“The heavenly motions are nothing

but a continuous song for several voices,

perceived not by the ear but by the intellect,

music that sets landmarks

in the immeasurable flow of time.”

Galileo

When we gaze at stars and planets, they appear as stationary points of light, fixed in place in what seems a random pattern across the entire night sky visible to our hemisphere. Time stands still.

Throughout human time, humans have imagined that stars make picture patterns we name as constellations: fish, warriors, goddesses, animals. Only the persistent observers, such as astronomers, identify their nightly march across the sky, rising in the east and disappearing below the western horizon.

Metaphor

Musical sounds mark points in time, like stars. They form immediately into recognizable patterns we call chords, melodies, rhythms, memorable themes. They convey a sense of motion, time surging forward or slackening in our perception of their well choreographed parade.

Astronomers observing and mapping (recording) the myriad points discovered that some of the stars are actually whole galaxies, with exotic forms of spirals and clouds. They observed through the color of the light that all these objects are racing away from us and each other in an expanding universe.

Mapping music means cataloging many possible patterns, distinguishing their contrasts and commonalities. We will explore how to measure and compare the periodic rhythmic streams of musical events and their changing momentum. We will define and employ a simple but powerful math tool for cataloging and then creatively sculpting with all natures of harmony and melodic line in our 88-key chromatic universe. We will explore how master composers weave colorful fabrics and grand structures from skillfully crafted materials.

Pursuing periodicity

My music-mapping Periodicity Project began in 2021 as a comprehensive catalog of musical patterns and processes, meant to provide simple tools for understanding the complexities of modern music. It grew into this book, Mapping the Music Universe, written for anyone who is curious about how music works, especially in the 20th-21st-century modern and “post-modern” eras. For me as a composer, it is also an exploration of how some less traveled conceptual paths lead to interesting creative possibilities.

In 1989 I co-authored a conceptually ground-breaking composition textbook with Larry Austin, Learning to Compose: Modes, Materials, and Models of Musical Invention. My next book, ARRAYS, was an aural skills workbook covering basic modal, tonal, and “post-tonal” music of the Renaissance through the Twentieth Century. Mapping the Music Universe draws in part on the ideas and approaches of both these now out-of-print publications.

A common assumption within Western culture is that Science is all about observation, measurement, precision, and mathematical rigor . . . and Art is all about the “i” words: imagination, inspiration, intuition, improvisation. Science is Deductive, art is Creative. Our culture has begun to recognize the commonality of all these intellectual strengths, that the best Science can be creatively intuitive and great Art can be rigorous.

Pioneer map makers

As an educated musician and professional composer, I also have long been deeply interested in science, especially astronomy. Having read a great deal of general science writing, I am inspired particularly by ground-breaking pioneers who methodically and comprehensively mapped the possibilities of their particular field.

Johann Joseph Fux — wrote Gradus ad Parnassum in 1725, codifying basic contrapuntal principles of Renaissance music.

William Smith — a rural surveyor, in 1799 drew a colorful map of the subterranean rock strata of his county in English coal country, launching the modern science of geology.   

Meriwether Lewis — kept extensive journals of the 1804-1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition, documenting and illustrating the discovered new world of the Northwest.  

Dmitri Mendeleev — devised a “periodic table of the chemical elements,” published in 1869, providing a solid basis for modern chemistry through its graphic and organizational genius.

Amédée Mouchez — launched an ambitious international star-mapping project (Carte du Ciel) in 1887 at the Paris Observatory.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt — worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a “computer,” examining thousands of photographic plates from telescopes to measure and catalog the brightness of stars, identified 1777 variable stars.

Lawrence Herbert — invented the Pantone system in 1956 to systematize color for printing ink and fabrics.

Allen Forte — published an article in 1964 that launched musical set theory, defining, classifying and comparing all possible collections of “pitch classes” drawn from the equal-tempered 12-tone chromatic galaxy.

The work and insights of the two on the list representing rigorous study of music, Fux and Forte, were part of my formal education in music and later an integral part of my teaching of composition and music theory.

Maps

Carte du Ciel was an ambitious second phase of an international star-mapping project initiated in 1887 by Paris Observatory director Amédée Mouchez.  A new photographic process revolutionizing the gathering of telescope images inspired the first phase, the Astrographic Catalogue of a dense, whole-sky array of star positions. Carte du Ciel, never completed after 70 years, used the Catalogue as a reference system for a complex survey of the vast field of even fainter images.

Celebrating the grand metaphor relating astronomy to art music, here is my 8-minute computer-music sound sculpture. In the music, ghostly wisps of sound are punctuated by brighter bursts, clustered in a natural, not-quite randomly dispersed texture.

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Looking ahead

The blog-post chapters of Mapping the Music Universe will proceed in three broad phases, progressing logically from fundamental — time and periodicity — to pitch space, then to larger structures, texture and form. Within each phase, various topics are presented in a progressive order, but jumping in at any point is fine.

Terms will sometimes be freshly coined. Graphic figures will include notated musical examples, tables, and graphic illustrations of patterns and their relationships. Big Ideas — Periodicity, Complexity, Symmetry, Relativity — will be explored using precise mathematical arrays as well as broad metaphors. Newly composed sample etudes will illustrate aurally.

Along the way, “Map Labs” will present step-by-step recipes to compose simple pieces based on models of different compositional genres. Each Lab includes an original sample piece following the Map Lab guidelines, illustrating one possible creative outcome.

Welcome! Join this creative journey of discovery . . .

a composer’s expedition.