Music and the Making of Modern Science

82 Chapter 5

me. Forsake me not, O Lord; O my God, be not far from me. ” As a devout Lutheran, he

viewed the semitone of human suffering as an essential part of the quest for divine grace,

so that the song of the Earth resounds within the larger scheme of suffering and redemp-

tion. The semitones in Lasso ’ s motet and in Kepler ’ s song are signs of terrestrial disso-

nance that can be reconciled in celestial harmony.

This music is alive in every sense, not just lifeless intervals and ratios; Kepler takes

Plato ’ s concept of a world-soul animating the cosmos further by describing its activity in

the most vivid physical terms. Emphasizing the primacy of experience and felt response,

Kepler connects music with sex, both mirroring the soul ’ s yearning to reunite with the

primal archetypes that shine through visible, palpable reality. Though novel in its graphic

sexuality, his idiosyncratic (and not much noticed) ideas draw on ancient connections

between er ō s and musik ē.^59 Kepler argues that cadences, essential to musical syntax, are

fundamentally sexual in character because of the underlying sexuality of numbers them-

selves. In a 1608 letter, Kepler identifies 2 and 10 as male, 3 and 24 as female, noting that

“ I do not think I can more clearly and explicitly explain this than by saying that you are

to see the images here of phalluses, there vulvas. ”^60 A slightly less explicit figure appears

in Harmonice mundi ( figure 5.4 ), where he draws attention to the geometric figures he

considers the source of musical ratios: “ What is surprising then if the progeny of the

Figure 5.4

Kepler ’ s illustration of the sexual relations between male numbers (2 and 10) and female (3 and 24).