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

Abstract

The year 2022 saw the two hundredth anniversary of the death of William Herschel, a profoundly significant figure in the field of astronomy, but one who made his early living as a musician – as an oboist, violinist, harpsichordist, organist, composer and impresario. After leaving a military band in his native Hanover for an unsuccessful two-year stint in London (1757–1759), Herschel moved to the north of England (1760), where he composed his symphonies and many other works as an itinerant musician in and around Richmond, Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham, Pontefract, Doncaster, Leeds and Halifax. In 1766 he accepted an invitation to take up the post of organist at the new Octagon Chapel in Bath, where from the following year he became a mainstay of the musical scene until 1782. In Bath William was joined by other musical family members including his sister Caroline, who assisted him first in musical and then in astronomical duties, ultimately becoming a distinguished astronomer in her own right. Herschel’s astronomical interests and construction of very high-quality telescopes, beginning in 1773, brought him international and lasting fame when in 1781 he discovered the planet now called Uranus. He came to the attention of George III, who summoned him to Windsor and effectively ended the musical portion of his career, at the age of forty-three. 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. For Herschel and other eighteenth-century thinkers, contemporary academia’s separation of music and astronomy across the divide of the arts and the sciences would have been hard to understand, given that both endeavours proceeded for them on mathematical principles. 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. The aim was to explore new aspects of Herschel’s work as composer, instrumentalist and astronomer in the intellectual, creative and cultural contexts of his time, including the Herschels’ legacy in connections between science and art today. Three sessions of papers, two panel discussions, a keynote lecture, a film and a two-hour concert were packed into a single day. Sullivan began by detailing the outsized place of Herschel in