It's a good question to ponder, the universal nature of music, or its cultural specificity. The Bach phenomena in Japan is interesting in this regard. A 17th-century German Lutheran composer whose very cultural-specific music somehow becomes all the rage among late 20th/early 21st-century Japanese. How is that possible? The perceptions of beauty would seem to differ, yet the popularity of Bach's choral music in contemporary Japan begs some questions. The high suicide rates and despair evident in Japanese society, according to some interpreters, suggests a fertile ground for the sense of hope that animates Bach's music. Not just the lyrics of his orotorios, passions, or cantatas, either, but the music itself. It doesn't seem to matter that Bach's music is rooted in Early Modern western patterns, and that these are foreign to Japanese modes of thought. The response to the efforts of Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan suggests that the bridges assumed by advocates of the music of the spheres are more than imaginary constructs rooted merely in ancient mathematical ideas.
The conceptual origins of the music of the spheres provide a foundation that developed in different directions, mathematical, metaphysical, and musicological. Some current theories, even if speculative, remind us that the different languages of music transcend the local, and that our emotional response to sound waves requires a whole lot of wonder and curiosity. Count me in.