Cosmic Harmonies: A Symposium Celebrating the Life, Science, Music, and Legacy of William Herschel (1738–1822) University of York, 19 June 2022

• Published in: Eighteenth-century music 2023-03, Vol.20 (1), p.122-124
• Main Authors: Cowgill, Rachel, Waltz, Sarah
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 18th century; Archives & records; Astronomers; Astronomy; Big Data; Careers; Communication: Conference Report; Herschel, William (1738-1822); Interdisciplinary aspects; Motion pictures; Music; Music festivals; Musical performances; Musicians & conductors; Philosophy; Science; Stars & galaxies; Telescopes; Universe
• ISSN: 1478-5706; 1478-5714
• DOI: 10.1017/S1478570622000318

For the rest of his life Herschel made numerous ground-breaking contributions: designing large telescopes; mapping the Milky Way system of stars and the Sun's motion in it; cataloguing and classifying thousands of star clusters, nebulae, variable stars and double stars; proving the effectiveness of gravity outside the solar system; discovering several moons around Saturn and Uranus; discovering infrared radiation (from the Sun); postulating an evolving universe with stars and nebulae that are born, age and die; estimating the age of the universe; and arguing that all stars and planets are populated with intelligent beings. In this spirit, ‘Cosmic Harmonies: A Symposium Celebrating the Life, Science, Music, and Legacy of William Herschel (1738–1822)’ at the University of York – organized by musicologists Rachel Cowgill (University of York) and Sarah Waltz (University of the Pacific) and astronomer Woodruff T. Sullivan III (University of Washington) – brought together an interdisciplinary confluence of musicology, performance, composition, astronomy, data science and philosophy. Waltz gave a paper contextualizing Herschel's music theory, focusing on his unpublished music treatise, which includes a ‘gravitational theory’ of modulation; Matthew Spring (Bath Spa University) considered the music of Herschel's Bath years (1767–1782), sharing the beginnings of a sorely needed catalogue; and Meredith Michael (Indiana University Bloomington), with her paper ‘The Inhabited Moon: Imagination, Female Astronomers, and 18th-Century Opera’, discussed Herschel's belief in an inhabited moon alongside the use of lunar societies as imaginary spaces in opera. (The genealogical discussion was particularly interesting, given that Herschel's great-great-great-great-grandson Will Herschel-Shorland was in attendance.) Next was a paper by John Mulligan (Rice Center for Research Computing, Rice University), ‘As Numerous as the Stars that Shine on the Milky Way: Big Data and Slow Time in the Herschel Observatory’.