![]() ![]() Moon: The "Moon," depicting our archetypal phase-shifting experience, is reflective in many senses, based on chords going in and out of phase, and the constant of the movement is that every texture is made up of phrases going out of phase with each other. The movement is dedicated to Joseph Franklin, original director of Relache. From the boiling intensity of the minor-key opening, one might gather that I "am" a (that is, my Sun is in) Scorpio. The content of each module within the lengthening crescendo is determined by its numerical place. The "5 motive" reappears in repetitions 10 and 15, the "3 motive" in repetitions 6, 9, 12, and 15, and so on. In addition, a plethora of motives is determined by the number series. The form of the movement is strictly additive: A, AB, ABC, ABCD, and so on. Thus the "Sun" movement evolves through the linear crescendo common to all sunrise movements (for example, Ferde Grofe's "Sunrise" from the Grand Canyon Suite). Sun: The Sun is the planet of progressive self-realization we are not necessarily born with the qualities of our sun-sign, but spend our lives growing into them. Male-planet movements are driven by active melodies, female ones often fall into a receptive musical background with no foregrounded elements. ![]() The "personal" planets (Sun, Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury) are characterized by clear melodies and individualistic solo parts the "transcendent" outer planets are depicted in cloudier ensemble effects. The male planets are Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn Mercury and Uranus are neuter Moon, Venus, Neptune, and Pluto are female (though Pluto is related to Mars despite its Dark Mother feminine archetype). And so I have ten movements where Holst had only seven. But in astrology as conceived today, the Sun isn't really the Self (nor the Moon the female or receptive Self), but is rather an influence that acts upon the Self with particular characteristics, more intense, perhaps, but no less qualifiable than Mars, Saturn, and so on. And Holst didn't portray the Sun and Moon, which astrology refers to as planets, possibly because they seemed too personal to exert the same influences, or perhaps simply because they weren't strictly speaking, planets. This was sufficient reason to update.Īt the same time, I have Pluto, which wasn't discovered until 13 years after Holst wrote The Planets - and which is still used as a crucial astrological planet, even if downgraded by the astronomers. My Planets may be better, may be worse, but their raison d'etre is that they are more suggestive of contemporary astrology than Holst's. Where Holst had melodies suggestive of traditional planetary forces, I have processes that mirror our current understanding of how those forces operate. At the same time, through the advent of minimalism, music itself has become more capable of embodying gradual and transformational process. The ushering in of "free will astrology" by composer-astrologer Dane Rudhyar and others in the mid 20th century has replaced the old view of astrology as implacable fate with a new one of psychological process. My justification for writing my own such piece is this: music has not progressed since Holst, in the sense of having improved, the new superceding the old - but astrology has. Asked, years ago, to write an article about my favorite orchestral warhorse, I picked his The Planets. No one could be more aware than I am of the foolhardiness of competing with Gustav Holst. For flute, oboe, alto saxophone, bassoon, viola, double bass, percussion, and synthesizer
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