Commentary Par I 78

The reference is pretty clearly to the 'music of the spheres,' that harmony created by the movement initiated by the love of the spheres themselves for God.  As early as the Ottimo (DDP Ottimo.Par.I.76-81), students of the poem attributed the notion of the harmony of the spheres (as do other early commentators [see also DDP Pietro1.Par.I.76-78; DDP Benvenuto.Par.I.82-84 -- including Macrobius in a more complete list of earlier sponsors of this phenomenon, Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, and others; DDP Buti.Par.I.73-84; DDP Serravalle.Par.I.76-81]) to Macrobius's commentary to the Ciceronian Somnium Scipionis (for a brief overview of the vexed topic, the extent of Dante's knowledge of this early-fifth-century neoplatonist, see Georg Rabuse, 'Macrobio,' ED.1971.3, pp. 757-59 [Rabuse enthusiastically supports the view that Dante knows both the Somnium Scipionis and the Saturnalia well]).  And for an also brief but useful discussion of Macrobius as reader of Virgil, see Curtius (Curt.1948.1), pp. 443-45.  Among the moderns, since Lombardi (1791), commentators have suggested the dependence here upon that concept (DDP Lombardi.Par.I.76-78); and, closer to our own time, Bosco/Reggio (DDP Bosco.Par.I.78) point out that it is clear that Dante refers to the so-called 'music of the spheres,' with its roots in Pythagorean and Platonic writings (perhaps best known to Dante by the passage in the Somnium Scipionis [De re pub. VI.18] that exhibits Latin forms of the two verbs found here, 'temperi' [temperans] and 'discerni' [distinctis]).  Such music is a pleasing notion, but all of Aristotle's three greatest commentators, Averroës, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas, quash its possibility.  Dante, as poet, seems to like the idea well enough that he is willing to be its sponsor despite such firm and authoritative opposition, as indeed Benedetto Varchi, citing only Aristotle, remarked (DDP Varchi.Par.I.73-93).  Bosco/Reggio go on to point out that this reference to the music of the spheres is the only one found in Paradiso, where all later music will be in the form of the singing of the saved and of the angels, less suspect musical forms, we might conclude.  Eddie Condon, a banjoist, describes the night sounds of music in Chicago's jazz area in 1925, when King Oliver and Louis Armstrong were duelling cornetists, in terms that may remind a classicist of another kind of "natural" music, the Aeolian harp.  See Bergreen (Berg.1997.1), p. 261: 'Around midnight you could hold your instrument in the middle of the street and the air would play it.'