Sir William Herschel: Accomplished Astronomer, Secret…Composer?

About five years ago, way back in 2012, I wrote a post describing how I had learned that Sir William Herschel, famous astronomer and discoverer of Uranus, was actually an accomplished classical musician and composer prior to becoming interested in astronomy. Looking back at that post, I realize I never bothered actually linking the album I'd found of some of Herschel's symphonies, so here's a link to that.

At the time, there wasn't a lot of Herschel's music available as recordings. Five years later, that's…actually still pretty much the case. Amazon has one CD with two random Herschel works (along with some Haydn for some reason?), plus a new CD in French that appears to be some of Herschel's organ works. I'm mostly guessing on that one, and it doesn't have a digital preview to check.

However! Over on Google Play Music, I came across a new album of Herschel's music that came out in 2015 when I searched his name there on a whim. It's a collection of six sonatas for harpsichord and violin, and it is fantastic. I've fallen in love with Herschel-as-composer all over again, and it makes me really wish more of his music was available, because seriously, this stuff is really really good.

You might be tempted to think that having only a harpsichord (one of my favorite instruments, by the way) and a violin would be a little limiting in what music you can make (Edit: on further listening, I'm pretty sure there's a cello in there too). Nope! Herschel manages to make each movement in each sonata completely unique, different and compelling, with some really interesting little musical motifs. I'm also not generally as big a fan of slow movements as I am of fast ones, yet he somehow made the Andante middle movement of the fourth sonata one of my favorite of the bunch!

All in all it's a really wonderful bit of music and I'd definitely urge you all to go have a listen. A hui hou!

Globular Cluster Photo Series (Part 26): NGC 5466

Today I have a picture of the surprisingly sparse globular cluster NGC 5466 for your perusal. NGC 5466 is located very far away in the constellation Boötes at 51,800 light-years from Earth, making it the third-farthest I've shown so far after M53 and M72. At this great distance its larger-than-average size of 166 light-years in diameter gives it a visual angle of 11.0 arc-minutes, about a third the width of the full Moon. Interestingly, NGC 5466 makes nearly an isosceles triangle with Earth and the galactic center, being about 52,800 light-years away from the core.

NGC 5466 in Boötes.

As you can see from the picture NGC 5466 lacks any sort of concentration in its core, in sharp contrast to most globular clusters. It's almost difficult to tell that it's a globular cluster at all. In fact, under the globular cluster classification scheme devised by Harlow Shapley in 1927, NGC 5466 is a class XII, the most loosely concentrated class there is (class I being the most highly concentrated towards the center). You may have noticed that there is general lack of stars both in the globular and in the foreground of this image; this is because Boötes is located away from the galactic plane, and thus there are relatively fewer stars between us and the cluster.

Finally, in an interesting historical aside, it turns out that NGC 5466 was discovered by William Herschel exactly two hundred and five years to the day before I was born, back in 1784.

Music of the Sphere-Studiers

In my last post I mentioned William Herschel, well-known in astronomy circles as the discoverer of the planet Uranus. What is probably not as well known, however (I didn't know it until last week), is that Herschel, before he became interested in astronomy, was actually a professional musician and composer, writing a total of 24 symphonies and numerous concertos and other works.

Herschel lived from 1738 to 1822, pretty much the entirety of the Classical period (so-called to distinguish it from the preceding Baroque and the following Romantic periods). Although born in what would become Germany, he moved to England at the age of nineteen where he spent over a dozen years performing and composing music before becoming interested in astronomy. Recordings of his work are very rare; at the moment there are only one or two CDs of his music available online, but I was able to pick one up on Amazon that contained 6 of his symphonies.

Listening to them, I can say that he was quite an accomplished composer. It's always impossible to say with these things, but I think that if he hadn't become interested in astronomy he might have become famous as a composer. His music is definitely of the Classical type, a bit less complex than the Baroque, though it still sounds somewhat Baroque in places (which makes sense since he was writing most of it near the transition from Baroque to Classical). Strangely, it often reminds me in places of Handel, another German-born musician who later immigrated to England. (Given that Handel is probably my favorite composer, I'm just fine with the occasional resemblance.) All in all, Herschel's music (or at least symphonies 2, 8, 12-14, and 17) is quite good, and I would highly recommend it to any lovers of good music out there.