Jamie James – författare

From the 5th century BC, when Pythagoras first composed his laws of Western music and science, until the flowering of Romanticism over 2000 years later, scientists and philosophers perceived the cosmos musically, as an ordered mechanism whose smooth operation created a celestial harmony - the music of the spheres. The separation of science and music began with the scientific revolution during the Renaissance, and reached a peak with Romanticism, which celebrated what was human, individual and local. 20th-century science and music, argues Jamie James in this book, have rejected the Romantic ideal and placed the ultimate focus outside the reach of human reason once again. The book provides a survey of the history of science and music, a reassessment of Romanticism and the modernist reaction to it, and a radical intellectual journey.

Focusing on six principal subjects, Jamie James locates "a lost national school" of artists who left their homes for the unknown. There is Walter Spies, the devastatingly handsome German painter who remade his life in Bali; Raden Saleh, the Javanese painter who found fame in Europe; Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian-Swiss writer who roamed the Sahara dressed as an Arab man; the American experimental filmmaker Maya Deren, who went to Haiti and became a committed follower of voodoo. From France, Paul Gauguin left for Tahiti; and Victor Segalen, a naval doctor, poet, and novelist, immersed himself in classical Chinese civilization in imperial Peking. In The Glamour of Strangeness, James evokes these extraordinary lives in portraits that bring the transcultural artist into sharp relief. Drawing on his own career as a travel writer and years of archival research uncovering previously unpublished letters and journals, James creates a penetrating study of the powerful connection between art and the exotic. Jamie James is the author of The Music of the Spheres, The Snake Charmer, Rimbaud in Java, and other titles.He has contributed to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, and National Geographic Traveler, among others, and served as the art critic at The New Yorker and The Times of London. He moved to Indonesia in 1999.

The parallel histories of music and science - from celestial harmony to cosmic dissonance. For centuries, scientists and philosophers believed that the universe was a stately, ordered mechanism, mathematical and musical. The perceived distances between objects in the sky mirrored (and were mirrored by) the spaces between notes that formed chords and scales. The smooth operation of the cosmos created a divine harmony that composers sought to capture. With The Music of the Spheres, readers will see how this scientific philosophy emerged, how it was shattered by changing views of the universe and the rise of Romanticism, and to what extent it survives today. From Pythagoras to Newton, Bach to Beethoven, and on into the twentieth century of Einstein, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Cage, and Glass, this is a spellbinding examination of the interwoven fates of science and music throughout history.