#planets suite

got to listen to Gustav Holst’s Planets suite live this weekend, my dad is in the local symphony orchestra.

I have synesthesia, so I see moving shapes in music and I enjoy trying to draw them (not easy, it’s like trying to depict an entire music video in a single image) I don’t see colors in music but if I didn’t use colors in these they would look a lot less interesting and even more crowded. these are in concert order.

descriptions under the cut:

If you want Star Wars-type music but don’t feel like listening to the soundtracks for the umpteenth million time, you should really check out Gustav Holst’s “Planets” suite. It was one of time main inspirations for John William’s work on Star Wars and you can hear it everywhere in the soundtrack for A New Hope. “The Imperial March” takes it’s cues from “Mars” and I found strains of Holst’s “Jupiter” in the track “The Little People Work”. It really helps conjur up that feeling of mystical other-worldliness and fantasy that the original trilogy had in spades.

With resources inherited from Lady Shaa and the help of acolytes desperate to aid me in my work, I designed a great engine. It was a weapon, of course, powerful enough to burn the city to ash. But anyone can make a weapon. To be worthy of the Force, my design had to be so much more... and it was.

I would begin to destroy the city, let the heat and the ash and the flames rise up. But at the very moment the people understood their imminent doom, I would pour the Force into my engine and use it to stop the flow of time. 

All those minds, reacting as one. Pain and fear, on a scale the galaxy had never known, frozen like insects in sap for anyone to see... forever. An eternal shrine to the Dark Side. My masterpiece.