Welcome to the fourth issue of Galdrar, where writers and artists create pieces based on a musical stimulus. For Issue #4, we will be listening to a movement from Gustav Holst’s most famous suite, titled The Planets, Op. 32, No. 7: Neptune, The Mystic. Join us as we experience the mysteriousness of Neptune through the works of Stuart Baker Hawk, Tony Murray, and María DeGuzmán.

About the Composer

Gustav Theodore Holst was born on September 21, 1874 in Cheltenham, England to Adolph von Holst and Clara Cox. He grew up in a musically-inclined family, with one professional musician each generation for more than 100 years. His father’s family came from Sweden, Latvia, and Germany, while his mother was mostly British. Gustav and his brother Emil were benignly neglected by their father after the death of their mother in 1882, but each received an artistic education. Emil went on to be a successful actor known by his pseudonym Ernest Cossart, while Gustav pursued music.

Gustav was a sickly child, which contributed to the outcome of his musical career. He began playing the piano and the violin until the age of 12. His father then suggested he try trombone, in hopes that it would improve his severe asthma. Although Adolph tried to keep Gustav away from composition so that he would become a pianist, Gustav preferred writing since he suffered from neuritis. After leaving school in 1891, Adolph sent him to Oxford to study under George Frederick Sims. Four months later, Gustav returned to Gloucestershire and began his career as the organist and choirmaster at Wyck Rissington.

In 1892, Gustav wrote music for an operetta, which was well received. To further pursue composition, he applied for a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, but ultimately lost to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Holst was accepted as a non-scholarship student and his father paid the first year’s expenses. Money was so tight for the first two years that he became a vegetarian out of necessity. In 1895, he finally received a scholarship.

After college, Gustav got engaged and became a well-known composer and teacher. He and his wife, Isobel Harrison, married in 1901 and had a daughter named Imogen in 1907. Imogen would go on to become a prolific composer and teacher like her father. After marriage, Gustav taught for more than 15 years at James Allen’s Girls’ School, St. Paul’s Girls’ School, and Morley College. Gustav was praised by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams for building strong music traditions at these institutions, creating generations of world-class musicians. He taught at St. Paul’s until his death in 1934. On May 25, 1934, Gustav passed away due to heart failure.

The Stimulus

The Planets is a seven-movement suite written by Gustav Holst during his obsession with astrology. Completed in 1916, this suite is world-renowned for its contemporary quality and influence on musical scores for film. Each movement of the piece conveys a different emotion or idea associated with the planets in the known solar system at the time (hence the absence of Pluto). In addition, the movement order corresponds with the ruling signs of the zodiac.

Ironically, Holst disliked the popularity of The Planets and preferred some of his other compositions. However, he mostly didn’t like when concert halls asked him to shorten the suite. His daughter Imogen stated the following:

“He hated incomplete performances of The Planets, though on several occasions he had to agree to conduct three or four movements at Queen’s Hall concerts. He particularly disliked having to finish with Jupiter, to make a ‘happy ending,’ for, as he himself said, ‘in the real world the end is not happy at all.'”

Neptune is the final movement of the suite. This haunting piece was one of the first orchestral works to have a fade-out at the end, which was accomplished by having the chorus placed in a separate room. The door to that room was then slowly closed as the chorus repeated the final bar. Imogen once said that the ending to Neptune was “unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women’s voices growing fainter and fainter…until imagination knew no difference between sound and silence.”

Troubadour by Stuart Baker Hawk

there was a time when the finger tips bled
before the callous had come
open string notes untether,
waft into the haze of spent smoke.

hard rubber grabbing into the night
the next gig, the one after that,
names and places all forgotten
some murky purgatory,
resurrected by a smell, a word.

was it Geneva Hall? Poor David’s?
they all look the same.
where the women get drunker,
and hugs bring tears.

B.W. Stevenson on the radio, My Maria
when FM radio was godliness,
homage was given up at The First Presleyterian Temple of the King Devine
skinny Elvis did his gospel serenade,
and fat Elvis did his swan song.

when Memphis still meant the blues,
before the neo-Pharaohs paid homage to their faux pyramids.
Stax and Big Star, the river that took Jeff Buckley,
but you keep pumping out those songs.

the relationship that didn’t stick
kissing your man,
not seeing him for weeks on end.
the odometer keeps clicking off those miles,
as the void becomes a chasm

and you keep laying them down,
that honeyed song with lyrics hard to fill,
until the Blonde Guild that brought on the blood,
the callous and fame that never called,
finds rest at Capital Pawn and Loan.

a Homeric siren awaiting your beck and call
that embroidered blouse with rhinestone,
mother of pearl,
the high no drug can reach,
they are here for me.

Apogee by Tony Murray

Neptune by María DeGuzmán