About

"It is difficult for me to say exactly where the idea came from, much the same as how it is difficult for me to put into words the various forms this project took in its formation. 

 

My first exposure to the Music of the Spheres was sometime in middle school and I was immediately taken with that idea and fascinated by it. The seeds of interest were planted long before I had any idea I wanted to write music. Another exposure to it was the release of the Music of the Spheres (released 2017) album written by Michael Salvatori, Paul McCartney, and Martin O’Donnell as a musical companion to the 2014 video game Destiny.

 

I found myself in a planetarium at one point and seeing the dancing lights above me, the scattering of stars and movement of the night sky ignited the small embers of interest into the flames of an idea. I wanted to do my own interpretation, an interpretation of it I hadn’t seen done before and one that could answer these questions:

 

"If the Music was real and perceptible to us, what would it sound like from our perspective on Earth and in the Solar System? What if the planets could be heard orbiting around us? What if each planet had its own distinct music and joined together in a grandly dense harmony?"

 

I was particularly intrigued by the idea of hearing the planets orbit around us. the idea of many voices drifting past you, alternatingly fast and slow, shimmering and singing to the listener from whatever direction the planet was in. 

 

Not long after a piece started to form in my mind I told Jacob about it. My intention then wasn’t to get him to sign on to collaborate to make it, I was more just excited to share an idea of mine with a fellow composer. The pattern of work for a while was to come up with ideas and then share them, and I think as I told him about it more and more he became increasingly interested. It’s a good thing he did as well because if he hadn't this piece would have remained just a brain child of mine and little more. 

 

As we began the very first thing we had discussions about was the scale of time for the piece. My original idea was to do 100 years, perhaps 165 so that every planet in the system could have one full rotation around the sun. We also considered starting in May 2001, our birth years, and going until the current year. The final destination of our idea was the span of time when Humanity was sending astronauts to the moon. July 20th 1969 - December 20th 1972. Humans have never been out of low orbit before or after this time frame and I felt like that would be a good time frame for the piece, the 3.5 years where humans reached out beyond Earth. 

 

Musically, my initial idea was much more mathematical than it ended up becoming. My original plan was to start each planet on a pitch that would be inversely proportional to the planet's distance from earth. The further away the lower the pitch, and the closer, the higher. This pitch would bend and change in unending glissandi as the distance from earth constantly changed. This would be an interesting experiment, but I came to quickly realize that that version of the piece would be just plain bad. A cacophony of unending, undulating tones that could never really inspire the beauty and harmony of the planets and their movement. 

 

The idea changed to having each planet have a distinct musical voice - a different instrument and a different short melody. These melodies must be able to flow over one another at different speeds, and at different times, in every possible fragmentation or version so that the Music of the Spheres was ever changing, but still beautiful and dense in harmony at every moment. 

 

It was an interesting compositional challenge, writing an eight voice piece where every voice is repeating a different musical line, beginning at different times, playing at different speeds, and over varying lengths of time. This approach also yielded many moments of musical excitement and surprise when the music of the planets overlapped and intermingled with others in ways I had not anticipated."
 

-Sean Smith

May 2024