Elliott Carter Explains It All For You

The great Methuselah of American modernism, Elliott Carter, turns 101 today. Many happy returns of the day! For fun, here’s a dusty corner of Carter’s career: his brief turn as an astronomical scholar. In 1939, Charles Glenn Wallis—a prolific translator who also Englished Copernicus, Pico della Mirandola, and Baudelaire, among others—published his translation of Johannes Kepler’s 1619 Harmonices Mundi, the “Harmonies of the World.” Kepler, whose eponymous laws of planetary motion rank as one of the great scientific breakthroughs of all time, followed that up with an analysis of harmonic ratios derived from the orbits of the various planets of the solar system. The difference between the minimum and maximum angular speeds of a given orbiting planet could be expressed as a harmonic ratio; the ratios of planets in neighboring orbits also, Kepler demonstrated, corresponded to musical consonances (with the exception of Jupiter and Mars, Kepler unaware of the existence of the solar system’s asteroid belt). Kepler thus located the origin of prevalent quasi-Pythagorean music theory in the heavens. In Wallis’s translation:

Accordingly you won’t wonder any more that a very excellent order of sounds or pitches in a musical system or scale has been set up by men, since you see that they are doing nothing else in this business excepts to play the apes of God the Creator and to act out, as it were, a certain drama of the ordination of the celestial movements.

Kepler’s exposition is crammed with musical jargon, leading to passages like this:

Mars and the Earth have been allotted the least ratio, exactly the sesquialteral or perfect fifth: for one third of 57´3″ is 19´1″, the double of which is 38´2″, which is Mars’ very number, viz., 38´11″. They have also been allotted the greater ratio of 5 : 12, the octave and minor third, but more imperfectly. For one twelfth of 61´18″ is 5´6½″, which if multiplied by 5 gives 25´33″, although instead of that Mars has 26´14″. Accordingly, there is a deficiency of a diminished diesis approximately, viz., 35 : 36. But the Earth and Venus together have been allotted 3 : 5 as their greatest consonance and 5 : 8 as their least, the major and minor sixths, but again not perfectly….

In order to help the reader make sense out of that thicket of numbers and curious terms, Wallis had “Elliott Carter, Jr.”—that’s how he signed his contribution—provide footnotes. “As our present musical terms do not apply strictly to the music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” Carter writes, “a brief explanation of terms here may be useful.” Carter goes on to briefly expound on ratios, intervals, and 17th-century music theory in general. Carter also converted Kepler’s examples into modern musical notation, as, for example, this chart, which shows the modal natures of planetary orbits by filling in the tones between the extremes of each planet’s speed-derived interval:

You can read the whole of Wallis’s translation—footnotes included—here. Carter and Wallis were both Greenwich Villagers, but also had a connection via Annapolis, Maryland. Carter briefly taught at St. John’s College in Annapolis, famous at the time for having instituted a “Great Books” curriculum under the guidance of scholars Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan; Wallis, who had been part of Barr and Buchanan’s abortive “Committee on the Liberal Arts” at the University of Chicago, followed them to Maryland. Both Carter and Wallis eventually ended up back in New York, Carter working for the Office of War Information, Wallis publishing translations, criticism, and original poetry. (Wallis, incidentally, had a legendary Village demise—sitting in an open window at a Partisan Review party, Wallis laughed so hard at another partygoer’s witticism than he fell out of the window to his death.)

Carter’s 1999 opera What Next? (which, with a little hunting around, you can watch online via TanglewoodWebTV) features an astronomer among its stranded travelers, who sings, in Paul Griffiths’ libretto, a list of stars, luxuriating in their exotic names—”Antares, Alrakis, Maasym, Mizar.” Another character, a somewhat questionable seer, responds in Kepleresque fashion: “The message is written in thousands of stars.”