“Music is well said to be the speech of angels,” wrote Thomas Carlyle, the leading 19th-century Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher.
Before the geocentric understanding of the universe was dismantled by Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei’s observations, people believed the Earth was the center around which the planets, stars, sun, and moon revolved. This conception of the universe originated the Pythagorean philosophical concept of “musica universalis” (“universal music”), also known as “music of the spheres.”
