“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars.”
—Carl Sagan
Recently, I had a fascinating conversation with astronomer Dr. Ken Lanzetta who was on the team that discovered the farthest known object in the Universe. It’s a galaxy about 13 billion light years away, and it’s barely visible in that famous photo from the Hubble Telescope known as, “The Deep Field,” which shows millions of distant galaxies at the farthest edge of the known Universe. It was formed shortly after the creation of our Universe, and it’s so far away that it might not even exist anymore because it takes 13 billion years for its light to reach Earth. It might already be gone, perhaps even swallowed by another galaxy that it collided with, but whatever its fate, it’s the oldest and farthest known thing we can see—it’s like traveling back in time to 13 billion years ago.
That’s a fascinating thing to contemplate, time travel, because when I was briefly at the University of Washington in the late 1980s, I heard Stephen Hawking give a presentation about time travel. In his lecture, Dr. Hawking proposed that we could theoretically go backwards in time (which is what a telescope essentially does), but not necessarily forward in time because the future has not been created yet. Back in the 1980s, we hadn’t even discovered a single planet outside our 9-planet solar system, but now the current number of known exoplanets is approaching 4,000 scattered among 3,000 previously unknown solar systems. What will we discover in the coming decades? Certainly more planets, maybe some of them habitable, and perhaps extraterrestrial life that might even be intelligent. At this point, it appears that anything is possible, and the Sci-Fi books and movies we created in the past just might be the precursor to our reality in the future.
Humanity has finally gotten to the point of being able to create the very technology we need to look both outward into space, and inward into ourselves. In doing so, we are realizing that our tiny planet and even our galaxy is rather small and insignificant in the scope of the entire cosmos. Yet everything we do right here, right now, is vitally important to the outcome of events on this planet.
For me, one of the most powerful aspects of my life has been exploring the infinite facets of music. Music is an abstract representation of rhythm and harmony, which is a force that resides inside everyone and everything. Those same forces also helped to create the Universe itself, and if we start at the very beginning, as we currently believe it to be, we have to go back to about 13.7 billion years, not far from that farthest known galaxy that Dr. Lanzetta discovered. There, we see that our Universe was an infinitely small, dense singularity that contained all of the building blocks for everything that has, or ever will exist. In ancient Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages on Earth, this state is known as Sunyata, which translates as Emptiness, but it also means the potentiality for all things to arise and come into existence. This is because out of Emptiness, out of that potentiality, comes absolutely everything.
It’s a paradox for sure, but Emptiness allows for everything that we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. One of the oldest creation myths explains this process beautifully, and it comes from the Hindu pantheon of myths known as the Puranas. In this myth, the creator/destroyer god Shiva exists in a state of meditative Sunyata/Emptiness, where all of the possibilities in the Universe exist in Shiva’s mind. This state of Emptiness, at the human level, is simply the space for all the possibilities to reveal themselves over the course of our lives, even possibilities we have yet to consider. This is what makes life so interesting—the unknowable and the unforeseen, which can manifest as incredible new realities.
In this creation story, Shiva holds a double-headed drum, hourglass in its shape, because Shiva is also the first drummer in the Universe. One side of this drum is called the Drum Of Creation and the other side is called the Drum Of Destruction. Shiva holds fire in a second hand, fire being the symbol of both creation and destruction. His third and fourth hands (Shiva is a god after all) are turned upward and downward in a kind of dance-mudra that mirrors the spiraling dance of the galaxies, which is the turning of Shiva’s body. Finally, for reasons known only to him, Shiva awakens from this state of Emptiness to strike the Drum of Creation and—BOOM—the Universe explodes into existence. Shiva continues to strike both sides of the drum in alternating rhythms, and thus creates and destroys the Universe over and over, for eternity.
In Western science, we have come to call this the Big Bang, and modern physics has recently suggested that there could be Big Bangs happening all the time, creating new Universes in multiple dimensions, throughout eternity. It’s amazing that modern science is finally starting to comprehend this, and I think it’s important to note that the ancient, indigenous peoples have always understood this, as described through their myths and stories.
Shiva’s first drum strike (at least in this Universe) was a big hit— the sound waves rippled across the infinite folds of space, causing the subatomic particles to collide and merge with one another, forming the first atomic elements in the Universe: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, and so on up through the 118 known elements (only 92 of those elements are naturally occurring, the remainder are man-made, synthetic elements).
The subatomic particles, which make up those 118 known elements, are the foundational structures of the Universe and they are a fascinating study in themselves. Lately, they have been getting a lot of attention in the realm of quantum physics, as scientists search for the Higgs Boson particle, often referred to as the God Particle. These particles, known as quarks, leptons, and bosons tend to express themselves in groups of either 2 or 3, depending on their magnetic polarity. In quantum mechanics this is described as either a 2/3 or 3/2 electromagnetic charge.
What’s interesting about this little known fact is that it has a direct analog in African rhythmic structure. One of the oldest known rhythms, one that every drummer learns in African drumming 101, is called the Bembe. The Bembe possesses a clave pattern, which is a kind of rhythmic subdivision, and this clave pattern has just two possible variations: one is felt with a 2/3 accent, and one is felt with a 3/2 accent. This clave accent defines the feel of the rhythm itself, and it’s the very thing that makes us move and dance. The 2/3 and 3/2 clave patterns are still the backbone of African and Latin music today, and modern Latin jazz has refined this rhythmic expression into some of the most exquisite forms.
It is my belief, admittedly from a spiritual perspective, that the earliest rhythmatists in Africa were feeling the very fabric of the Universe, expressing it in their rhythms as they mirrored the subatomic dance of the Universe. Their bodies were, after all, made of the same particles that formed the Universe, so how could they not feel those timeless, cosmic rhythms? This is the very root of shamanism itself, and Zen for that matter—it’s all about feeling the interconnectedness of the Universe, communicating through the stardust.
Back at the formation of our Universe, the primary elements began to coagulate as they formed enormous dust clouds millions of light years across, and these clouds in turn became the birthplace of galaxies, stars, and solar systems. The galaxies evolved over billions of years with the same spiraling principles of Shiva’s dance, solar discs forming with stars at their center, and balls of dust becoming their orbiting planets. Our Earth formed in exactly this same way, evolving over the eons initially as a ball of molten iron that was forged in fire, cleansed with water, and cooled by the first winds to blow across her vast oceans. Eventually our planet stabilized enough for the final element, Life, to emerge and our evolution over a few billion years has now given us the consciousness and self-awareness to be able to reflect back and contemplate this entire magnificent process—and it’s still unfolding.
It is now estimated that every galaxy contains about 100 billion stars, and as we are still discovering, most of these stars have their own planets. We now estimate that the known Universe has at least 100 billion galaxies, each with a 100 billion solar systems. I can’t do the math on that, but I’m willing to bet that some of those solar systems have life in them. I wonder what kind of music they listen to, and if they dance to those same 2/3, 3/2 clave rhythms?
In 1977, ten years after my birth, NASA sent out the first of 2 Voyager space probes with a musical message that they called the Golden Record. NASA’s hope was that the probe might eventually find intelligent life beyond our solar system, or perhaps intelligent life would find it first. The gold-plated disc was attached to the outside of the craft, and on it was engraved a collection of music as diverse as the people of Earth itself. It included Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Pygmy initiation songs from Zaire, the jazz of Louis Armstrong, a Javanese gamelan orchestra, Navajo Indian chants, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto, Senegalese Sabar drumming, Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute,” Aboriginal songlines, Peruvian panpipes, and many other forms of world music.
I was happily surprised when I read that musical list, because it contained many of the musical forms I had personally studied or experienced in my life. I would have loved to have been on the committee that picked the music, and I assume their strategy was to give whomever or whatever finds the disc the broadest examples of Earth’s music. Hopefully they’ll have the technology to listen to it, figuring out how to play the sound waves embedded in the golden grooves. Maybe the music will sound crazy and chaotic to them, perhaps even unlistenable. Then again, maybe there will be something—a song, a melody, or a rhythm that resonates with them on the other side of the galaxy. Something that makes them realize that an intelligent life form once existed here on Earth, if only briefly, and that they were not alone.
It’s often said by scientists that math is a universal language that should, theoretically, be understandable by all intelligent life in the Universe. This is because math is a system used to measure quantities, distances, and relationships, represented with symbols. Presumably all intelligent life would have a system like that, and I would argue that rhythm, which is a system of mathematically placed sound waves and frequencies, might also be a universal language. Maybe math and rhythm are 2 languages that all intelligent life could understand, and one of these days, we just might find out.
It’s amazing to think about it like that, because it’s only been a little over a hundred years since recorded music became a popular medium (1901), the Wright Brothers figured out the physics of flying (1903), and Albert Einstein created his Theory Of Relativity (1905). 60 years later we were flying to the moon and sending recorded music back into space on a probe that is now as obsolete as a wind-up gramophone is to your digital music player.
As of the writing of this book, the Voyager probe has officially left our heliosphere, which is the farthest extent of our sun’s solar particles. It’s entering into deep space now, back in the direction from which we came over 13 billion years ago, back toward Shiva’s Big Bang.
A few years ago, NASA released a recording of what our Milky Way galaxy actually sounds like. They did this by reducing the radio waves down to a frequency the human ear can process. I listened to this recording and it was an enormous, eerie howling that sounded more like the feedback of a guitar when the amplifier is opened up to full volume, and the howl of the guitar feeds back through the amp. Jimi Hendrix, considered to be the greatest guitarist in history, made this same sound with his own guitar sorcery. In the centuries before that, many other musicians have tried to emulate this Sound Of The Cosmos, where chaos and disorder are wrestled into harmony and rhythm.
The German composer Ludwig van Beethoven went for long walks in the forests of Germany and Austria in between composing sessions when he worked on his great symphonies. He channeled all of that wild nature into his greatest symphony, the 9th, also known as “Ode to Joy,” and to pull it off he had to harness all of the instruments and voices available in Vienna for its premier in 1824. Another German composer, Richard Wagner, did much the same thing when he presented his warrior opera, “The Ring,” in Munich in 1869, breaking most of the rules of European musical pedagogy in the process. The French composer Claude Debussy composed his magnificent symphony for the sea, “La Mer,” in 1905, and soon after that the idea of writing for the elements of Earth became a legitimate theme for both classical and jazz composers.
The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky composed his ballet, “The Rite Of Spring,” as a tribute to the visceral powers of the life-giving Earth. Its premier in Paris in 1913 caused rioting among the audience members, the result of his progressive, discordant approach to melody, something the people had never heard before. When the French composer Maurice Revel debuted his modern classical piece, “Bolero,” at the Paris Opera in 1928, it was met with a similar riotous response, the ascending, spiraling melody deemed too erotic for the masses.
The African drum ensembles of West Africa mirror the rhythmic dance of their cultures, as do the enormous Indonesian gamelan orchestras, with their dozens of percussionists, hammering away on bronze gongs and bamboo marimbas—instruments made of the Earth itself. Wood and skin, bronze and bamboo, steel and electricity—every culture around the world has found a way, through the natural materials of their environment, to express their interpretation of our Universe Made Of Sound.
I hear individual musicians channeling this sound every day, as a way of expressing the natural laws of the cosmos, which includes the right to be treated equally and fairly, the right to a clean and healthy environment, and the right to think and live freely. Sometimes I hear their music in the time machine of my stereo, and other times it’s a live band playing in a particular city, somewhere in this lifetime. I hear it in the swaggering swing of John Bonham, as well as the refined elegance of Duke Ellington. I hear it in the melodic, dancing-star solos of John Coltrane, and I hear it in the asteroid collisions of a Keith Moon drum fill. I hear it in the voices of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday when they sing from the depths of their ancient souls, and I hear it in the human rights rhythms of Max Roach and Elvin Jones. I hear it in the galactic bass lines of Charles Mingus as he roars with indignation, and I hear it in the primal screams of Kurt Cobain, Layne Staley, and Chris Cornell.
Some people believe that all the songs in the Universe already exist, and it is the duty of the shaman, composer, or singer-songwriter to capture those songs and bring them down into the human realm so we can all benefit from their healing power. Other people, and I count myself as one, believe that music is infinite and can always be created. One thing is for sure, and that is music is everywhere on this planet, and some of the most beautiful songs aren’t even human-made. They’re made from the wind howling through the treetops, ten thousand frogs croaking in a swamp, or a birdcall that evolves into a symphony of polyphonic melody.
All of this—this Universe Made Of Sound is inside each of us, because we are made from the same elements—stardust, rhythms, melodies, and fire. It’s all music and it’s inside each of us. Truly, and quite literally, there is a galaxy in your heart.