MAR
9, 1998 - Gustav
Holst: The Planets Suite is a website devoted to what has become
a classical anthem of astrology. In addition to a review and historical
perspective of Holst's The Planets, this site offers free downloads
of the suite in zipped MIDI format. You can download the entire suite if
you like, or any of the seven individual movements named for the known
planets of Holst's day: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and
Neptune. (The entire suite is a 246 kb zip file.) Granted, the nuances
of an instrumental performance are more or less lost in these MIDI files.
But they do serve to introduce the music, and you might find the Neptune MIDI in particular to be a nice meditative mood-setter. (This is a 132 kb file I've set up for you to hear via Astropro, by the way. Because of the size of the file, I don't recommend clicking it on unless you have the Live Update Crescendo plug-in, a fast modem, or both!) In any
case, just knowing that the seven-tone musical scale derives from the seven
planets of classical astrology might spawn a meditation or two on the music
of the spheres.
