For years now, I've had a digital sticky note on my computer desktop reminding me that the phrase "across the universe" in "Music from the Spheres" might be a little nod to the Beatles song "Across the Universe." I happened to look at this yester-day, and I realized something about that line in the Argent song: the "universe" is sung with a melisma (B C# D# E), musically giving a sense of the breadth of "across the universe." At the same time, there's a string glissando*, which gives the same impression of breadth in two different ways: the glissando itself encompasses a large span of notes, and because it's recorded in stereo, it seems to travel from left to right, giving a sense of spatial range.
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*I'd always thought it was a harp glissando, but after listening more closely, I'm not so sure now. The timbre seems too different. I think it might actually be piano, played by striking the strings directly, not using the keyboard. Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer did this on "Take a Pebble," and Rod Argent's mentioned him a few times (for instance, in this interview originally published in March 1975 and - more recently - in this interview from 2017 [in response to a question asked at ~17:33]), so it might even be a bit of his influence.
