As a good introduction should, this book starts in the ancient past with Pythagoras and Plato and moves right up to the 20th century. There is a bit, perhaps, of editorial bias on some of the characters that have been involved in this topic throughout history; nevertheless, one is not put off on anyone mentioned by the book if someone decided they'd like more than an introductory course in the Music of the Spheres.

As it was my intention, before even reading this book, to look deep into this subject, I was not put off at all by the historical coverage of the topic as opposed to a more practical treatment. It's not an in-depth practical work on the Music of the Spheres, but as an introduction to the topic and coverage of some of the historical and biographical background, I was not left disappointed.

A very interesting read, it fueled the desire to look deeper into the subject and helped shed a little background and perspective on a few of the historical figures connected with the topic. Worth the read, even twice.


Regrettably Concise   April 24, 2000
 33 out of 34 found this review helpful

I began reading this book with the highest of expectations, based both upon the credentials of the author and the reviews contained herein. However, now that I have completed it, I must rate it with some personal disappointment. Although the book is some 230 pages long and covers several millennia worth of history, its structure lends the feeling that it is a collection of condensed articles taken from the pages of periodicals. Anyone who reads Discovery Magazine will immediately recognize this factually succinct trait.

And succinct is what best describes the depth of information presented by this book. It provides a very thorough lineage of relevant historical figures throughout the ages, but sadly it only gives the majority of them a cursory mention. While he devotes alot of attention to the specific numerological devices of Pythagoras and such, very little of their ideas are easily comprehendible according to his fragmented explanations, and the reader must go to an outside source to grasp their true mechanics. The passages concerning musical scales suffers especially from a lack of explanation, and if I had not already possessed an insight into their nature, I would have been utterly befuddled about what Mr. James was trying to tell me.

Further on, the author begins to insert his personal opinions about the people he is describing. In an interesting chronicle of a minor feud between Kepler and Fludd, Mr. James draws sides immediately and nearly dismisses Fludd as a mystic who merely regurgitated archaic knowledge, but only after slight after slight does he admit, seemingly regrettably and with an apologetic tone, that the very crux of Kepler's argument was wrong. And worse still, near the end he offers the opinion that Brahms was the `most cosmic' composer of all time, and then in no way supports his conjecture. It is incredibly frustrating to try and figure out why the author feels the way he does about almost every subject he brings up, an obstacle made even more difficult given the author's semi bombastic, abstruse sentence structure. A notable exception to this is his chapter on Newton, which was the most thorough and intelligible character description offered.

In summation, the phrase `A brief and cursory history of' should be inserted before its title to give any potential reader an accurate idea of what this interesting-yet uneven and biased-account of the dissolution of and between science and music achieves. It mentions fascinating concepts and ideas, but altogether it does little more than refer to them with a glib capacity.


Fabulous!   December 27, 1999
 2 out of 9 found this review helpful

Get inside the mind of Pitagoras and Plato and discover an extraordinary interpretation of music. Then drift away through Reinassence Science till the XX century and find how connected the universe, the music and the human mind are. Music can even start a rebellion, as it happened in Belgica.


A beautifully written history of music and science.   July 12, 1998
 21 out of 21 found this review helpful

This is a beautifully written exposition of both the harmony between music and science before the Renaissance, and the separation of the two into divergent disciplines after. James captures the beauty of the beliefs of the early musician-scientists, and how their contemplations sought to explain the meaning of life, God, and (like the Unification Theory of today) all existence. It is a fascinating story of how, one by one, scientific proofs separated science from the arts as knowledge increased. The book is well-explained, stimulating to the higher brain, and soothing to the lower brain. (Sorry, but if you get that, then you get it--and the book.) A rare non-fiction in that I never put it down.