The Musical Modes or Tones are Expressed in the Extremes of the Planetary Motions

The individual planets represent individual positions in the system hy their motion at perihelion, insofar as it is granted to each to traverse some particular interval in the musical scale, encompassed by certain notes in it, or positions in the system.

Each starts from the note or position which belonged to its motion at aphelion in the previous Chapter, for Saturn indeed and the Earth G, but for Jupiter, which can be transposed into the higher G, for Mars fg , for Venus e; for Mercury A, in the higher system.*

Here they are individually in the conventional notation. They do not indeed form the intermediate positions, which you here see filled in with notes, specifically, as they do the extremes; for they advance from one extreme to the opposite one not by leaps and intervals, but with a continually changing note, pervading all between (potentially infi­ nite) in reality.

I could not express that in any other way but by a continuous series of intermediate notes. Venus remains almost on unison, not amounting in the breadth of its tuning even to the smallest of the melodic intervals.*

Yet by the designation of two notes in a common system, and the shaping of the skeleton of the octave, by spanning a definite melodic interval, there is a certain first step towards distinguishing tones or modes: therefore the musical modes have been distributed among the planets.

To be sure I know that for the shaping and defining of distinct modes many things are needed, which are proper to human melody, that is to say when it has intervals; and so I have used the voice in a fashion. Now it will be open to a musician to draw his own conclusion as to which mode each planet more nearly expresses, now that the ex­ tremes have here been assigned for him.*”® I should give to Saturn, among the conventional modes, the seventh or eighth, because if you set its tonic note as G, its motion at perihelion ascends to to Jupiter the first or second, because if its motion at aphelion is matched with G, its motion at perihelion reaches b\ to Mars the fifth or sixth, not just because it almost attains a diapente, which is an interval common to all the modes, but chiefly because if it is reduced along with the rest to a common system, by its motion at perihelion it attains c, at aphelion it hints at/ , which is the tonic of the fifth or sixth tone or mode. To the Earth I should give the third or fourth, because its mo­ tions revolve within a semitone; whereas for Mercury on account of the breadth of its interval all modes or tones will fit indifferently; for Venus, on account of the narrowness of its interval, none clearly, though because the system is common, the third and fourth fit it also, as rela­ tively to the rest it occupies e.