Bill Barclay is Director of Music at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. When he was young, he took piano lessons and sang with folk groups in church, and in middle school was in choirs and orchestras, and plays bass, guitar, trombone, and other instruments. He is a composer, director, musician and actor, and enjoys music most when it serves a story. He has been a fan of Shakespeare forever and was interested in music during Shakespeare’s time, which led him to conduct research into the topic, the Music of the Spheres.
That took him to Johannes Kepler, who had researched the planets in the early 1600s, and determined by calculating measurements of the speed of the planets that their paths were elliptical, rather than circular as the Catholic church believed. Further, Kepler found that the relationships of the orbits of the planets were consistent with the Western musical overtone series. Bill says this indicates the planets essentially entrain themselves, seeking and “finding ways to discover consonant stable relationships over time. … Entrainment says that over time things, objects, the universe, everything wants to find a stable relationship … and everything that’s periodic, regular, seeks stability with other things that are regular.”
He believes also that “people do reach for music to entrain certain pleasant emotional states.” The mainstream responds to entrained tonal and rhythmic behavior in modern music. The music is describing stability and what the inclination to order looks like. Bill says, “the focus of healing ourselves and what to do in our modern world should be with our vibrational state.”
Referring to the book Nada Brahma, The World is Sound, by Joachim-Ernst Berendt, Bill says Berendt points to a “new consciousness, which is trying to raise our vibrational energies towards even more compassionate, more aware, more kind, more empathetic, to the rest of the world, more appreciating and tolerant of differences, above differences, above our thinking, and into a felt oneness with each other and with the planet.”
He believes people should include as much music in their lives as they can, and that it is important to share music they like as much as possible. He also suggests musicians focus on their performance space, and entrain the audience to the space, explaining the why and how of the music to be played, so as to entrain us together.
He has presented on Shakespeare’s Music of the Spheres numerous times and a video of the presentation is here: https://www.shakespearealoud.com/music-of-the-spheres/
