Professor Brian Cox celebrates Gustav Holst's "planets" with his vision of the science behind music

Brian Cox discusses the fragility of life, but also the great hope that can be found in the "planets" of Gustav Holst.

When Gustav Holst released The planets By 1916, most scientists had very little real understanding of the physical side of the planets with which Holst was musically inspired, but Professor Brian Cox explained that Holst, who was more interested in planets for different ideas like "Jollity," "War", "Peace", "Magician", "Messenger", "Old Age" and "Mystic".

As The Guardian In his report, Brian Cox noted that "planets, just like human beings, are born and will die someday, and it is this fragility that makes them valuable." Cox also explained that in music, pieces like The planets will live in a very different and subtle way than other forms of art.

"The music of the past is not a fossil in the same way that Aristotle, Shakespeare and Newton do not belong to the airless cases; music emerges from the ferment of ideas and contributes to the vitality of beer; as such, it is a transcendent ingredient of intellectual life.

In discussing Holst's "Venus: The Caretaker of Peace," Brian Cox described how the planet represented "the evening star, the brightest of worlds" at the origin, while astronomers, in the 1960s, a thick layer of clouds, a magnificent paradise similar to the Bahamas can be hidden there.

However, Americans and Russians quickly learned that this planet was actually a very real version of Dante. Hell with temperatures of 860 degrees Fahrenheit, which makes sunbathing a somewhat scary and daunting prospect.

Brian Cox on the planets of Holst then and now https://t.co/AzNMQh33IQ

– Guardian Music (@guardianmusic) September 29, 2018

Two billion years ago, Venus was almost certainly a very different place from what it is today and Cox believes that with this knowledge, there is a very important message . That is, everything powerful and powerful, whether human or planetary, is subject to death and decay, and this fragility and shortness of breath make the room Holst even more poignant.

"Listen to Holst's" Venus "while thinking about this story, and the play becomes a requiem for a bankrupt planet, a fairy-tale fugacity. The laws of nature allow the spontaneous emergence of beauty but only as an intermediate destination between creation and decline. A reminder that planets, just like human beings, are born once and will someday die, and it is this inevitable fragility and transient that make them valuable. "

"Mars: The War Carrier" by Gustav Holst is another powerful piece of music, and Professor Brian Cox notes that it was written before the First World War. As such, it was perhaps a condemnation of capitalism at that time.

"Before World War I, Holst's motivation was probably a critique of industrial capitalism; a prophetic work that has found a new resonance and a new power in the face of the images of the mechanized war that dominated the decades that followed its composition.

It was thought that Mars might have been habitable, just like Venus, but everything changed in 1965 after the passage of the Mariner 4 spacecraft and revealed that he actually had more in common with the Moon than with Earth. This surprised many people, even the then president, Lyndon Johnson, who took a positive approach by stating, "Maybe, it's maybe just that life as we know it , with his humanity, is more unique than many have thought.

But with the advancement of science, it is now quite possible for humans to move to Mars to become an interplanetary species, as SpaceX's Elon Musk would very much like this to happen. Brian Cox also thinks that this is very likely and that Holst's vision of the living planet as part of the human race on Earth might someday become Martians.

"A planet with a history like Mars could also play a determining role in our future. Mars is rich in resources. all things necessary to support a civilization. Even if there are no Martians today, there will be soon: The Martians will be us. Mars is the only planet we could hope to visit. The others are far too hostile.

Gustav Holst The planets inspired not only scientists like Professor Brian Cox, but also filmmakers, with Nicolas Roeg's film The man who falls on the earth with David Bowie with both "Venus: the spokesperson for peace" and "Mars: the spokesperson for the war", to add to the noble vision of the film of a lost and sad stray extraterrestrial without friends on Earth, but with a message of peace and hope to its conclusion.