Weekend self-care open thread: The Planets

Happy weekend, everyone!

To call me a musical omnivore would be an understatement. I delight in all expressions of the Euterpean muse. Growing up, I would switch between Michael Jackson and Beethoven, between the Beatles and Louis Armstrong, between Celia Cruz and Depeche Mode, between Black Sabbath and Grandmaster Flash. I didn't consider it odd or weird. I have continued that as I aged. (I remember my mother, despondent, asking how I could listen to MJ when I also listened to Beethoven. I got incensed. "It's all music!")

One of the pieces which influenced my love of Western classical music was Gustav Holst's The Planets. 

At the time I was very much into tone poems. A tone poem is a programmatic piece of music which purports to tell a narrative in purely musical language. There are no lyrics, there is no chorus. The composer relies on the music to convey a story.

In this orchestral suite, Holst travels the Solar System, composing a piece for each of the seven planets besides Earth, crafting music out of their mythological and divine namesakes. (Pluto had not been discovered when he wrote this suite.) The Planets, to this day, is one of my favorite pieces of music.

For this weekend's self-care, we shall scale the empyrean heights of Mount Olympus and commune with the ancient gods. Many times I think we would have been better off if we'd stuck with them, rather than gone with the God of Abraham, whose worship has both brought us great men and women, and sunk us into violence and genocide. (Then again, that descendent of Venus, Julius Caesar, had no need to worship Elohim to slaughter one million Gauls in his conquests.)

This performance is from the 2015 BBC Proms, a yearly music festival sponsored by the BBC in the United Kingdom.

As always, dear friends, be ever kind, gentle, and joyful with yourselves and those around you.