Annie and Henrietta to worry about. Or do these words imply that someone with especially keen senses might have a chance of hearing the music of the spheres? Annie and Henrietta certainly found subtle harmonies that would have impressed Pythagoras. If humans require a noise much louder than the Nile, it was Henrietta Leavitt who first creaked open the lid of the Big Bang.
After Kepler the crystal spheres and their music faded out of the scientific cosmos, but Pythagoras’s vision of the mathematical order of the cosmos became one of the foundations of science. The universe was built of sphere within sphere of extraordinary order, of atom within cell within body within ecosystem within planet within solar system within galaxy. In every generation astronomers have experienced Pythagorean awe at seeing the secrets of the universe unfold in their equations. Albert Einstein, who preferred playing Bach and Mozart on his violin because of the mathematical order in their music, said that mathematical elegance was one of the first things he sought in a scientific theory, one of the surest signs that a theory must be true. Once, the night sky was built out of stories and poetry, but now astronomy textbooks are full of equations, which are poetry of a different kind, a deeper kind in which “cosmos” rhymes with “life,” in which human life is articulated by a vast sequence of rhymes.
Annie Cannon and Henrietta Leavitt must have felt some Pythagorean awe that a few numbers could make sense out of their years of searching the stars, and perhaps this makes it a bit less likely that if they went to the concert hall with Harlow Shapley they went to see Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Holst’s work was based on a different vision of the cosmos, an astrological cosmos in which planets were gods whose personalities and eccentric whims ruled human life. Even Shapley would have been deaf to such music or, at least, the idea behind it.
It would have been more appropriate for them to go hear music by William Herschel. William Herschel spent most of the 1760s composing music for orchestra and solo instruments, especially the organ. Herschel was the organist at a chapel in the resort town of Bath, England. His father had been a musician in a German military band, but William didn’t care for military life or, it seems, military tunes, and he moved to England to pursue a career in loftier music. In addition to playing the organ he gave music lessons and conducted choirs. Herschel probably heard the mathematical order in music, for he enjoyed studying mathematics. Herschel was 35 years old when he became captivated by astronomy, and it wasn’t the sky that captivated him but a book, which suggests that he was captivated by ideas about cosmic order.
Herschel began building ambitious telescopes and observing the sky. Sometimes he went straight from performing music to a night of observing, or straight from the telescope to the Sunday morning organ. Perhaps the music and the stars blended thoroughly in his mind. Certainly he heard the music of the spheres in 1781 when he spotted a sphere changing position from night to night. He was the astronomer who discovered a new planet, Uranus. Coincidentally, William Herschel’s sister Caroline, who gave up a singing career for astronomy, became one of the few women astronomers in the same league as Annie Cannon and Henrietta Leavitt. Yet in the end, it’s very unlikely that Cannon, Leavitt and Shapley would have had the chance to hear Herschel’s music, which history has allowed to go silent.
The years that Cannon and Leavitt worked together were the heyday of the silent film. Silent films placed deaf people and hearing people on equal terms. A bell ringing on a movie screen was equally silent for everyone. Even the greatest of bells, the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral, were silent in “The Hunchback of Norte Dame.” The deaf bell ringer, Quasimodo, was played by Lon Chaney, whose real-life parents were both deaf. The bells of Notre Dame were supposed to be the voice of God summoning humans to worship him, but their loudness had rendered Quasimodo deaf, and no one in the movie audience heard anything either. We can imagine Cannon and Leavitt and Shapley going to silent movies together and watching church bells proclaiming nothing, watching human mouths moving without meaning anything; yet when the camera glimpsed the night sky, the sky was just as right as ever: the stars were tiny Pythagorean bells.
Around 1550, it was to summon the deaf to church that a Spanish monk, Pedro Ponce de Leon, became the first person to teach language to the deaf. Ponce de Leon worried that if the deaf couldn’t understand the word of God or make confession, their souls would be lost. Christianity placed unprecedented importance upon The Word. When the first Greek Christians replaced the Demiurge with Christ, Christ inherited the Demiurge’s Logos, the rational order at the heart of the cosmos. That’s rational as in ratio, the heart of the Pythagorean cosmos. “Logos” means “word,” the kind of reasoned word a Greek philosopher would speak. Christian historians deduce that the Gospel of John was aimed at Greeks when it turned the act of creation into an act of Logos: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” God creates the world through a sequence of words: “And God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Since God was still alone in the universe, there was no one to hear him speak. What mattered was the divine power of words. Words are made out of breath, and breath is the essence of life.
The Greek and Christian emphasis upon the word may have culturally influenced 20th-century astronomers when they needed a name for the beginning of the universe. Humans rely on vision first, of all the senses, and astronomers rely on light completely, so astronomers could have honored light by calling the birth of the universe “the Great Flash.” Since there is no sound in space, it is scientifically nonsensical to use an auditory term. Yet astronomers have adopted one: the Big Bang.
The cosmos was silent and the cosmos was deaf. Even after the cosmos started making sounds, the cosmos remained completely deaf. The sounds came from tiny pockets in the vast silence. As proto-stars accumulated gas, the gas began conducting sound waves. Even after the stars ignited, they could still contain sound waves, but of course the stars could never contain ears. Planets and moons began making sounds, the sounds of Jupiter-dense atmospheres blowing and blowing, the sounds of asteroids crashing, the sounds of lightning and rain and volcanoes. But almost all of these sounds would remain forever unheard.
It was Annie Cannon and Henrietta Leavitt who represented the normal state of the universe, and it was the rest of the human race that was the anomaly. Annie and Henrietta were hearing the true voice of the universe, the ancient and vast silence. The great silence had crept out of space and into their ears and taken over their heads. The great silence had taken on human form, a form that finally allowed the great silence to study itself and recognize itself and speak itself. The great silence became human in the way that Christ became flesh, to redeem an Earth that had forgotten its source. The Great Silence became the Word, and the Word was the sign language of the stars, and the Word was the Big Bang. The music of the spheres became voices with which to sing.
It was the nearly silent ringing of a church bell that finally convinced Ludwig van Beethoven that he was going completely deaf. He had tried everything to avoid losing his hearing, but nothing had worked. He wrestled titanically against the Great Silence, but the Great Silence was far more powerful than he. The Great Silence wanted him and seized him. Beethoven fell into despair. He considered suicide. He moaned that he would be “forced to become a philosopher already in my twenty-eighth year.” A philosopher like Pythagoras? Beethoven withdrew into himself like a star collapsing into a black hole.
Of course! If Annie Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt and Harlow Shapley went to the symphony together, it must have been Beethoven, the completely deaf Beethoven, who composed music with enough loudness, drums and horns that even the deaf could feel it vibrating the floor, the chair and their teeth. It must have been the Ninth Symphony, the creation of one who had gone beyond despair: the philosopher Beethoven, the Pythagorean Beethoven, the Beethoven who could hear in the great silence the music of the spheres and the Beethoven who could no longer hear the church bells but who still yearned to call out for celebration.
Imagine Annie Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt and Harlow Shapley leaning forward as the Ninth Symphony winds and builds into its finale, as the singers and choir begin the “Ode to Joy.” This Joy is not just a feeling but a Greek goddess, Laetitia, the daughter of Elysium, the Greek heaven. Joy personifies a nurturing cosmos: “All creation drinks joy from the breasts of nature.” Joy also seems to be Christian: “Brothers, above the starry vault, there surely dwells a loving Father.”
Perhaps we shouldn’t mind: The Romantics readily mixed pagan gods and Christian messages. The “Ode to Joy” is a mystical vision beyond words, beyond religions; it is a vision of a joyous cosmos. Annie and Henrietta couldn’t hear the words anyway. But perhaps they could feel the joy. They could certainly see the intensity of the players and the singers. Perhaps they saw the intensity of Beethoven composing music he could never hear. Or was it the Great Silence speaking through him? The Great Silence that shut out all other distractions so that humans could finally hear the music of the spheres. Perhaps as Annie and Henrietta gazed at the stars every day and every night they saw the notes of a majestic symphony. Was it the “Ode to Joy” they heard?
At the end, Annie Cannon, Henrietta Leavitt and Harlow Shapley stood up, applauding.