[Dixielandjazz] The Cosmic Bb

[Stephen Barbone]

NOT OKOM, but fascinating reading. Do you hear the Cosmic Bb?

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

January 30, 2004 - NY Times

REVERBERATIONS

The Speculative Case for the Cosmic B Flat

By JOHN ROCKWELL

         Who knew? All those philosophers and scientists and
theoreticians and composers who believed in the ancient notion of a
Music of the Spheres were onto something. There is such a music, and
it's the note of B flat.

Or so scientists told us a few months ago when they announced that the
Perseus galaxy cluster, 250 million light years from our little planet,
was emitting that note, or a series of those notes, which "appear as
pressure waves roiling and spreading as a result of outbursts from a
supermassive black hole," in the words of Dennis Overbye, a science
reporter for The New York Times.

The notes have a period of oscillation of 10 million years, which makes
them "the lowest note in the universe." So said Dr. Andrew Fabian, an
X-ray astronomer at Cambridge University in England and the leader of
the team that discovered the note.

Most of the commentary since has been about the implications of this
discovery for the study of black holes and hence of the physical
properties of the universe. My interest is, to put it mildly, less
scientifically informed and more aesthetically speculative.

These B flats may be the oldest and the longest notes in the universe,
but just how universal are they? My eye was caught by another recent
article in The Times, this one about a mysterious low hum that bedevils
some people, a kind of basso variant of tinnitus, which is a high pitch
likewise heard in the ears of sufferers. Are those sounds, I wondered,
also in B flat, suggesting an even more cosmic implication for this
once-humble pitch?

Courtesy of Mindy Sink, who wrote the article, I entered into e-mail
correspondence with Dr. James Kelly of the University of New Mexico, who
undertook studies of hum sufferers in Taos. Dr. Kelly first clarified
for me the difference between frequency and pitch. "Frequency is a
physical measure," he wrote. "Pitch is what you perceive." Since the
black-hole B flat is 57 octaves lower than middle C, it cannot be heard,
thus only questionably qualifying as a pitch.

As for the hum, Dr. Kelly reported that it was close to 66 hertz, two
octaves below middle C. But he suggested that other patients heard hums
as low as the lowest E on a piano. No specific correspondence with B
flat, but one can always hope.

Back to the macro picture, the black hole B flat. If that frequency (or
pitch) is now the acoustical bedrock of the universe, perhaps our entire
tuning system, centered on middle C, needs revision. The Western
harmonic system involves keys with increasing numbers of sharps and
flats exfoliating out from middle C, or from C major, all white keys on
the piano. Now, perhaps, we have to exfoliate from B flat. Maybe this is
as big a shift in human thinking as that from a flat-earth-centered
universe to the solar system. Or maybe not.

As a digression, I thought of the California composer Terry Riley. Mr.
Riley, always something of a cosmic mystic, won his first fame in 1964
with his composition "In C," which has been endlessly recorded and
played, in part because it's so beautiful and in part because it's so
ingenious: a series of simple melodic figures that any group of any kind
of instrumentalists may play according to certain simple rules, setting
up a dappled tapestry of sound.

Mr. Riley's most recent piece attests to his fascination with the
cosmos. It's called "Sun Rings," and although lavishly praised on the
West Coast (the Kronos Quartet performs it), it hasn't yet made it to
our benighted Eastern outback. "Sun Rings" is based on "space sounds"
recorded by Dr. Don Gurnett of the University of Iowa. One wonders idly
if B flat plays any special role. To judge from "In C," Mr. Riley is a C
man.

According to the music encyclopedias, the Internet and Jamie James's
chatty book "Music of the Spheres: Music, Science and the Natural Order
of the Universe," thinkers and artists have been less interested in what
might be designated a universal fundamental tone as in the relations
between the tones: scales and modes and keys.

Tables ascribing emotional characteristics to keys have poured out over
the centuries, back to the ancient Greeks. The most complete compendium
of these descriptions was compiled by Dr. Rita Steblin in a book
published by the University of Rochester Press and titled "A History of
Key
Characteristics in the 18th and Early 19th Centuries," although she
ranges far earlier and later than that. Check it out for $95 plus
shipping on Amazon.com.

The descriptions were always highly subjective, but those in Dr.
Steblin's book for B flat major (let's try to keep this reasonably
simple, avoiding B flat minor) generally call it a happy key.
"Magnificent and joyful," as per one early French source. "Noble,"
thought another Frenchman.
"Condescending greatness mixed with venerable seriousness," said a
late-18th-century German. "Cheerful love, clear conscience, hope,
aspirations for a better world," wrote another. "Tender, soft, sweet,
love, charm, grace," according to an Italian.

If we listen to these sages, a B flat universe is not such a bad place
to be. And if we buy into August Gathy, a Frenchman who wrote in 1835,
the key relates to "noble womanliness," too. Maybe there's something to
Erda or Gaia, after all. Check out www.gaiaconsort.com, a site devoted
to "music for freethinking pagans, humanists, psychedelics, visionaries,
wiccans, mystics." Perhaps Mr. Riley already has.

Before we reluctantly leave the concept of keys, here is a highly
selective list of well-known compositions in B flat major; make of them
what you will: Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Piano Sonata and Symphony No.
4, Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2, Haydn's Symphonies Nos. 98 and 102,
Prokofiev's Symphony No. 5, Schubert's Symphony No. 5, Schumann's
Symphony No. 1.

But perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves, besides managing to annoy
any serious acoustician or physicist or musical theorist. The universe
has not yet been detected as emitting music in any key or mode. It is
just steadily (and very slowly) singing the note of B flat, over and
over. What song did the Sirens sing? What note? What key? We await
further word from our intrepid scientists, ears cocked to the cosmos.