“Tomorrow Never Knows”, the final track of The Beatles 1966 Revolver album, includes tape loops thanks to the atom-splitting composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were entranced by his DG LP Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths, 1956), an overdubbed mix using a 12-year old boy’s voice, sine waves, white noise, and musique concrete—extremely painstaking razor blade manipulation of audio tape sources in the spirit of surrealist collages. The careers of Miles Davis and Frank Zappa were also changed by the LP. Lasting 13 minutes, Gesang der Jünglinge is electronic music’s first masterpiece.

Stockhausen’s face appears on the Sgt. Pepper’s album in the top row, 5th from the left, between the foul-mouthed comedian and provocateur Lenny Bruce and W.C. Fields, a serious boundary pusher in his own comedic way. Stockhausen was the only composer to appear in this crowd of imaginary fans and friends of the “Lonely Hearts Club Band”.

Unimaginably Dramatic

He was born at 3:00 am on the last day of Leo August 22, 1928. Each zodiac sign lasts 30 days, but the solar year is roughly 365.25 days long. Because of that extra fraction, the exact moment the sun enters a new sign drifts until a leap year resets it. The two 31-day summer months push the end of Leo’s residency to the 22nd. The last day of each zodiac cycle often concentrates and collects the sign’s characteristics.

Karlheinz was born in a maternity center repurposed from a German castle near Mödrath. By 1956, the town would be displaced by the strip mining of lignite, fast-burning brown coal. Sixty years later, the castle was repurposed again as a gallery for modern art and a new home for WDR Electronic Music Studio, where Stockhausen made Gesang der Jünglinge.

He was born to schoolteachers Simon Stockhausen, and Gertrud Stupp, the fragile daughter of a wealthy farmer educated as a pianist and singer. Three pregnancies in 3 years escalated his mother’s depression from thoughts of suicide to a total a mental breakdown. She was institutionalized days before Christmas in 1932. Karlheinz’s younger brother died later that winter. With his baby daughter in tow, Simon moved Karlheinz to Altenberg, where at age seven the boy received piano lessons in the historic Catholic Cathedral from its resident organist. At home he was intensely curious about the back of the radio as though listening to a portal. Hammering objects to hear their sound excited his imagination. On the street, he earned pennies as a performance artist with live frogs and worms as props.

In 1938 his father married his housekeeper Luiza, who bore two more daughters. At age twelve Karlheinz learned that the Nazi’s had created a false story of a Leukemia “outbreak” to cover the extermination of 90 “useless eaters” including his mother in a gas chamber—the Hadamer Killing center. Profoundly disillusioned, Karlheinz left home in January 1942 to board in a training college for teachers where he studied piano, oboe and violin. When the war intensified he was conscripted in 1944 to be a stretcher bearer for wounded soldiers, more accurately, a medical orderly. Near the frontlines of the Lower Rhein was naval hospital Bedburg-Hau where German, British and American casualties were brought, horrendously mutilated by phosphorous bombs. Allied bombing forays surrounded the hospital with constant antiliterary fire. With the endless chaos of explosions, collapsing buildings and sounds of human agony, Karlheinz carried corpses to a chapel where they were stacked for mass burial.

Back in Altenberg, during February of 1945, the teenager coordinated a break from these horrendous duties with his father’s leave as a volunteer soldier serving in the army. Through his shell-shocked exhaustion, Simon knowingly pressed his son to “look after things. I’m not coming back.” Simon did not return from the Hungarian front.

Industrious

After the war, as jobs came up, Stockhausen was a farmer’s field hand, parking lot attendant, and factory worker. He guarded the homes of Allied troupes occupying Cologne, learning jazz and boogie-woogie by ear to entertain them at night. For a year he accompanied Adrion, a magician, by improvising at the piano, while directing amateur shows. In 1947, he enrolled simultaneously to study academics at the university and music at the academy, ultimately graduating with two degrees in 1951. As though by fate he met Olivier Messiaen, the famous French prisoner of war, at Darmstadt, a summer cauldron of the new and the locus of a turning point in the history of music. At this international gathering, Messiaen’s upping the ante of serialism with his trailblazing piano work Mode de valeurs et d’intensités radicalized Stockhausen, determined his path to be a composer, and impelled him to move to Paris for continued study with the master.

Double Leo, Moon in Scorpio

Were it not intense enough for Stockhausen to be born on the last day of his sign, his rising is also Leo—conjoining his fiery magnetic external self with the whole radiant personality. With moon in a water sign Scorpio, ruled by ancient Mars and modern Pluto, Stockhausen’s chart gains immense stamina, unyielding willpower, his solitary ease in darkness, undergirded by intuition, secrecy, and sexuality. Moreover, this position has an extraordinary talent for self-reinvention. As a youth faced with death and destruction all around him, rather than seek comfort, Stockhausen’s impulse across all domains of his life was to clear the slate and subsequently seek ways to exert control over the new reality—with utmost precision. Eventually he created his own publishing house.

Another outer planet, Neptune, is conjunct Stockhausen’s Sun. This is the most powerful aspect in the chart supercharging his double Leo, and moon in Scorpio. In architectural terms, this aspect is like a blueprint for god-like self-importance, and an idealism of cosmic proportions. Stockhausen created a steadfastly maintained myth that he was spiritually educated in the star system Sirius, the brightest in the night sky, and that he served as a vessel of its wisdom. His 1971 Sternklang: Park Music for Five Groups, anticipated Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind denouement. The US premiere occurred at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The only unlit outdoor space large enough to distance the five groups by 200 feet was Sylmar’s Veteran Memorial Park. Singers running with torchbearers communicated between the five groups of four singers and instrumentalists. A massive gong in the center of the park signaled changes across three hours on two nights June 18 & 19. Stockhausen supervised. His deep meditation was intended as a “preparation for creatures from other stars and their arrival on earth.”

Tierkreis (Zodiac)

Sternklang was followed in 1975 by his wildly popular work Tierkreis, the German word for Zodiac. Twelve structurally simple and melodically infectious hooks were created for each sign of the zodiac to be performed in free adaptations by any ensemble including jazz groups, toy pianos, organ and synthesizers. Stockhausen’s complete horoscopic chart is an startling portrait of the composer as clear as a textbook. The extremely early degree of his rising sign (1 degree out of 30) with a very late degree of the Sun (28 degrees) is almost exactly conjunct Neptune is the whole sum of his personality, as described above.

In an on-air interview with me and KPFK’s John Schneider, the late conceptual Fluxus artist Mary Bauermeister, to whom Sternklang is dedicated, shared about her 1967 civil wedding to Stockhausen in San Francisco, while he was teaching at UC Davis. She was his second wife after a famous menage á trois with his first wife Doris. Leaving City Hall they drove to Big Sur to officially consummate their union. Cavorting like wild animals between thousand-year-old redwoods and through a dense thicket of sword ferns, soon enough, the couple experienced full-body reactions to the pervasive undergrowth of poison ivy. After receiving steroid injections, the remainder of the couple’s honeymoon was spent taking oatmeal baths, spreading calamine lotion, reading books, and smoking weed.

Stockhausen’s other famous and oft-performed work was the vocal sextet with electronic drone Stimmung. Jacaranda first performed Stimmung with the Concord Ensemble in a spacey production described in the pioneering blog Out West Arts as “a very high-quality and appropriately free-spirited version of this ‘60s psychedelic classic. The detail and clarity were phenomenal.” This 2008 concert paired with works by Iannis Xenakis zeroing in on Messian’s famous students as part of a 2-year centennial celebration called OM Century.

When it came time to celebrate the series’ tenth anniversary, Jacaranda chose to bring Stockhausen’s widow to Los Angeles for her 80^th birthday to celebrate with a concert at Villa Aurora, and a Goethe Institut-hosted panel discussion and silent auction of her art with proceeds donated to Jacaranda. The capstone concert was the return of Stimmung as the international debut of an ensemble based in Rome Vox Nova Italia. To side step the work’s sexually explicit text it was performed in the original German in 2008. Director Nicholas Isherwood leaned into his long-standing working relationship with the composer to make an English version that was, in the words of Mark Swed, “…unusual — stunningly beautiful, utterly serene, full of charm and doing everything it could to avoid embarrassment.” – Los Angeles Times.

Here is a clip from the Wednesday section:

The light on Stockhausen has dimmed a little over the last two decades, ever since his widely published but dispassionate observation at a Hamburg press conference that the 9/11 attack was the “greatest act of performance art ever performed,” adding that it was as “a demonic act of Lucifer.” His observation was certainly received with widespread condemnation and may serve as the first international example of cancel culture. As a concert producer I would say who has tried twice, including during COVID, to mount his near-impossible Helicopter Quartet—failing both times--the man knew something of the logistics involved in flight and what impeccable execution looks like. As we soon mourn the 25^th anniversary of 9/11, perhaps Stockhausen could be better understood within the full scope of his life. He died of heart failure September 16, 2007.

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Best friends Magnus Lindberg & Esa-Pekka Salonen were born in the final week of June—two crabs in a Finnish bucket called Helsinki. They are indebted in many fascinating ways to Gustav Mahler, the ultimate Cancer composer, but this month’s edition of AstroMusic will favor music over astrology. It doubles as program notes for ALTITUDE—a new release from Jacaranda Live Recordings, that features these great living Cancerians—with their late Libran soulmate Kaija Saariaho providing balance.

Jean Sibelius is Finland’s most important historical figure—forever linked to its inevitable rupture with Russia. Despite the composer’s haste and lack of patriotic intent, his tone poem Finlandia (1900) was immediately embraced as a rousing call to end Tsarist censorship—when Finland was a Russian grand duchy. His rousing Jaeger March thrilled crowds when independence was declared in 1917. After the Russo-Finnish War of 1939, when the Helsinki Music Institute was renamed the Sibelius Academy, Finlandia’s hymn section gained words to intensify the music’s national feeling. His seven luminous symphonies have become enduring cultural emissaries. The composer died in 1957.

The personality of Sibelius is omnipresent in Finland. The International Sibelius Violin Competition was founded to celebrate his centennial in 1965. A massive 24-ton Sibelius Monument in Sibelius Park followed. In 1996, Breitkopf & Härtel began editing the still-unfinished Critical Edition of Complete Works by Jean Sibelius. Finnish identity is powerfully infused by music education; at its core is the Sibelius Academy. Many exceptional conductors and solo artists have emerged from the academy during the late 20th century—and continue today. Among the Sibelius Academy’s most notable graduates were composers Kaija Saariaho (1952-2023), Magnus Lindberg and Esa-Pekka Salonen—both born in 1958. Worldwide, the name of Sibelius is synonymous with a software program for composing music.

Coincidence

A very independent four-year-old Salonen refused his mother’s offer of piano lessons preferring soccer instead, but music would soon call to a temperament ill-suited for the pace and restrictions of school. The boy’s outlook on life irrevocably changed in 1968 when he heard RCA’s recent recording of Turangalîla Symphony by Olivier Messiaen. His father was testing out the family’s new Hi Fi Stereo with a mix of familiar and unknown LPs. The boy was dumbfounded by the possibilities presented by this very loud and strangely exotic French music.

Notably—Olivier Messiaen’s father, a Shakespeare scholar, returned from battlefield action in WWI to his teaching job and family in Nantes. The Armistice agreement between the Allies and Germany was signed at exactly 11 am November 11, 1918. Nantes was a massive Allied hub of operation, so the moment was met with cacophonous outbursts of joy. Every bell in Nantes pealed as children shrieked. James P. Europe’s Harlem Hellfighters, first to perform jazz in Europe there in Nantes, erupted with the raucous syncopations of American ragtime. Memphis Blues competed up-tempo with three national anthems fervently shouted alongside a wall of bass sound—the bellowing foghorns of ships docked along the Loire River. Less than a month later Messiaen turned ten.

He received the score for Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande as a birthday present. This highly sophisticated score, exceeding 400 pages, was then little more than two decades old! Leonard Bernstein, as a last-minute substitute, conducted the premiere of Turangalîla Symphony at Tanglewood in 1949. So, the symphony was not yet twenty years-old when Salonen, also aged ten, became spellbound by the imposing brass of Messiaen’s statue theme.

Such a coincidence for two ten-year-old speaks to the rapid advancements of music in the 20th-century, and the effectiveness of challenging young minds to strive for comprehending the seemingly impossible.

A Bloody Greenhouse

Soon, the young Finn took up the French horn. He entered the academy at age 15 remaining there for four years. Pianist Magnus Lindberg—born three days apart—shared Salonen’s Theory I class. Their strong temperaments and restless minds were apparently so volatile, a wise pedagogue put Risto Väisänen, a brilliant young musicologist and tutor in harmony and counterpoint in charge of them. Every Saturday for four years the three young men sightread the entire standard symphonic repertoire and many operas, including Wagner’s Lohengrin, on two pianos, alternating the conducting duties, all the while Väisänen expounded on the compositional principles operating in each work.

“It was like a bloody greenhouse. Until I was about 25,” said Salonen to Alex Ross in his famous 2007 article “The Anti-Maestro” in The New Yorker, “I never gave any thought to the pragmatic aspects of music-making, such as having an audience. Sometimes we had contemporary music concerts, and maybe four people would come, including my mother.” That being said, Salonen studied conducting at the academy with Jorma Panula. Soon Lindberg and Salonen fled Finland for Italy to study intensively with the composer Franco Donatoni. The small Tuscan city of Siena was as far from the omnipresent Sibelius the two firebrands could get.

Smoking Cigars

Not surprisingly, Saariaho (née Laakkonen) had a more challenging path to enjoy the kind of education so readily available to her younger male peers. Given the importance of music in Finland’s conservative male-dominated culture, Saariaho had difficulty imagining herself as a composer, so she pursued studies as a graphic artist. Due to its emphasis on the whole person and the primacy of lived experience, she graduated at age 20 from the progressive Rudolf Steiner School. Its pedagogy proved quite welcoming to a left-handed self-described synaesthete—someone with powerful associations of color with sound. As a student she was briefly married to Markku Saariaho, but in 1972 chose to live instead with a painter until 1979.

By 1976, her need to compose music become so overwhelming Saariaho demanded entrance to the Sibelius Academy for studies with the 38-year old Paavo Heininen, a cosmopolitan pianist/composer, and the last pupil of the thwarted pioneer composer Aare Merikanto. She also briefly took up smoking cigars—how else could a talented self-possessed female composer be taken seriously, or even get attention in a conservative Lutheran male-dominated country

Saariaho, Lindberg and Salonen founded Korvat Auki (Ears Open) at the Sibelius Academy in 1977 to promote new music in non-traditional spaces. Upon graduating in 1981, Lindberg studied with the seminal French pioneer of spectralism Gerard Grisey, a composer who had already strongly influenced Kaija Saariaho during the summer of 1980 in Darmstadt. In 1981, she moved to Freiburg Germany, but studies there with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber were too stultifyingly focused on serialism, hence her departure for Paris. Salonen continued in Milan with the eccentric composer Niccolò Castiglioni, who countered Donatoni’s austere strictness with humor, puzzles, and freedom.

Thunderclap

Salonen’s dedication to the performance of new music fostered a need to conduct, which he furthered with Donatoni. A classic thunderclap of fame happened when the 25-year old Finn substituted with a few days’ notice for Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Mahler’s massive six-movement Third Symphony with a vocal soloist and choruses in London’s Royal Festival Hall. That triumph led to his appointment in 1989 as Music Director of the LA Phil. By 1992, a wholly different context and the freedom to reinvent himself became apparent.

Five Images After Sappho

That freedom would become fully evident in an orchestra work premiered in 1997 aptly called LA Variations. Its impact was widely hailed as a breakthrough that signaled a new era of dynamism, maturity, and promise. Two years later that promise was fulfilled by a major work co-commissioned by the Ojai Music Festival and London Sinfonietta intended for the soprano Dawn Upshaw, with whom Salonen would record it in 2000. The result is a near miraculous evocation of the ancient poet Sappho (circa 610-580 BC) from written evidence of her life found on the Greek island of Lesbos.

The composer writes, “Sappho reveals to us secrets of the female soul like nobody else. There is no subject more interesting.” The arc of the subject’s life from girlhood’s awakening to the consummation of marriage is elicited with ravishing harmonies that recall Debussy’s treatment of the same era fictionalized in his Chanson de Bilitis, as well as the sun-drenched splendor of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe. While the written fragments of Sappho have attracted many composers, no work so thoroughly inhabits the material or channels the primal ecstasy of this ever-fascinating figure. The instrumental balances ingeniously allow the soprano to shine within a flurry of glistening details and navigate ancient realms.

Jubilees

After extensive experimentation with electronics and a rugged avant-garde profile, Lindberg gained major attention with his 1988-90 orchestral trilogy: Kinetics, Marea, and Joy. The massive four-movement memorial tribute to Witold Lutoslawski Aura proved to be a career milestone in 1994. Related Rocks (heard recently at the Ojai Music Festival) for two pianos, percussion and electronics created considerable excitement for its vibrant and rhythmically aggressive posture in 1997.

While a Jubilee is synonymous with an important anniversary, the unusual plural usage makes wonderful sense when the simultaneous anniversaries being celebrated by Lindberg were the 75th birthday of Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), a Diamond Jubilee, and the so-called Millennium, or Great Jubilee. Gloria Cheng gave the world premiere of these six beautifully crafted and prismatic miniatures Jubilees for Piano Spheres in 2002. I have exercised my curatorial prerogative to arrange them in two sets ordered so as to function as central pivots to each half of the original program. That order has been retained.

Terra Memoria

A turning point in worldwide recognition for Saariaho and her music occurred in 2003 with the bestowal of the Grawemeyer Award for her first opera L’Amour de Loin (2000). Saariaho was inspired to undertake this five-act story of a 12th century troubadour after seeing the Peter Sellars’ 1992 Salzburg Festival production of Messiaen’s only opera Saint-Françoise d’Assise with Salonen conducting the LA Phil. Chamber works often involving electronics had begun appearing in 1982 with the important Nymphéa ( Waterlilies) string quartet with electronics in 1987. Saariaho’s second string quartet Terra Memoria arrived in 2006, after she experienced frustration with the restless evolution of electronics.

Nymphéa (1997) was written during a decade focused on finding new ways of integrating electronic with live performance. Saariaho’s husband since 1982, French composer Jean-Baptiste Barriere, worked closely with her in this experimentation and helped maintain her music with electronics in a rapidly changing technological environment. The new work was cast in more conventional terms and reflected a fully mature understanding the string quartet’s potential for complex expression and nuanced lyricism. “The piece is dedicated ‘for those departed.’, she wrote upon its premiere:

“Twenty years have passed since Nymphéa and my musical thinking has evolved much in that time, but my initial interest in string instruments has remained as vivid as ever. Some thoughts about this: we continue remembering the people who are no longer with us; the material—their life—is ‘complete,’ nothing will be added to it. Those of us who are left behind are constantly reminded of our experiences together: our feelings continue to change about different aspects of their personality, certain memories change, some remain clear flashes which we can relive. These thoughts brought me to treat the musical material in a certain manner; some aspects of it go through several distinctive transformations, whereas some remain nearly unchanged, clearly recognizable.”

Without identifying any particular source of such memories, she states “The title Terra Memoria refers to two words that are full of rich associations: to earth and memory. Here earth refers to my material, and memory to the way I’m working on it.” The Emerson Quartet commissioned and toured extensively with Terra Memoria. The quartet was soon arranged by the composer for string orchestra, in which guise it has been recorded and widely performed. This is the work’s first Southland performance. Saariaho’s thoughts now resonate more fully with her passing in 2023. This recording by the Lyris Quartet is dedicated to her memory

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As a Pisces native, with my fish swimming in opposite directions, I have ambivalence toward that other dynamic duo of the Zodiac—Gemini, the twins. The compatibility of these particular water and air signs (Pisces & Gemini are both mutable) is less than ideal despite sympathy and deep levels of mutual recognition.

The supremely gifted Gemini composers Igor Stravinsky (June 17, 1882-April 6-1971) and György Ligeti (May 28, 1923-June 12, 2006) dominated the Ojai Music Festival’s final concert, Sunday June 14. Offering contrasting moods, they enthralled a rapt audience after Cancerian Esa-Pekka Salonen eloquently conducted Fog, his orchestral tribute to his close friend, the late great Piscean architect Frank O. Gehry. That fine day, the extraordinary music of these brilliant Geminis shared the cosmos with the most unimaginably grotesque birthday party since the Roman Emperor Caligula’s fabled extravaganzas—an elite cage match held under a canopy called “The Claw” to entertain cynical opportunists, wealthy vulgarians, and invited military guests at The White House—with blood, sweat, and jeers—costing $60 million! It was even more cringe-inducing to ponder that the 110th birthday of America’s only other Gemini President, John F. Kennedy, will likely be celebrated somewhere other than the White House next year on May 29.

An American Composer

In his 1957 Omnibus series on television, one of seven devoted to classical music, Virgo Leonard Bernstein introduced Stravinsky to American audiences as a musical Janus—the two-faced god. This Roman god’s duality—with one face pondering the past and the other face staring into the future—is often conflated with Gemini, the mythical Greek twins Castor & Pollux—one mortal, the other immortal. Gemini natives are not infrequently observed as two-faced, fickle, and narcissistic.

Instead, Bernstein focused on Stravinsky’s backward-glancing neoclassicism at a time when the composer had begun embracing the serialist wave of the immediate future. My favorite Stravinsky work that launched this late period is a Balanchine ballet that perfectly comingles neoclassicism and 12-tone serialism—the past enmeshed with the future. The score of Agon (1957) was premiered on the composer’s birthday in UCLA’s Royce Hall. His shadow twin Robert Craft, a Libra, conducted the Los Angeles Festival Orchestra.

Despite Stravinsky’s Russian heritage and international fame derived from scandalizing & entertaining Parisian society—with citizenship in both countries—Bernstein noted that Stravinsky became an American citizen in 1944, upon immigrating to Los Angeles/Beverly Hills. He lived longer in the City of Angels than in any other metropolis. Like his naturalized Brentwood nemesis Arnold Schoenberg, Stravinsky was determined to become American. In 1945 he composed the jazz-infused Ebony Concerto for clarinet and jazz band, and the rousing Symphony in Three Movements, a strong candidate for The Great American Symphony.

Stravinsky’s Sun sign is at 26” 07’, a late degree of Gemini, with Moon in Cancer and Virgo rising. This “big three” configuration is the same as the German emigré novelist Thomas Mann, Stravinsky’s famous fellow Los Angeleno and Brentwood neighbor. All ten of Stravinsky’s planets are concentrated in the last third of his horoscope—within four houses. A house containing three-or-more planets is called a stellium. Stravinsky’s chart has two four-planet stelliums! Such a quartet of faster moving inner planets is quite unusual, while a cluster of slower moving outer planets is less so. However, having two four-planet stelliums in the Ninth and Tenth Houses leaves only two remaining planets—and those magnificent loners are “solo-maxxing” in the Eleventh and Twelfth Houses. Stravinsky’s chart is quite extraordinary!

Crowded together in the Tenth House of career, public reputation, social standing, and legacy is Stravinsky’s gregarious Gemini Sun less than 4 degrees from Cancer—a position of “seen it all” mastery—shoulder-to-shoulder with the three other faster moving planets in neighboring Cancer. His moon, ruling the interior world of Stravinsky’s feelings, is right there always available to him, if not always shared with others. The communication style of his Mercury in Cancer is informed by empathy, intuition, and emotional intelligence, if not without the occasional poke of a defensive crab claw. His friends were often warmly addressed as “my dear”, while he was also known for an acerbic Gemini wit that didn’t suffer fools lightly. With Venus so nearby in Cancer, Stravinsky’s love life continues to be the source of public fascination. In short, this Tenth House stellium powers a forceful public persona built on unshakable conviction.

In the Ninth House of higher learning, belief systems, and adventures, we see three slower moving and generation-defining planets—Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto in earthy pragmatic Taurus. Together, they embarked on a life-long quest for spiritual security with reverence for nature, while nearby Jupiter in Gemini, completing the stellium, imbued this eternal student with immense public curiosity.

Stravinsky’s charismatic action-oriented Mars, in fiery and egotistical Leo, is alone in the Eleventh House. His humanitarian ideals were expressed through invention, with tangible long-term repercussions of such originality, playing out in complex networks & communities.

Solitary unpredictable Uranus—the generational planet of sudden breakthroughs, disruption, iconoclasm, and chaos—placed in the Twelfth House of collective subconscious—is here under the watchful eye of meticulous, duty-bound, analytical Virgo—a lover of ritual and order! This position of inherent tension is amplified in the Twelfth House, a potent place of private revolution from which Stravinsky’s superpowers emanated. Accounts of his elaborately organized composing desk, with its colored inks, sharpened pencils, talismans, and ready erasers sets the scene. This chart’s “bundle pattern” is comprised of almost equal parts air, earth, and water with a mighty dash of elemental fire—solo-maxxed Mars in Leo. Not surprisingly, it represents an emphasis on trans-personal achievement and massive public success from highly focused creativity.

A Wounded Warrior

My hope is that every installment of AstroMusic emphasizes the uniqueness of each person’s astrology, while contemplating the eternal archetypes that shift, shuffle, and come to bare—using composers and their music to sort these ideas out. Enigmatic György Ligeti’s story illustrates the point and purpose of such exploration. This pioneer of near-impossible music had a quirky personality to match, especially toward the darkening final chapters of his life.

Ligeti’s Hungarian Jewish father and brother were exterminated in Hitler’s death camps all the while he subsisted as a forced laborer; his mother barely survived Auschwitz. Theirs was an anguished reunion after the war. Ligeti and his new wife escaped Hungary in 1956, as Soviet tanks thundered into Budapest to suppress the democratic uprising, by burrowing under mail bags on a train to Germany. While under the thumb of Communism, Ligeti publicly composed Hungarian folk music, much of it lost in his haste to escape, while protecting his avantgarde works. In Cologne he embraced electronic music as a source of inspiration and condemned dogmatic orthodoxy of all kinds. Having moved to Vienna in 1968 he sued Stanley Kubrick over 2001: A Space Odyssey for the director’s unauthorized use of his music. MGM settled appropriately and the notoriously difficult auteur used Ligeti’s music in subsequent films. Ironically, 2001 became Ligeti’s calling card and claim to fame.

Ligeti’s Sun is at an early degree of Gemini near Taurus, with his Moon and Jupiter in Scorpio placed in the Third House—and, like Stravinsky, Virgo rising. Also, like Stravinsky, Ligeti’s chart has a Tenth House stellium with Mercury, Mars, and his Sun together in Gemini and Pluto nearby in Cancer. Useful and necessary to face the extreme challenges of his career, this powerful trio of faster-moving planets in Gemini powered Ligeti’s chameleon-like adaptability while slower-moving Pluto in Cancer, along for the ride, underscored the painful transformations of his intensely emotional nature.

Venus in sensual and stubborn Taurus is alone in his Ninth House of higher learning & beliefs. The public gestures implied by this romantic position can be seen in the dramatic love story of his treacherous escape. Career-shaping Saturn, exalted in the judicious balancing act of Libra, is alone in the Second house of self-worth and life’s basic security. Here, the pursuit of fairness, discipline, and partnerships is critical. Fear of scarcity and strict budgeting would be rewarded later in life. Continuing the theme of independence and interdependence as a charged zone in Ligeti’s personality, change-agent Uranus in spiritual Pisces is alone in the Seventh house generating considerable paradox. Craving intimacy, the composer attracted freedom-loving like-minded “twins”—partners who, like him, were creative, unpredictable, and emotionally detached. But, being very sensitive to suffocation and routine, he could distance them with disruption and shocking insults, if seeming too close. Neptune in Leo is alone in the Twelfth House. His vivid cinematic imagination struggled within a secretive nature that needed to be regularly validated with praise and attention.

The Concerto and the Hybrid Ballet

I’ve written before in Patrick’s Picks about the Colburn Orchestra. There is nothing so thrilling as an orchestra of twenty-somethings that have been given extra rehearsals to learn a very good piece for the first time—and then give it all the passion they have! A strong case can be made for Colburn at The Soraya performing Pelleas und Melisande Op. 5, the gigantic Late Romantic tone poem by Arnold Schoenberg, conducted by Carlos Miguel Prieto, as the most astonishing concert I have attended this year. For Ojai, the students had to play seven challenging works on Friday and Sunday making the last two all the more remarkable.

The Ligeti Violin Concerto’s “Praeludium” creeps in with a modest bowing pattern as the soloist is soon immersed in a sharply astringent mood—the orchestra becoming assertive—then flowing together with vivacious luminosity for a total of about four minutes. The eloquent second movement “aria” is interrupted by a brittle “Hoquetus & Chorale” that surprises as its mournful sweetness dissolves into a maze of stacked variations heard in simultaneous tempi—quite slow to very fast. That hocket shifts to a gnarly chorale of peculiar counterpoint vaguely reminiscent of Bach—all in less than eight minutes. A very romantic violin vibrato suggests high-pitched nervous tittering with a hint of hysteria for an edge-of-your-seat intermezzo lasting two minutes. The “Passacaglia” is slow, but its intensely moving violin line is punctuated by orchestral chords sounding lightly like a pensive organ before opening out into anguish, and the solemn chorus of four ocarinas—in less than seven minutes. The final six-minute “Appassionato” had the ocarinas keening while a sped-up version of the opening prelude music continues to accelerate amid glassy shimmering textures that contrast the soloist’s fragility with imminent danger before rushing to a frenzied near-impossible cadenza capped by the enigma of a tossed-off ending.

Leila Josefowicz wrestled and caressed this concerto with an ardent ferocity I have never seen before. Her stance was Amazonian in its implacable strength, while her beautiful face was constantly alive with fierce quicksilver emotions. Attacking the concerto’s astonishingly final cadenza—of Josefowicz’s own making—like a Greek fury, her countenance could petrify a hapless onlooker. Fortunately, her devoted and indefatigable fellow warrior Esa-Pekka Salonen was not turned to stone.

After a balmy Ojai intermission, with dumbstruck music lovers huddled in the approaching twilight, trying to comprehend what just happened, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella ballet offered a delicious Italian buffet of melodic delights inventively served with infectious rhythms. This rarely-performed stage work, based on commedia dell arte and 18th century songs, was the career turning point that jumpstarted the composer’s shift to neoclassicism. Delving into the nourishment of simple songs made possible all that followed in the half-century of Stravinsky’s remaining output. By leaving behind the Russian period and the seismic disruption of WWII, Stravinsky discovered the past, and with it endless possibilities for the future.

Cringe

Of the entire zodiac, Gemini is the sign least connected to the truth. Gemini believes truth can be invented as a social construction. The acronym TMI seems created to describe Gemini. At its most extreme, the Gemini native is a restless, loquacious, gossip-guzzling, shape-shifting, multitasking, loose-lipped, sleight-of-hand fabulist. Donald Trump’s core personality—Sun in Gemini—is one of restless talkative curiosity, constantly changing topics like a kaleidoscope loosely wrapped in a crazy quilt. This Gemini Sun is glorified by its position opposite the zodiac wheel from Sagittarius—where Trump’s Moon resides in imagined grandeur with the flourishes of flags, trumpets, and drum rolls. His moon is a flying palace! As witnessed daily, with Leo rising—the surface outward personality—this Gemini native is an entertainer frantic for an audience. Facing the public, he is compelled to razzle dazzle.

Donald, the teenager, was a rebellious uncouth student who bullied his peers and taunted his teachers. Hoping this highly-volatile personality would gain self-discipline and restraint, his parents enrolled the boy in the New York Military Academy for five years. What he learned instead, apart from personal hygiene—to a near-phobic degree—was how to maximize his competitiveness, and apply dominance through hierarchy, loyalty, military drills, and pageantry.

Happy 250th birthday, America.

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Sagittarius composer David Conte—who shares credit for the fine score of Ballets Russes, a documentary creamed with invaluable rare footage about how Russian dance forever changed American culture (Amazon Prime)—was the last American student of the indominable Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979). Boulanger taught up until the last five months of her life. “One works, or one cannot work —that would be death”, she commented on retirement.

The 20^th-century’s most formidable French music pedagogue, Boulanger mentored American composers Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, David Diamond, Elliott Carter, Irving Fine, Philip Glass, Quincy Jones, and Conte—among more than 250 acolytes from around the planet. Plucky at age fourteen, Boulanger joined Gabriel Fauré’s Paris Conservatory class in 1901 alongside the then controversial composer Maurice Ravel aged 26. For both, the pathway to the coveted Rome Prize was through the broad-minded teaching of this humbly powerful chain-smoking reformer. Fauré was born May 12, 1845, was appointed Director of the Paris Conservatory in 1905, dramatically shook the institution to its skeleton, set new standards, and managed to teach with declining health and debilitating hearing anomalies until 1924.

Living Bread

Three years before then, the young Copland, (1900-90), started working with Boulanger in Paris as her first American student. After Conte’s Fulbright Scholarship to study with her was finished, he worked with Copland several days a week at the composer’s estate during the summer of 1982—travelling with Copland’s assistant by train—to work on the score of his last orchestral work Inscape. Boulanger, the master analyzer, was their common bond.

Nadia’s family name means baker, which like the baguette itself is almost synonymous with being French. In 1765 Antoine Boulanger opened a groundbreaking health-forward soup kitchen with the world’s first menu. It became the birthplace of the modern restaurant. Nadia, unrelated, was a no-nonsense hard-working Virgo who started teaching at 8am and stopped after 10 pm, while having food brought to her, taking small bites between students. When asked about her eating habits, she replied, “The way to eat and the way to teach are two absolutely separate questions.”

Such food chatter is especially apt this month for talking about musical comfort food and the robust appetites of Taurus. In this regard, Boulanger shared with Conte a distinction about artists attributed to the structural anthropologist/linguist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009). Her intellectual colleague also moved in the avant-garde circle of the American Winaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing machine fortune, and, as the Princesse de Polignac, married to Polish royalty. Levi-Strauss and Boulanger worshipped Igor Stravinsky, and later as the Nazi’s marched to occupy Paris, both were rescued by the Rockefeller Foundation and resettled to a French-centric milieu in New York City (1940-44). Conte shared with Jacaranda’s music director Mark Alan Hilt an exchange between these two displaced titans—music is either raw, or its cooked. This distinction is quite a seductive “sorting hat” once you let it sink in!

Hilt shares a birthday, September 16, with Boulanger, making them both Virgo natives and, as such, sympathetic with fellow earth sign and second decan Taurus Monsieur Fauré. As a composer, Fauré was an exemplary chef, refining his blends in serene summer retreats. The French countryside, Italy or Switzerland were as far from a China shop as a bull could be.

A childhood of eating unhealthy fare rationed in an austere boarding school for church musicians shaped Fauré’s appetite. Rather than become an epicurean, he appreciated traditional bourgeoise French cooking. For him eating was a sensual social ritual, for artistic networking, romance, and conversation. Fauré had an expansive network of hostesses across Europe and accepted the invitations of those he knew had good cooks and relaxing gardens.

Vocal Chords

Following the Aries declaration “I AM!”, Taurus asserts “i feel” with grounded humility and stubborn authority. Their primary domains are eating, sleeping, and making love. One must add singing as a domain because Taurus rules the throat. This rulership is one of astrology’s most incontrovertible facts made evident in the vocal wonders of Taureans Ella Fitzgerald, Barbara Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Frankie Valli, Enrique Iglesias, Fred Astaire, Billy Joel, Cher, Grace Jones, Adele, & Lizzo—as well as, past opera superstars Luciano Pavarotti, Birgit Nilsson, Beverly Sills, Renata Tebaldi, joined by the still glorious bass of Ferruccio Furlanetto and compelling countertenor of Anthony Roth Costanzo. Today, the spectacular 50-year career of Patti LuPone, who originated Evita in 1979, attests to the durable and judicious use of her well-endowed throat.

The notorious Taurean sensuality is also verified by Fauré’s exceptionally active sex life. The composer Alfredo Casella, described his teacher as having “the large, languid, and sensual eyes of an impenitent Casanova”, irresistible to women across Parisian society. His loveless arranged marriage was further undermined by his horror of domestic life. Fauré’s mistresses included Emma Bardac before she became Debussy’s mistress, and the British composer Adela Maddison. The brilliant pianist Marguerite Hasselmans, 31-years younger, lived openly together for the last 24-years of his Fauré’s life. Some speculate about his closeness with Winaretta Singer, but her “white” marriage to the Prince de Polignac allowed their same-sex preferences an excellent cover. In the later years, a standing joke at the conservatory had it that many of his students were actually the illegitimate children of his previous students.

Next to the serenely affecting orchestral morsel Pastorale, Fauré’s Requiem is his most admired and popular work—one that also redefined, one might say liberated that liturgical genre, from the Roman grandiloquence of Sagittarian Berlioz, the operatic drama of Libran Verdi, and the protestant sobriety of Brahms, a fellow Taurus. For all its seeming simplicity, the Requiem Op. 48 is notoriously difficult to get right, among its several versions. Hilt, an initially self-taught pianist and singer, was thirteen when he made its acquaintance.

The first music of Fauré I knew was the Requiem. Our little community chorus and orchestra sang it in Pratt, Kansas, where I was born. We had many rehearsals, so I was able to pick up all the choral parts quite easily, not realizing what I had accomplished. As an avid reader I was struck that the dreamy, fluid quality of the music did not mirror or “explain” the Latin text, but rather amplified its emotional resonance, while Fauré’s music seemed to organically blend melody & harmony. At the time, the dream-like quality of his harmonic progressions, and the way that Fauré made the melodies grow out of the harmonies were new and miraculous to my young ears. I would learn later that the quality I loved was a direct result of his immersion in ancient chant and the modes of church music. Fauré studied at the Niedermeyer School, an institution for the training of church musicians. As an aspiring young church musician, I felt a collegial kinship with him, even though our jobs could not have been more different—a sophisticated French Catholic organist, working at one of Paris’s important churches, and me, in college playing organ for the Christian Scientists in Wichita. I had never heard music with such a comfortable feeling of intimacy before, and no-one else writes quite like Fauré, despite the enormous influence that he had as teacher and mentor to many composers at the Paris Conservatory —and their students going forward. With more study and decades of repeated listening, the entirety of Fauré’s music has revealed itself more deeply. It has worked its way into my being.

Winnowing the Herd

The search for a recommendation takes us from Boulanger’s pioneering 1948 EMI recording in Salle Gaveau with organist Maurice Duruflé, and her noisy live recording in 1962 at Carnegie Hall—the first woman to ever to conduct the New York Philharmonic—to the well-known classic recordings conducted by Andre Cluytens, Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, and Robert Shaw. There are several laudable productions featuring less prominent British choral conductors, as well as a few early music specialists extending their reach. The Requiem is a good vehicle in which to hear the differences in choral singing technique among the French, British, and American traditions. Some pipe organs sound fuzzy and too blended, others are too intrusive, and some are electronic, or sound that way. Soloists include big names in opera with commercial cache, others associated with oratorio singing hover closer to the chorus. Tempi vary widely, and the weight of the sound depends on which of four of versions is performed and in what type of hall acoustic.

Given all of these considerations, the 2008 Naïve Records release comes from the French choral group Accentus founded in 1991 by Laurence Equilbey, an assiduous style queen. Its not difficult to draw a line from Boulanger to this Pisces conductor born in 1962. She studied with Niklaus Harnoncourt and Claudio Abbado, as well as the great Finnish maestro Jorma Panula, mentor of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Osmo Vänskä, and Chicago Symphony’s new firebrand music director Klaus Mäkelä. Her immaculately French sound seems informed by the extremely clean singing of Estonian and Finnish choruses, and technically sophisticated Grammy-winning Arnold Schoenberg Choir—augmented for “In Paridisum” by La Mâitrise de Paris. With the exquisite Orchestre National de France, the ideally balanced organ has bloom, color, and air, while the always poised soprano of Sandrine Piau is joined by the warmly humane baritone-tenor Stéphane Degout. This whole story-telling enterprise is comfortable in its skin, lightly sensuous, and balmy but devout. Given the Bull’s notable penchant for sleep, Equilbey’s performance earns the work’s nickname as a “lullaby of death”.

Musical Comfort Food

As Taurus composers go, Fauré has been handily eclipsed by the popularity of Johannes Brahms and Peter Tchaikovsky, two bulls who generated imperishable concertos and symphonies that are money-making warhorses—classical music’s dependable comfort food. While familiarity may breed contempt among many devotees, the cultural institutions that such comfort food staples support look the other way while straining to find new marketing strategies for the repetition of such “evergreen” fare—energy that could be spent developing seductive strategies to promote the richness of less-familiar repertoire.

With his glittering surfaces and suave arcs of passion, Tchaikovsky may seem a paragon of music that is cooked. I would argue, however, that there is a barely suppressed hysteria underneath the refinement that betokens a raw sensibility crashing against the boundaries. Burrow into his less well-know music and another world seems to unfold.

I have been amused by marketing ploys to justify a festival-like focus such as “Brahms Unbound” since this boundary-obsessed composer’s plodding deliberation, for my taste, stewed much of the flavor from his often lugubrious music. There are exceptions to be sure, but with Brahms no unbinding is possible. Brahms is surely cooked, while Tchaikovsky’s wild side strikes me as ultimately raw.

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Decades ago, my astrology mentor Tim Troy shared an aside about a couple we knew who were born weeks apart in neighboring signs. The phrases “past lives” and “karmic debt” raised my skepticism level way back then. But he went on about a special interpersonal bond that may deepen into a complex, challenging tango of dominance and submission—or platonic coexistence with deep understanding. Laguna Beach celebrity astrologers Jack & Ray, Tim’s mentors, concurred that one or both members of an “adjacent” couple might struggle with their sexual identity or have some similarly deep-seated issue.

Smashing Atoms

Turns out the enormously powerful but problematic bond between Pisces dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and Aries impresario Serge Diaghilev exemplifies what Tim was getting at. Last month I hinted at this dynamic in The Pisces Pleasure Principle. April’s Aries: the Sacred Monster will elaborate on some of my March themes—so this read should be considered a sequel.

Most astrologers now concur that while adjacent signs are technically in “aversion” to one another—blind because they don’t share a common element (as with this couple—water versus fire), or modality (mutable versus cardinal)—together theirs is a special “calling” from a possible Karmic root-cause for their bond. Simply put, the successive sign usually acts as the “evolved” version of the previous sign pushing it foreword to resolve significant “shadow” traits from an unsettled past. But this particular student/teacher pairing—Nijinsky & Diaghilev—is additionally significant because it bridges the end point and the beginning of the Zodiac’s cycle—highly evolved “old soul” watery mutable Pisces attaching to fiery fledgling “newborn” cardinal Aries. Past/future. Who is teaching whom?

The zodiac’s eleven other adjacency pairings lean forward, but this particular couple conjoins Pisces’s accumulated karmic wisdom with Aries’s clean slate. The phrase, “X has forgotten more than Y will ever learn”, comes to mind. Nonetheless, the newbie is impelled to teach the master! Terminally evolved Pisces holds the “karmic memory” of everything that impatient little Aries has been through, or will ever go through, making the Aries feel inexplicably exposed as they stare into the deep gaze of Pisces. This volatile and vastly creative bond, like smashing atoms, was the very center of the revolutionary Ballet Russe at its pinnacle—before WWI ushered in a terrifying New World Order, and Nijinsky’s persona began to unravel.

Theirs is a perplexing story made more so by the ephemeral nature of dance, by the liberal sexual mores in pre-Revolution Russia, the distorting lens of fame, and the menace of widows. Still photographs and oral history takes on exaggerated importance when dealing with dance—especially dance of this period. The spoken memories of all who were involved have to be reconciled with their respective vantage points and agendas. Generally considered definitive, Nijinsky: A Life of Genius and Madness by Richard Buckle, changed appreciably from feedback received over its three editions 1971 to 1980—and before Nijinsky’s unexpurgated diaries restored 60% of the 1919 original when finally published in 1999. Romola Nijinska, wife, and editor of the diaries, cut out anything Nijinsky wrote that contradicted her 1933 biography (ghost-written by the emerging gay impresario Lincoln Kirstein) when she first published the diaries in 1936.

Is Nijinsky the queer icon he is being made out today? Were he and Diaghilev really a romantic couple? Was his madness congenital, or brought on by circumstances? Can the potential for madness be seen in Nijinsky’s horoscope? Did his wife help him or contribute to his decline?

Feminine Provocation/Masculine Lust

With the help of Astrotheme, a trustworthy astrology resource, and much corroboration from multiple sources, I found that Nijinsky was conclusively born in Kiev to Polish ballet dancers February 28, 1888—not 1889, or maybe 1890, as is widely reported, including in AstroMusic last month. I have not seen the time of his birth elsewhere, but Astrotheme reports Nijinsky was born with Scorpio rising making it 10:30pm. At this point I can only square what I know about the intense Plutonian energy and raw sexuality of Scorpio rising with what I know about Nijinsky—and It makes very strong sense.

His mother Eleanora, neé Bereda, waited until 1891 for “Vatsa” and his sister “Bronia” (Bronislava Nijinska was born Capricorn 22 months after Vaslav) to receive a non-Orthodox Catholic baptism together. His mother may have officially misstated her son’s birth to avoid military conscription. Given Nijinsky’s various career-defining romantic relationships that followed, including prolonged sexual affairs with two older men, it’s important to know that Vaslav likely graduated a virgin at age 19.

His marriage to Hungarian dancer Romola de Pulszky on September 10, 1913, would have made him 25, and the symptoms of his descent into madness some four years later were diagnosed as psychosis by 1919. It is telling that his wife, like his mother, made false reports about the dancer—in Romola’s case, to secure him a highly-coveted U.S. visa that barred entrance to the mentally ill. Sadly, Nijinsky died in 1950 not long after relocating to England. He had just turned 62.

Thomas Nijinsky joined the Kiev-based traveling Setov Opera Company staying for 13 years as a virtuosic character dancer known for his athletic high-jumping hopak. He met Eleanora there. They shared the same training in Warsaw and trained their children to eventually join them on stage while on tour. Perhaps anxiously squirming, playing, or fighting, his first-born son Stanislav—older than Vaslav by two years—fell out a moving carriage window and suffered traumatic brain injury. He remained disabled and was institutionalized until his death in 1917. Thomas was more accomplished than Eleanora, so as little “Stasik” required more of her attention, he increased his dancing. On tour little Vaslav (he topped out at 5’ 4”) would roam strange towns and cities alone. According to Bronia his voracious curiosity led her brother to explore wherever the family landed, to climb trees and scamper into bell towers taking in the vistas these vantages might offer. He constantly sought the boundaries of his freedom. Without warning, Thomas Laurentiyevich Nijinsky abandoned the family for his pregnant mistress while on tour dancing in Finland, leaving them without support and ending his career with the company.

At this dreadful turning point, Eleanora, burdened with an 11-year old disabled son and a 7-year old daughter, led her unimpressive 9-year old Polish boy through the grand boulevards of St. Petersburg. He was herded into studios for a succession of tests and examinations. Finally, after failing to make a favorable impression among 150 other boys auditioning to enter the Imperial Ballet School, Nijinsky was told to jump.

Through the Window

The surprising height of his jump and his ballon—the illusion of weightlessness—commanded more attention be paid to his legs. The boy was not outwardly bright or well-educated—he was certainly poor—but for nine years he thrived, dancing in the school. First as a day student, then two years later he was made a resident on full-scholarship. Because of lackluster academic achievement his graduation date had to be extended by two years.

Nijinsky was described as taciturn, backward, and mostly unaware of his talent. This extremely sensitive and empathic Pisces boy walked past bloody corpses in the snow outside of the Winter Palace on his way home in the aftermath of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre. He immersed himself in the school’s bubble, only to have his favorite ballet teacher, politically active Sergei Legat, commit suicide. Nonetheless, given regular opportunities to advance, he matured, taking further initiative to refine the assigned choreography and alter the look of his costumes.

In front of a timeworn backdrop and dressed in borrowings from the opera house with a new but conventional score by Nicolai Tcherepnin—and a story inspired by Theophile Gautier’s novella Omphale—the Franco-Russian ballet Pavilion d’ Armide was strategically expanded by choreographer Michael Fokine to feature Nijinsky for his Imperial Ballet School graduation in April of 1907. Plans followed immediately for this well-received preview performance to be given a full staging at the Mariinsky Opera House in St. Petersburg starring Anna Pavlova as the enchantress Armida.

Surrounded by the golden opulence of its four-tier neo-Byzantine architecture, on November 25, 1907, Serge “Chinchilla” Pavlovich Diaghilev—so nicknamed because of his big head and the white streak in his jet black hair—and dapper Prince Pavel Dmitrievitch Lvov, were separately enthralled by the historic debut of a teenager. The applause was tremendous for the new emerging star in tan makeup as the favorite slave of Pavlova’s Armida. He crossed the enormous stage diagonally with four transverse leaps punctuated by double pirouettes landing on one foot and finishing with a triple turn.

Pavlova’s applause would have been stronger but for the astonishing surge of energy Nijinsky had unleased on stage. Despite his Russian-style high-necked basque tunic, with lace cuffs, breeches, tights, and a plumed turban, such naked male charisma had never before been seen in the theater. Pavlova’s near total eclipse wasn’t forgotten by her, but Nijinsky’s good fortune overrode any of her devious machinations.

The family of Prince Pavel Dmitrievitch Lvov grew up neighbors to Leo Tolstoy. Prince Pavel was cousin to Prince Georgy Yevgenyevich Lvov, who would briefly become the ill-fated first Prime Minister of Post-Imperial Russia after the 1917 Soviet Revolution. Pavel Lvov was eight years older than Diaghilev, who was sixteen years older than Nijinsky. He was a sportsman and wealthy patron who frequented the opera and ballet. In 1907, St. Petersburg was more culturally liberal than Vienna, Paris, or certainly London still reeling from the Oscar Wilde scandal of 1895; Lvov could be relaxed about his homosexuality in this elite social scene.

Alexandrov, a well-known Mariinsky dancer and equal opportunity sexual go-between, was paid to carry a note backstage asking to celebrate Nijinsky’s success at Cubat, a very chic restaurant. Prince Lvov, his friends, and Alexandrov would meet the dancer at the stage door, the note proposed. There was likely a ruse involving an amorous princess since Nijinsky was sexually naive and Prince Lvov, a Libra born October 16, 1864, was stylish, calculating, manipulative yet patiently respectful. The courtship began.

Pygmalion Without Elocution

As Nijinsky’s biographer Richard Buckle writes, “The dinner led to a visit to Fabergé; this led to more dinners, visits to night-clubs—such as The Aquarium [a perfect place to take Pisces on a date], where the American Negro Claude Hopkins demonstrated tap-dancing for the first time in Petersburg—more presents and more parties…” That year the House of Fabergé was at its peak of Imperial Russian commissions including the famed “Rose Trellis” Egg given by Tsar Nicholas II to Empress Alexandra for Easter commemorating the birth of Prince Alexei, their son and heir, three years earlier. Enameled translucent green over guilloché-surfaced gold (etched to create a reflective pattern under the color) with exquisitely painted opaque pink roses and emerald green leaves of gold, the egg was latticed with rose-cut diamonds. Inside the egg, on a white satin lining, lay the boy’s painted ivory portrait framed in diamonds, like a medallion, adorning a fine chain necklace, studded with equidistant brilliants—now lost. Meanwhile a health coverup of the boy’s hemophilia, a humiliating defeat on the international stage, and the rise of the Second Duma clouded the imperial horizon.

Prince Lvov, aged 42, immediately began helping the Nijinsky’s family financially. When her foot was dangerously infected, Lvov saved Bronislava’s life and her soon-to-be-important dancing career with crucial medical attention. Eleanora had long discouraged any interest her son showed in girls. She endured artistic disappointment and the burden of raising three children as a single mother. For her son, marriage was to be avoided at all cost. The boy had been mocked for the Asian slant of his eyes, called Japanchik (especially after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 ended with Japan destroying the Russian Baltic Fleet), bullied for being Polish, and regarded as sissy. Vaslav needed the protective love of a father figure, she thought, and she liked Prince Lvov. Career success was always paramount in her mind.

Soon enough Eleanora granted permission for her son to become Prince Lvov’s lover. Buckle observes, “the Prince’s admiration brought out in [Nijinsky] an inherent vein of feminine provocation. Just as, when dancing, he had the instinctive knowledge of the pattern his limbs were forming without the need to correct his poses in the mirror as other dancers did.”

Wearing smart clothes, the handsome couple attended horse shows at the Pavlovsk Parade Grounds, a favorite spot for the Romanov Court. The Imperial Circus brought together the urban public and the court’s inner circle, including the Prince, around equestrian acts and trained animals. They attended bicycle races at St. Petersburg Athletic and Cycling Club and visited fabulous homes. Prince Lvov bought his lover a piano. Nijinsky could play Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser March without mistakes in a popular 2-hand arrangement.

How, then did this seemingly happy public liaison dissolve? Passages in Nijinsky’s diaries wistfully reveal that he was attracted to girls, yet at a party with Lvov the advances of a young woman excited him, but the actual experience of her was quite traumatizing. He also wrote that he loved Pavel and felt safe with him. When Diaghilev struck a deal with the Prince for Nijinsky to become his lover and protégé, what happened? By telephone, Lvov made the introduction for Nijinsky’s meeting with Diaghilev’s at a hotel.

Was the Prince bored by his partner’s conversational limits, or was this Libra’s sometimes brittle attention to surfaces and gossip misaligned with the visual/aural/tactile/kinetic dream state of Pisces—put off by his authenticity? Or was it, as Buckle crudely suggests, that Nijinsky’s male endowment was found wanting? Could it have been that Diaghilev’s high-flying social status as producer of the transformative Imperially-supported Russian Historical Concerts in Paris, and his domineering personality, made resistance to the Aries impresario’s demands futile? Could Nijinsky see with Diaghilev a brighter more exciting and revolutionary future, and did Lvov realize he was holding Nijinsky back?

Regardless, Nijinsky put up no resistance to losing what security he had in Prince Lvov’s teetering world. Just as the Tsar was oblivious to growing public interest in races with automobiles as interest in bicycles dimmed, modernity was about to crash Russia’s glittering garden party. Suddenly Nijinsky’s life and his career were now hitched to the fiery Diaghilev whose ambitions knew no bounds. He took a calculated leap into the future.

Hitched to a Star

Sorting out inclinations, gauging nuances, and reading valences where the public record fails to shed light is where astrology can become invaluable. To the extent we know the specific details of their charts—with increased algorithmic support—and can add horoscopic information about the key people in the lives of Nijinsky and Diaghilev, the better we can grasp the dynamics and feel of their relationship. Furthermore, it’s also possible to progress their natal charts and ponder any planetary transit “coincidences” with actual historic events and documented behaviors. This group of four natal charts: Nijinsky, Diaghilev, Prince Lvov, and Romola de Pulszky, provides valuable insight into their interpersonal drama.

The three modalities recur four times around the wheel. Each time, the negotiator cardinal signs lead the fixed and mutable signs. The cardinal world operates on give-and-take. Both Prince Lvov’s and Diaghilev’s Sun signs are cardinal, and both have the majority of their planets in cardinal signs, so it’s clear they knew how to bargain over everything—including Nijinsky.

Diaghilev’s astonishing eight out-of-ten cardinal planets made him a consummate deal-making networker and explain his upper hand with the Prince regarding Nijinsky, as well as his tremendous power in the role of impresario. Lvov’s Sun and Moon signs are both cardinal while the strength of his three cardinal outer planets Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, for all intents and purposes, cancel out Nijinsky’s only two cardinal planets in his chart, distant Saturn, and Uranus.

Despite the potent impact of sensual Scorpio rising, up-close and over the stage lights, with both his artistic Sun and poetic Moon in ultra-sensitive Pisces, Nijinsky’s love life was ruled by Venus in the fixed air of Aquarius. This final air sign in the zodiac displays cool detachment, unconventionality, restless mental energy, and—as with all fixed signs—a tendency to be stubborn. In short, Venus in Aquarius wants friendship with benefits. So, hooking up with the Sun in Libra (fairness, balance, socially cool in both senses of the word), and the Moon in Aries (emotionally demonstrative and warmly creative) individual, such as Prince Lvov, filled the bill for Nijinsky in spades.

A further look at the Venus placements of these three men, reveal Lvov’s Sagittarius love was ardent, adventure-loving, and excited by the chase, especially when the object of his affection was Scorpio-rising-exotic. Diaghilev’s Venus is exalted in Pisces making him a softly idealistic lover, attracted to talent, exceptionally devoted to sensuality, and worshipful of beauty—perhaps lopsided but keyed into Nijinsky’s very being. Between his two lovers’ Venus placements in the last quadrant of the wheel of— Sagittarius driven by powerful fire and Pisces driven by sensitive water—is Nijinsky’s Venus in fixed Aquarius—non-traditional, mental, and independent, the ultimate expression of evolved Air. Nijinsky was experimental in love, idealistic, rational and his cool mental approach to love was catnip to these passionate masters, but ultimately he couldn’t satisfy the emotional needs of either one in love.

The dynamic of Nijinsky’s connection with Diaghilev was not primarily in the bedroom. The impresario’s relentless bead on the future and mastery of his emotions (Moon in Capricorn), his blunt and compulsive need to communicate (Moon in Aries), his action orientation and pointed aggressiveness (Mars in Aries), his career discipline and iron will (Saturn in Capricorn) were everything Nijinsky wasn’t.

Wild Card

1913: enter Romola de Pulszky. Like the obscure Serbian nationalist who would assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand the following Summer to catalyze a world war, Romola was the most unlikely person to catalyze a historic breakup of two artistic geniuses.

In the wake of Stravinsky’s groundbreaking Rite of Spring—scandalously premiered in Paris on May, 29—Arturo Serra, a cultured Argentine impresario with access to substantial wealth, bankrolled Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes’s South American tour. Their Theatre Royale Drury Lane engagement in London finished July 31. A smattering of one-night stops followed. Finally 60 dancers with 20 support staff/crew departed Southampton, the cruise capital of Europe, August 15. Prima Ballerina Tamara Karsavina made a slightly later departure. The company returned in late November. As was widely reported, Diaghilev feared the ocean and dreaded travel over water; he stayed behind. Some established company dancers also declined to participate, so lower-ranking dancers were engaged in their place—including a beautiful young Hungarian aristocrat of Polish descent.

Romola de Pulszky’s father was a wealthy member of Parliament forced into exile because of a scandal involving his role as the director of the Hungarian National Gallery of Art. He was close to his daughter, but committed suicide in Brisbane, Australia when Romola was eight. Her mother Emilia Márcus was the most famous Hungarian actress of her time. Her remarriage a few years later caused Romola’s deep resentment and rebellion.

The 1,300-passenger SS Avon steamship was a First Class luxury liner with lido decks and swimming pools built on top of refrigerated storage for transporting 4,500 tons of frozen beef at minus five degrees. After island and coastal shoreline stops, the dancers disembarked long enough to shop in Rio de Janeiro before settling four days later in Buenos Aires September 6^th—to give 23 performances that month. The October leg of the tour would began with a twelve-hour trip to Uruguay on the Saturno, a luxurious paddle steamer with ornate dining rooms and comfortable staterooms. Ballets Russes was booked for a short engagement in Montevideo’s Teatro Solis. Then the Saturno hugged 1,000 miles of coastline on a 4-day trip to Rio de Janeiro for 12 performances just into November.

Romola’s distant infatuation with Nijinsky and the Ballet Russe was ignited while attending engagements with her mother throughout Europe. Romola abandoned attempts at acting for training as a dancer. Her obsession to get closer to Nijinsky included joining the company as an apprentice with portfolio. She was oblivious to the Nijinsky’s bond with her now-distant boss Diaghilev, so when three weeks on an ocean liner was offered, it seemed a stroke of good fortune and the fulfillment of her destiny. As the rice was thrown and the tour began, destiny may have brought them together, but good fortune soon fled—never to return.

Since Romola spoke neither Polish nor Russian and Nijinsky’s French was weak, their on-board fling had hardly gotten underway when this barely demonstrative dancer kneeled in front of Romola to mime, like Petruska, his intentions to propose marriage to her. They hastily bought rings while in Rio September 2. They registered In the morning for a ceremony later that afternoon September 10. Finding a fashionable cream-colored wedding ensemble made Romola late to the church. Navigating Spanish language barriers with the priest added uncertainty to the ceremony in the venerable Church of St. Michael the Archangel, with its famous new façade under construction. The reception was held in the ultra-glamorous Majestic Hotel, where the company was lodged. A dress rehearsal at Teatro Colon followed in preparation for the opening night September 11. Their wedding night was spent in separate rooms.

Nijinsky was fascinated to watch the movements of animals, so they visited the zoo. Within ten days Romola was pregnant. From here the story gets more complicated. An oft-repeated story that an enraged and betrayed Diaghilev shot off a telegram dismissing his lover forthwith upon hearing the news of the wedding may be too facile. Immediately after the wedding, as the society pages of local gossip rags were ablaze with photographs, surely telegrams were sent. Nijinsky immediately wrote Diaghilev a letter of explanation with a careful tone offering lasting friendship.

Diaghilev’s telegrammed response to the letter was brief: “Ballets Russes is no longer in need of your services. Don’t come back to us.” Other stated reasons for the dismissal have surfaced including a rule against married couples in the company. Since the famous Rite of Spring fiasco, Diaghilev had grown disenchanted. Nijinsky was unable to communicate his very unconventional ideas to classically trained dancers—the Rite of Spring required 120 rehearsals—often led to fits of temper and moodiness. More than that “The Sacred Monster” as Diaghilev was called by wary admirers had to be ruthless to maintain and expand the extraordinary reputation he had created. Another sexually ambiguous but more opportunistic and worldly dancer/choreographer Leonid Massine was in the wings.

The newlyweds landed late-November in Southampton. Romola was about 9-weeks pregnant. They soon cobbled together a small troupe and arranged performances for Saison Nijinsky, March 1914 in the Palace Theatre. Some sources described the ultra-empathetic Pisces dancer, as having Couvade Syndrome with which the father mimics the symptoms of his wife’s pregnancy—morning sickness, mood swings, swollen ankles, etc. Could this be the mysterious illness that made Nijinsky unfit to work, missing rehearsals, and cancelling performances? Their risky plans collapsed in legal actions with the Palace Theatre, a suit Romola filed against Diaghilev for back pay, and Fokine barring performances of Petruska and Les Sylphides in spiteful retaliation at Diaghilev’s behest. Bankrupted, Nijinsky suffered his first documented nervous breakdown.

Dark political clouds hovered just out of sight. The traumatized Nijinskys arrived in Vienna in early June with just enough time to prepare for the birth of their daughter Kyra June 18. Ten days later the fateful assassination catalyzed the outbreak of war in August. Nijinsky being Russian was declared an “enemy alien” of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His mother-in-law Emelia Márcus used her influence to bring the family home to Budapest, where he spent two years under house arrest.

At the behest of Diaghilev, and in service to his plans to conquer New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the politically neutral Spanish King Alphonso, and the still-neutral U.S. President Wilson, were joined by Pope Benedict, Great Britain’s Dowager Queen Alexandra, and the Red Cross advocating for a prisoner swap to free Nijinsky from house arrest and allow him to dance in New York after more than two years absence from the stage. Romola negotiated the contract with Diaghilev

The legal and interpersonal tensions were still simmering when on April 4, 2016, the Nijinsky’s arrived in NYC dockside to an extravagantly floral press event with Diaghilev signaling their outward reconciliation. This was the final engagement of a less than stellar tour with Massine that had traveled in a special 12-car train to 17 cities, including the New York opening in January at the Century Theater before Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Atlantic City. Lydia Lopokova was the “Americanized” prima ballerina familiar form her work on Broadway, who later married the founder of macroeconomics John Maynard Keynes and becoming a baroness in 1925. New York went wild for Nijinsky selling out all performances with ecstatic notices that consistently compared him more favorably than Massine.

Under another brief truce with Diaghilev, Nijinsky returned to Buenos Aries in 1917 and then on to Montevideo where he gratefully performed the solo death of the puppet Petruska, fulfilling a special request of the Red Cross. It was his last public performance.

What then does Romola’s chart illuminate about her marriage and the disintegration of Nijinsky’s personality? Her communication always kept the humanitarian high road in view with Mercury in Aquarius, which spoke to his Venus. Her Venus was in Cardinal Capricorn—more earthy and conservative than the mutable men’s placements. She was better able to negotiate with his cool fixed air as a lover. Like Diaghilev, she had Mars in Aries making them an even match. Her Moon, exalted in the summer warmth of Cancer, trumped his opposite Moon in Capricorn in detriment like a plant dormant in cold soil. Both Saturns were in earth signs, however unlike the ambitious driving scope of his ego-driven Capricorn career, hers in Virgo was patient, strategic, organized and ultimately at service outside of herself and directed to another who she worshipped. Her fateful Uranus in Scorpio made her unafraid to confront darkness.

This brings us back to our opening proposition about Adjacent signs. That Romola’s Sun is at 1 degree of Pisces is almost too perfect. The student/teacher dichotomy is here and now dissolved, called off. In choosing Romola, Nijinsky learned that the lessons offered by Diaghilev actually negated his being and were inimical to it. Painfully aware of his survival deficits and his failure to master the skill sets his mentor offered for success in the real world, Romola made okay whatever was left for Nijinsky to express before he retreated from reality and into an inchoate universe. One cannot minimize the many profound traumas he endured as a child, or how his destiny as a dancer was shaped at every turn, but the power of celebrity always has a cost in diminishing returns. While the menace of widows is a real thing, Romola always made choices she thought were in the best interest of her obsession, Nijinsky.

Some six months after Nijinsky was formally diagnosed with schizophrenia in a clinic near Zurich, where Einstein lectured and big diplomatic gatherings were held, Pavel Dmitrievitch Lvov died September 29, 1919, in war torn Saratov, Russia, 2000 miles away. He may have succumbed from harsh conditions for victims of the Red Terror—following the 1917 Revolution—or was murdered by the Bolsheviks. He was 54.

The “Sacred Monster” Diaghilev died in a diabetic coma in the “floating city” Venice, Italy at the Grand Hotel des Bains August 19, 1929. Virtually penniless, his unpaid hotel bill and the expenses of his gondola funeral (“you will die on the sea” predicted a childhood fortuneteller) were picked up by fashion luminary Coco Chanel and the impresario’s close friend and supporter Misia Sert, the legendary “Queen of Paris”. He was 57.

Romola remained dedicated to her late husband’s memory. After publishing his diaries, she established a foundation in his name directed be her younger daughter Tamara. She died quietly in Paris June 8, 1978. With tenacity Tamara honored her mother’s dying wishes to be buried with her husband. Romola was disinterred in 2005 and rests now in the Montmartre Cemetery where Nijinsky’s grave has been adorned since 1997 with a sculpture by Oleg Abaziev of the sad puppet Petrushka. His bronze likeness was donated by the Tchaikovsky Perm Academic Opera and Ballet Theater dating back to 1870. Perm, latitude 58º N, was Diaghilev’s childhood home, where the Mariinsky Ballet had to be evacuated during WWII. She was 87.

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Imagine my surprise as a young dancer to find I share a birthday with the celebrated Cold War defector and ballet star Rudolph Nureyev—March 17th. He was born in 1938 on the Trans-Siberian Railroad headed east while skirting the southern edge of frozen Lake Baikal, the deepest and oldest lake on earth—near Irkutsk at 52º N. In a Muslim family with three older sisters, Farida brought their only son to her husband Hamat, a Red Army official stationed in Vladivostok, the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean. Twenty years before, the Soviet Union aligned with the rest of the world’s Gregorian calendar when its Great October Socialist Revolution was complete.

The other Russian dance icons in my California high school pantheon were born under the old Julian Calendar still cited back then in Riverside’s library books. I read Vaslav Nijinsky was born in Kiev to Polish parents February 28, 1889, maybe 1890. Impresario and Ballet Russes artistic force-of-nature Serge Diaghilev was cited as born March 18, 1872, in army barracks along the Volkov River near a garrison where his father was stationed at Novgorod. For years I relished the notion that all four of us were born Pisces, even though Diaghilev’s nature seemed quite different—later I learned he actually was an Aries. Utterly different! The shift to the Gregorian calendar eventually moved Nijinsky 14 days toward Rudy and me—to March 12, and Diaghilev to April 11, just a day into the third decan of Aries. You can read more about the significance of decans in my December edition of AstroMusic.

March 17, St Patrick’s Day

Eleven years and several hours after the Nureyev’s baby boy took his first breath at 1:00 pm, I was born in Snow Lake, Manitoba, a newly-minted gold mine 480 miles from of the U.S. border—due north of Winnipeg at 55º. Back then, that particular latitude delineated a region of sporadic permafrost where Black Spruce grew in as little as 18 inches of thawed soil. The lake and the mining town were only accessible by a rugged gravel service road from the Wekusko train station 40 miles away—or by a puddle-jumping plane with wooden skis landing on its frozen surface. In early May, once the lake’s ice melted, pontoons were used for landing—up until late October. Today the freeze time is a little more open.

Wearing sturdy work boots with a strapped-on steel slider over the left boot and a rubber galosh “gripper” completely over the right boot, my father was lashing a curling broom across the pebbled ice when I was born at 6:35 pm in a tiny hospital near the rink.

North Pole is latitude 90 degrees. The difference between 50° N, where Nijinsky was born in Kiev, and 58° N, where Diaghilev, the man who would shape his destiny was born near Novgorod, is 550 miles. The angle of the sun’s rays hitting the cold earth is so shallow at 58°, that the days are about 2 hours 45 minutes shorter, and nighttime hardly exists at the peak of summer. In the early 20th century temperatures ran colder by about 12 degrees Fahrenheit in Novgorod than Kiev. The difference today is only about 9 degrees. Novgorod feels today like Kiev used to feel back then. Giving us an even longer view, my mother’s grandparents traced their lineage as farming people—Alberta Mennonites—back to small towns around Kiev circa 1880, when it could have been 36 degrees colder. But latitudes don’t change.

A miners bunkhouse, mess hall, and general store were the first buildings erected in Snow Lake after the tractors cleared the ground in 1947. When not bolted directly to exposed bedrock, each building’s foundation had to be excavated to 14 feet with steam jets boring holes for tight-fitting timbers that would freeze in place. Building the first 43 houses was limited to five temperate months of furious activity. To prevent winter heaving, the moss-covered flat ground around each foundation’s basement, and furnace, was cleared to lay a thick pad of rock and gravel made plentiful by excavating the gold mine. A month after my birthday, the first gold bullion bar (99.5% pure) was officially poured and flown out to Winnipeg.

Building physical houses in the extreme north requires serious accommodation. The same was true for building a horoscope’s natal ring of 12 houses for births occurring in the extreme north—until an ancient system was painstakingly vetted using modern math with more accurate translations of ancient Greek. The ancient system was newly applied to what were problematic mathematical aberrations. While in no way comparable, this breakthrough in astrology paralleled breakthroughs in personal computing through the experimental 1970’s into the mainstreaming 1980’s, and the syncing-up by Windows 95 in 1995.

Dealing with the Extreme North

A person’s ascendant is calculated when and where the sun is rising above the horizon at the moment of their birth. The rising sign then determines placement of the 12 zodiac houses. For most of the world this is just not a problem. But when using standard math computations based on astronomy in the extreme north latitudes of the globe, the size and shape of houses get distorted. At 58° N, one of the twelve houses might span 60° of the 360° zodiac wheel, while another house might span only 10°.

When I was leaving college, astrologers would calculate these extreme house placements with slide rules, poring over the minutia in Ephemerides—thick books filled with tables of values positioning planets in intervals of time on a given date abiding by a standard quadrant system. With the extreme angles of births in the frozen north, such angular geometry was especially time-consuming, and often misleading. In the late spring of 1972, my horoscope was first cast by Tim Troy. It took weeks to produce. Tim was an apprentice to Jack Fontan & Ray Unger, pioneering gay astrologers living then in Laguna Beach. Well-connected in Hollywood and to the gay shakers and movers, they lived frugally but with an extravagant sense of anti-establishment style. They were guided by intuition and common sense to adjust house placement after all the calculation were done.

Using my own chart to explain quadrant house distortion, courtesy of AI, the “ecliptic” (path of the planets) intersects the horizon at a very sharp angle. The houses are mathematically “squashed” toward the East/west axis and “blown out” toward the North/South axis using the prevailing quadrant system. On March 17 near sunset, just days before the Spring Equinox, the Sun was at 27° of Pisces. This late degree (of 30) would be near the western horizon or the descendent. The rising sign, or ascendant in Virgo, is opposite my Pisces Sun in Virgo. In this chart, using the quadrant system, an entire zodiac sign falls in one house while other signs do not appear on the cusp of any house at all. The intercepted signs are “hidden” within the houses, often interpreted historically as qualities that are “locked away”, or difficult to access. For the sake of interpreting these extreme placements, more astrologers sporadically began in late 1980’s to normalize the divisions using what would be called the Whole Sign/Equal House system.

The Whole Sign/Equal House system merged the two most ancient methods of astrology developed by—dare we say scientists—Vettius Valens and Firmicus Maternus in Alexandria between the Ist & 2nd Century BCE—further refined by Claudius Ptolemy circa 2nd century CE. This late 20^th-century hack, if you will, was pioneered by Project Hindsight.

The project was co-founded in 1992 by scholars Robert Schmidt, a linguist and translator of 2000-year old Hellenistic texts, and Robert Hand, an accomplished astrologer whose definitive monograph Whole Sign Houses: The Oldest House System (ARHAT Publications, 2000) popularized the practice of equalizing the houses with the first house established by the degree of the rising sign. It is as though the flattened cylindrical Mercator projection that mathematically distorted land mass to favor equatorial marine navigation—created in 1569—was sensibly wrapped back around a globe again.

Today, high speed computing based on NASA-generated data, combined with the verbal analytics of AI algorithms, is being made accessible as interactive text via apps, such as Co-Star, to the point of near ubiquity. General interest in astrology has substantially increased especially among Gen Z.

Yuri Gagarin in Space Sets the Stage

About his railcar birth Nureyev, the most electrifying and sensual male dancer of his generation, commented: “I was born to move”. In the industrial town Ufa, near the Ural mountains, the striking looking boy was taunted as a “white crow”, the ultimate misfit. The folk dance ambitions of his childhood were transformed upon first experiencing a Bolshoi touring ballet company. He soon secured an audition and set a path. After the institutional trauma of WWII settled, Nureyev took another train 1,000 miles to Leningrad/St. Petersburg in 1955. He began formal studies under the wing of Alexander Puskin, whose august academy was associated with the top-ranking Kirov Ballet. Puskin would train Makarova (b. 1940), and later Baryshnikov (b. 1948).

Nureyev behaved like a caged animal. Once on the stage in public he skyrocketed among the ranks of the Russian ballet elite despite his rebellious, non-conformist nature and suspect curiosity about the West. He was soon recognized as a Soviet asset for asserting “cultural supremacy”, but he was also viewed as a decided risk. On April 12 Yuri Gagarin became the first human astronaut, four years after Sputnik signaled globally, and the Moscow stray dog Laika’s one way trip—just a month apart in 1957. USSR, and Khrushchev were riding high when the decision was made to take the Kirov ballet with their finest artists including Nureyev to Paris.

His thunderously received performances rapidly turned up the international media attention. This unbelievably magnetic dancer mingled with foreigners, which was forbidden, and worse, Nureyev was seen by the KGB going into Parisian gay bars. Instead of flying next to London with the Kirov Ballet tour—June 16, 1961—in the Paris airport he was told he must return to Moscow for a very important gala—or, he suspected, a fatal accident. Nureyev refused and refused again when they said his mother was seriously ill.

A Parisian socialite dating the son of Andre Malraux helped connect him to the powerful French Cultural Minister, who was close to President de Gaulle. The French police were on alert at the airport and harbored the dancer while defecting under the glare of paparazzi. Only Maria Callas and the Beatles generated such frenzied excitement. By the end of June, Nureyev signed with the Cuevas Ballet to star in a new production of Sleeping Beauty. The Cuevas Ballet was recovering from the death of impresario George Cuevas in February. Among the handful of aspiring successors of Serge Diaghilev, sitting in a wheelchair Cuevas was given a standing ovation after the ballet’s October premiere. Eight months later they needed a superstar to galvanize the tour which include a Denmark stop.

In Copenhagen, luggage in hand, Nureyev knocked on the door. The door was opened by Erik Bruhn, the premiere danseur noble of the Royal Danish Ballet, and the living epitome of the refined Bournonville style. Nureyev introduced himself and declared, “I want to dance like you.” Bruhn was ten years older. Their “fire & ice” romance lasted five years, followed by artistic projects, and close companionship when their challenging schedules would allow.

I find a gallery of stills edited to not-too-objectionable music is a better way to appreciate Nureyev, despite the kinetic thrill of his dancing. This montage spends time close up to the dancer’s astonishing feet. Is it surprising that Pisces rules the feet.

Predictably in his chart, most of Nureyev’s important planets are clustered in the tenth house of career and social status. Sun in Pisces is very content at the center of attention in this art world career ruled by the ultimate showman Aries. The communication maven Mercury, love/romance ruler Venus, & work ethic task master Saturn thrive together in the pure ego of Aries alongside the multifaceted complexity of Sun in Pisces. This sizzling and prismatic gang powerfully manages the animal magnetism of fire alongside the emotional depth of water.

Within Nureyev’s eleventh house of friendships and community resides Mars, the action planet and Uranus, the source of disruption. Both dwell in the creature comfort of Taurus—patient, methodical and sensual Ferdinand the Bull—while the house itself is also comfortably ruled by the earthy basics of Taurus. The third house, the actual domain of Taurus, hosts the nuanced imagination of Neptune in detail-oriented Virgo. Nureyev’s lonely Libra Moon is in the fourth house of family. His emotional struggle to find balance and good judgement is here fortunately ruled by pragmatic Virgo.

This month there is not enough space for the astonishing careers of Pisces Vaslav Nijinsky and Arie Serge Diaghilev, both separate and together, but suffice it to say they have much in common with their fellow Russian Rudolph Nureyev, and some resonance with my journey—not the least of which is the frozen latitude of our births. Since Diaghilev is a formidable example of Aries, and neighboring sign relationships have special significance, we will continue this saga next month.

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From time immemorial Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will be music’s poster child for Aquarius. But now, with his massive catalogue of operas, named symphonies, concertos, tone poems, choral works, and chamber music, John Adams—undiminished at age 79—has boldly emerged as a very different Aquarius to share the mantle of greatness.

We think Jacaranda Music was the first to put Shaker Loops, Adams’s miraculous string sextet (1978), on LA’s live music map in 2005. As was reported, a minor earthquake occurred during the performance, but neither did the audience nor the players miss a beat – so intense was the concentration in Santa Monica’s First Presbyterian Church 20 years ago!

If you are not yet an Adams fan, Shaker Loops is the place to start. Building on the shape note tradition of early American unison singing, the Shakers (Shaking Quakers) created vigorous foot-stomping music for worship, while in the spell of their simple tunes. The title’s “loops” refers to the tape recording technology key to generating the earliest minimalist scores of the sixties. With the title Shaker Loops, Adams signaled at once his minimalist sympathies while firmly aligning with his New England regional musical roots and synthesizing a new American vocabulary informed by Stravinsky and the titans of jazz along the way.

Beyond being an excitation to the ear (and the grey matter in between), this mesmerizing sextet remains durable and influential. Its shaking vibrates in Rewilding, Capricorn Gabriella Smith’s new percussion concerto discussed last month. Both she and Pisces Dylan Mattingly, childhood friends and proteges with birthdays on either side of Adams, are cutting a huge swath across the contemporary classical music world today. Watch for Dylan’s first album release on the Nonesuch label this summer, and for more music to follow from that source.

If Shaker Loops whetted your appetite, go next to the highly accessible but bad-ass orchestra piece Grand Pianola Music (1984) with two pianos and three female backup singers. The work’s accessibility, and the controversy surrounding its premiere, comes largely from the composer’s love of Black music initially acquired from childhood dancehall experiences. As an inquisitive Aquarius, Adams’s awareness of other Black music—gospel, work songs, field hollers, banjo orchestras, and the blues—is particularly evident in the third section “On the Dominant Divide”. With Grand Pianola Music Adams embraces an exuberant succession of Creole & Black composers—Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, and later Art Tatum. His forward-looking grasp of music’s traditional tonic/dominant home key, shunned by the leading “minimalists” Philip Glass & Steve Reich, not to mention the “new difficulty” composers Brian Ferneyhough & Helmut Lachenmann made for, according to Adams, a “swaying, rocking, oscillation of phrases that gave the finale a controversial gaudy Lisztian effect.” For the open-minded listener that effect feels profoundly liberating.

A Pointed Digression

I have long been obsessed with the Great American Symphony. Unlike the Great American Novel, there are not acres of opinions, debates and countless revisions to what symphonies should or shouldn’t be included in such a list. Literati may disdain the conceit of a pecking order, but these lists generate reader engagement—the coin of the realm. The novel’s near existential certainty defies the explosion of non-fiction boundaries because storytelling is at the core of being human—but so is listening to music

While the latest symphony is not a widely enjoyed evergreen genre, signs tell us conditions may be changing, at least as far as living composers are concerned. The much-anticipated sesquicentennial premiere of Symphony No. 15 “Abraham Lincoln” by Glass was recently withdrawn from the National Symphony’s current DC season, making worldwide headlines. The 89-year old composer’s sense of honor and justice was violated. Everything that the symphony’s dedicatee Old Abe stands for is being mocked by the actions of Donald Trump, who commandeered The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the orchestra’s home, and renamed it after himself. For Glass, an Aquarian composer, honoring an Aquarian President on America’s 250^th birthday is no trifling matter.

Music consumption is in turmoil, as the business of music exponentially grows new platforms. While classical music may seem endangered, the genre is more accessible than ever, despite generally declining attention spans. Undistracted listening is harder than ever to achieve, but the rise of very sophisticated movie scores, wedded to compelling stories, may be building audience capacity to listen intelligently—should an individual’s attention span be so inclined. This storytelling with music brings us to the rise of opera composition over the last half century—but let’s put a pin in this subject for another Substack.

With the rise of audio books and the art of layering life experiences—jogging, cooking, doing dishes—enabled by headphones, the paradigm of solitary leisure is changing. To deepen listening, a next step is needed—take a break from words. Listen to a symphony as a vacation from the novel. Make a structured non-verbal interlude without songs. Immerse yourself instead in a different way of ordering of time, a different kind of storytelling, open up to a different set of sensations.

Unless you regularly attend the LA Phil, American symphonies barely register in concert halls, let alone being counted among the hundreds of symphonies written by the 20th century’s composers—more than the combined symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky! This global superabundance of fascinating symphonies written between 1900 and 1975 is mostly unavailable in live concert offerings—despite important standard repertoire incursions by Mahler, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, and their Finnish neighbor Sibelius composed before 1950.

The symphony largely lost its pride-of-place in classical music after WWII ushered in a distain for nationalism, the concomitant embrace of international styles such as serialism & chance operations, the rise of progressive jazz, and eventual emergence in the sixties of minimalism. The symphonic argument seemed to have lost steam by the time Libra Dmitri Shostakovich soldiered-on to premiere his eccentric Symphony No. 15 in 1972—seen by many as the last gasp of Mahlerian largesse lasting nearly an hour. The heroic Russian’s final symphony offered quotations from Rossini and Wagner with an ironic orchestra reduced in size—all the better to distill the composer’s valedictory argument with his distinctive pathos and a wicked sense of humor.

Rebirth was detected with the appearance of a few symphonies from American composers working in and around academia heralded as “New Romanticism”. The moniker was flagged first by the short-lived European Art rock dance music dubbed New Romanticism—just as the raw edges of Punk were first acting out circa 1979. The New Romantic symphonies by these post-serialist composers were a reaction to the robust cross-cultural rise of minimalism, and a more tangential counter-insurgency of hyper-cerebral music dubbed the “New Difficulty’’.

Enter John Adams

To his great credit Adams embodied most of these contemporary music trends with a creative personality enlivened by the sensibilities of Black music, without shying away from rigorous European and American orchestral traditions of Mahler and Ives, or minimalism. Over the next several decades, it would become clear to me that Adams was actually writing 3-movement symphonies with highly distinctive names and penetrating programmatic rationales.

The first, and arguably most communicative to a general audience, was Harmonielehre. Breaking an 18-month artistic block, it was composed for the San Francisco Symphony immediately following the premiere of Grand Pianola Music. Adams reaffirmed his grounding in tonality while adopting for the work the name of Arnold Schoenberg’s famous 1911 treatise on harmony. A fantastic dream of a huge oil tanker cinematically upending in the San Francisco Bay and becoming a rocket soaring upward with a great exhaust plume witnessed while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge. Adams was not yet 40. It was by listening to the Nonesuch recording of Harmonielehre just months after its March premiere with Edo de Waart in 1985 that the idea of the Great American Symphony became real to me.

On the Riverbanks of Florida

For most of my adult life the recorded music and wayward biography of the British composer Frederick Delius, born January 29, 1862, has held little appeal. The slight string pieces called Aquarelles seemed to typify a pale and meandering quality I most associated with Delius. Who would imagine that this musically indeterminate—at least to my ears—composer could become a compelling figure in the telling of Black history. The large wealthy Delius family was musical, but his Dutch-born father insisted that Fritz, as he was born, apply himself to the family’s international wool business. In the late 1870s The Fisk Jubilee Singers from Nashville Tennessee toured Britain singing African-American spirituals in four-part harmony leaving an indelible impression on Fritz and planting seeds for his future as a composer. After failing in clerical positions across Europe—Germany, Sweden, and France—Delius’s father finally sent the 22-year old Delius to operate an orange plantation where he lasted about a year—again avoiding his work responsibilities while self-studying music. He lived alone in a four-room cottage in Solano Grove on the banks of the St. Johns River near Picolata south of Jacksonville, Florida.

Whether it was the music of African-American plantation workers and the community that supported them, the singing waiters in nearby Jacksonville hotels, or the sound of singing deckhands on passing river boats, Delius was surrounded by Black music. He was believed to have sired an illegitimate son with a slave named Chloe, but future attempts to reunite failed, an outcome that weighed heavily on him in later years as blindness advanced. His Florida Suite is infused with the flavor and texture derived from such firsthand experiences.

After resolutely setting up his own business in Danville Virginia teaching music and languages, French and German, his father relented and paid for formal studies in Leipzig Germany, where Gustav Mahler and Arthur Nikisch conducted in the local opera house, and Delius fell under the spell of Richard Wagner. Only after Edvard Grieg heard the Florida Suite performed in a private conservatory concert, did Delius’s career gain any forward motion. In France he found a more receptive artistic social milieu among painter Paul Gaugin, and playwright August Strindberg, and was strongly influenced by Claude Debussy, as well as enjoying the delights of brothels where he likely contracted syphilis and the long-term health issues that affected his later life.

Of particular interest is Delius’s third opera written in 1896-97 and premiered in 1904. Koanga represents his musical maturation. Despite the airy Britishness of musical landscapes that come to mind when hearing the name Delius—e.g. Upon Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring—this first European opera comprised entirely of Black characters set in a Louisiana plantation connected him to a pervasive musical source dating back to the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Based loosely on the 1880 book The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life by George Washington Cable, the opera was published posthumously and has been revived as recently as 2015. The only part of the score that has a concert life is the ingratiating dance tune La Calinda.

The opera Koanga’s performance history is a fascinating one involving some of the most highly placed and unlikely Europeans, but the point of the Delius story is to emphasize the indomitable will of Aquarius, their stubbornness, autodidactic self-absorption, and the urge to innovate whether or not the genius is there. I don’t know if in his prime Delius was a talker like most Aquarians, but he certainly enjoyed the company of brilliant people, and like Mozart and Adams possessed a strong sex drive. In Hallelujah Junction, Adams’s well-written and highly engaging memoir, he answered a high school yearbook question about his most prized possession “my libido”. That this quip got in the book, Adams speculates the editor thought it was a musical instrument.

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The well-known Capricorn composers Puccini and Scriabin are an odd couple, and an even more random quartet when including their lesser-known countrymen Pergolesi and Balakirev. To be sure, they are interesting in their own ways, but collectively these guys don’t make much of an astrological statement after December’s cavalcade of brilliant Sagittarians: Beethoven, Berlioz, Sibelius, Messiaen, and Britten.

I gave the homely Capricorn Francis Poulenc much warranted attention in January 2025 for his ability to succeed while leaping from peak to peak in a career that produced music ranging from the trivial to the profound—ingratiating himself everywhere while carrying on romantic dalliances with three men, a woman—with whom he fathered a daughter—and finally settling down with a soldier. Poulenc’s fantastically expressive Concerto for Organ, Tympani & Strings has powerful impact.

Regarding this odd Capricorn assortment, however, nobody needs to read more about the ubiquitously popular Giacomo Puccini, least of all me. Fortunately, in January Los Angelenos were able to experience Alexander Scriabin’s awe-inspiring Prometheus: Poem of Fire led by Esa-Pekka Salonen—its finest champion—with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, LA Master Chorale, and a fiber-optic light show. But it would take a very deep dive into the composer/ theosophist’s chart to sort out the astrological sense of this eccentric—some say crazy—visionary’s life and music. Maybe later.

About baroque composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi too little is still known. Mily Balakirev’s prime importance lies in what he relayed from his studies with Berlioz to Russia’s “Mighty Handful” (Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, & Rimsky-Korsakov), and of course Tchaikovsky. Only Balakirev’s “oriental fantasy”, the knuckle-busting Islamey (adored by some, reviled by others), gets regular performances by pianists who have technical chops to burn. So, where does this leave us?

Three names gaining more attention than ever are joining the important Capricorn list of composers: Morton Feldman, Gabriella Smith, and Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, subject of a seriously flawed but attention-getting feature film. Also, I’m opening this discussion to include Capricorn documentary filmmaker Sam Green because of his film 32 Sounds (2022). This uniquely witty and discovery-filled journey first came to my attention at the Ojai Festival last June. It is streaming now on the Criterion Channel, Apple TV, Amazon Prime and YouTube.

Feldman’s 100^th birthday January 12, 2025, was celebrated with a two-day 12-hour marathon in two alternative Los Angeles locations. Many more performances are promised worldwide this year. Feldman’s serenely cerebral music tests the endurance of both performers and listeners. The test derives not from the too-many-notes kind of virtuosity, but the pure rigor of executing small precise gestures within impossible-to-achieve silence extending, in the case of String Quartet No. 2, up to six hours! In contrast to his tender empyrean sensibility, Feldman’s impact as one of music’s biggest thinkers, an earthy, sensuous, and intellectually nimble personality, could also be an obdurate, goatish, cigar-smoking genius disposed to to outbursts of temper. As such, a deeper dive into his entire chart is called for at another time. Check back in a year, when Scriabin and Feldman, the oddest of odd-couples, are likely to appear together in AstroMusic.

Capricorn, the mountain goat, reigns supreme above everything with their show-stopping double-arched coronet of horns looking down through the crag-shrouded mists. Yet such regal bearing emanates from a tough little animal with a shaggy brownish coat and pointy cloven feet that evolved to leap and land with unparalleled sureness. While not an apex species, their predators are always at a serious disadvantage.

A cardinal earth sign, Capricorn is advanced, industrious, grounded, and a little emotionally cool given their inner world of constant private calculations. Capricorn practicality is ruled by the shortest point between two lines, their ingenious solutions come from paths well-trodden —and sudden flights. Sometimes they betray earthbound humility and shyness, otherwise they calmly gaze at the distance. An evolved Capricorn’s eyesight is exceptionally true and their fine-tuned instincts always on alert. Their sense of situational politics is about sustaining forward motion, at all costs.

Capricorn is ruled by ring-adorned Saturn, the last dazzling planet that many centuries of stargazers could see with the naked eye. Due to its 29-year orbit, the position of the ringed planet at ones birth will realign with that position three times in the course of a lifetime: at age 27-30, again at age 58-60, and finally after 80. The teacher planet returns first over two years to impose the rites of passage associated with entering adulthood, sometimes with harsh lessons. The second return is a two-year self-assessment that tests the durability, breadth, and seriousness of an individual’s achievements to-date, thereby setting a legacy plan in motion. The third pass is the culmination of a life’s accumulated wisdom. With each visit the planet of “tough love” Saturn challenges that which is false, insincere, and shaky to forge a life of authenticity.

Gabriella Smith

Master-planned by the late architect Frank Gehry and his partners—in concert with multiple government agencies—rewilding the Los Angeles River is of enormous local and statewide importance. Rewilding is a term for removing needless or obstructive construction, replacing non-native plants and opportunistic animals by reintroducing indigenous species, and restoring ecosystems to a self-sustaining state. The LA River plan will restore 700 acres by removing/reconfiguring tons of concrete put in place by the U.S. Army Corps from 1938 to 1960, in response to devastating Depression-era floods. But the individual artist’s generative role should never be overlooked.

To even envision this enormous rewilding, public awareness would need to be built and momentum stoked. That was the pathbreaking work of poet, performance artist, and environmental activist Lewis McAdams (1944-2020), a Libra who co-founded the non-profit organization Friends of The LA River (FoLAR) in 1986. Video artist Cheri Gaulke engaged pro-active East LA high school youth with their teachers and public figures, to fill a gallery with a multimedia installation called the LA River Project for Smithsonian Institution Touring Exhibition Services (SITES) in 1989.

Smith is a new generation vanguard of such artists. Those lucky concert-going Los Angelenos also heard Smith’s new percussion concerto Rewilding on the same LA Phil program with music by Scriabin, Sibelius, and Debussy. Percussiveness is so liberally shared in Smith’s concerto, with the strings imitating croaking frogs, and various stridulations of insects rubbing their specialized body parts, that the percussion quartet behind the orchestra breaking twigs, and working the spokes and rims of multiple finely-spoked spinning wheels, among more familiar gear, seemed to infuse the orchestra rather than contend with it in traditional concerto ways. The weather of Rewilding is misty, crackling, and sometimes stormy with a sense of nearby treetops thrashing in the wind while below microcosms adapt in myriad ways.

Smith, born December 26, 1991, has devoted her musical consciousness and prolific output to environment concerns stemming from her studies in science beginning at an early age. She is a generational ally of prominent activists Vanessa Nakate (Scorpio born 1996) of Uganda, and Greta Thunberg (Capricorn born 2003) of Sweden. To the world’s countless rewilding strategies underway, Smith contributes nuanced and pervasive cultural messages for the democratic elite who populate the concert halls of major cities and those who also share contemporary classical music files. The centuries-long time frame of classical music is suited wholly to the time frame of rewilding and Smith’s contributions.

Among her orchestral concertos Breathing Forests (2021) for organ, and Lost Coast (2023) for cello light up this listener’s imagination. Other recent symphonic works by Smith include Bioluminescence Chaconne (2019), Circadian Rhythm (2011), and Field Guide (2017). My favorite chamber work of hers is the subatomic fiddling of Brandenburg Interstices (2012), which received a brilliant performance by Jacaranda players recorded in 2023.

Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges

The biracial violinist/composer/conductor Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint Georges was a free man active in Paris during Thomas Jefferson’s five years living there as the American Minister to France—1784-89. Jefferson’s wife Martha had died in 1782. The slave James Heming attended to Jefferson on their Atlantic journey and upon arrival was apprenticed to a Parisian culinary master so that he could serve as head chef in Jefferson’s household. Paid less than a French cook, James became proficient in the French language through his own initiative. In 1787, the Minister sent for his 9-year old daughter Maria “Polly” Jefferson and her companion, James’s sister, the 14-year-old slave Sally Hemings. She would soon become the future President’s mistress. James and Sally were related by birth also to Jefferson’s wife, having been sired by Martha’s father John Wayles. Their mother was Elizabeth Heming. When Wayles died, the two siblings were inherited by their half-sister Martha and her husband Thomas Jefferson.

I linger on these details to contrast the elevated world in which American slaves mingled in Parisian society with European musicians of color having decidedly different privileges. Saint-Georges had been trained as a soldier and wielded a sword even besting the best fencing masters. Faire de l’escrime was the most important sport in determining status. He was well established as a refined court dancer having developed close ties with Queen Marie Antoinette and the Duke of Orleans. Though there is no record of any contact between Saint-Georges and Jefferson—himself an avid amateur violinist and music lover—the American Minister and his retinue did attend a socially important Paris debut. Having already impressed Emperor Joseph in Frankfurt, the biracial 9-year-old child prodigy violinist George Bridgetower’s debut received great acclaim in Paris, most likely in Jefferson’s favorite haunt the Concert Spirituel at the Tuileries Palace.

The strikingly handsome Saint-Georges would have been entering his fifties then as the first successful classical composer of African descent. Born of a white plantation owner and enslaved creole mother in the French colony of Guadeloupe, Joseph arrived in Paris at age seven. His musical studies rapidly advanced, and he added fencing to his accomplishments. Winning a swordsmanship contest, he was rewarded with a title from the Queen and given access to the court of Louis XVI.

Saint-Georges rose in the ranks of a distinguished orchestra of amateurs to become its conductor in 1773. With enemies typically gained by success, and inevitable racial animus, the politics of orchestra life in Paris were volatile, but Saint-Georges aways landed firmly and often took the laurel wreath. Opera provided a wealth of new opportunities that overtook his instrumental composition which included a dozen violin concertos, numerous sinfonia concertantes, two symphonies and a plethora of chamber works.

During Jefferson’s stay as Minister of America, a significant music history landmark took place in 1787 when the specially commissioned set of six Paris Symphonies (Nos. 82-87) by Franz Josef Haydn were premiered in the largest hall of the Tuileries by Concert de la Loge Olympic, a new orchestra of freemasons, conducted by none other than Saint-Georges!

A measure of the Paris Symphonies’ great success was how rapidly three of them acquired nicknames upon publication of the set. The Chevalier’s connection to Haydn, who had provided for the young Bridgetower’s education in the orchestra at the Esterhazy Palace, and the boy’s Royal Frankfurt debut that launched his career, has somehow escaped the attention of music historians. Also, coming to light is the six-week period Saint-Georges shared lodgings in Paris with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Not only did Saint-Georges invent the Sinfonia Concertante, a double concerto for strings, in 1775, but also Mozart’s astonishing single addition (1779) to the literature—for violin and viola—borrows a distinctive musical phrase from Saint-Georges, who altogether composed ten Sinfonia Concertantes by 1782.

Jefferson returned home to America when the French Revolution erupted in 1789. Saint-Georges decamped to London and the myriad opportunities available there for a man with so many talents. He returned in 1792 to establish Légion St-Georges the first all-Black military regiment in European history. Fighting for revolutionary ideals, the legion clashed with Austrian and British forces. For his previous fraternization with the beheaded Queen, his return to Paris during the Reign of Terror was not without dire consequences—eleven months in prison. Despite the extensive military service, his fortunes declined. Saint-Georges died from an ulcerated bladder under the care of a fellow soldier in 1799. He was buried in the Cemetery of the Church of Saint Marguerite, in Paris. His grave not clearly marked.

The nimble certainty of this extraordinary life of social climbing through iconoclastic achievement against considerable odds seems only possible with the strategic instincts, sure-footedness, and grounded tenacity of Capricorn.

Sam Green

These days the adjective “immersive” is more annoying than accurate. It’s been used to describe the award-winning documentary 32 Sounds, which employs viewer participation, and multiphonics as requisite techniques for absorbing its message and apprehending its point of view. What that is exactly is hard to summarize despite the director Sam Green’s assuring on-screen and off-camera voice-over participation, and disarming simplicity of means. Rare is the film about sound and/or music that is so visually sophisticated, and graphically elegant that it unfolds as a visual poem with nary a comma out of place.

While Feldman raises the tangibility of sound to the highest delectation of beauty with a stoic, if not pitiless rectitude, Smith surrounds us with the micro-interstices of sound mimicking inaccessible experiences structured as a musical discourse. Green goes much further with his sonic archeology offering layers of social and cultural meaning gleaned from especially articulate human subjects though archival footage, candid interviews, demonstrations, and bespoke exchanges with his disarming, music-making sidekick JD Samson.

I have watched 32 Sounds four times and will likely experience it many times more. Green layers content with uncommon deftness as though writing with invisible ink. His didacticism could not be more soft-grained, welcoming, and upfront. Humanity poignantly seasons his technical messages. When have you stared at a black screen and heard a sound that, as explained by a scientist, moved you to tears? Four times. If you were “woke” police ferreting out “politically correct” sympathies toward civil rights, gender equity, and environmental justice, you might have a field day here, or you might come up empty-handed because you didn’t have a way to read it without also sharing those utopian sympathies. The film is about 32 specific sounds, but so much more.

Green was Oscar-nominated for his unlikely and clear-eyed 2002 documentary film The Weather Underground about the radical anti-Vietnam resistance movement. It’s a beautifully crafted, intellectually solid dissection of a complex subject spanning three decades done in a familiar way. However, 32 Sounds resisted such expected structuring. Viewers were utterly flummoxed as Green shared his early edits. He accepted a request to talk about 32 Sounds as a work-in-progress to students including a live musician to help make the rough cut more engaging, and voilà—the interactive feel of the film made sense and the “live immersive documentary” was born.

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Cirrus—Socrates—Particle—Decibel—Hurricane—Dolphin—Tulip. These are the seven words that imprint the artificial child “David” to his human owner and “mother” Monica at the Act One pivot point in Steven Spielberg’s controversial masterpiece A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. With names uttered by the owner as though they were signatures, this spoken protocol unlocks David’s program to love Monica forever—unconditionally. The film was literally inherited from Stanley Kubrick upon his death in London in March of 1999 and opened in theaters June of 2001. These two immensely creative fire sign filmmakers—Kubrick was a Leo (July 26, 1928)—collaborated on the film’s concept, script, and designs intermittently for fifteen years. When the CGI advances that made Jurassic Park possible were unveiled in 1993, the directors’ discussions became more charged. Two years later Kubrick asked Spielberg to direct A.I., whereupon—across time zones—they worked privately with their fax machines ringing, beeping, squealing, chirping, then the white noise “handshake” and thermal paper chittering away in their respective closets until Kubrick’s sudden death from a heart attack.

Artificial Intelligence

As the real possibilities, the uncertain promises, and the vexing perils of AI become more apparent to us, I believe this unquestionably troubling film will be reassessed, debated, and eventually regarded as Spielberg’s most profoundly important work for its bold moral speculation and compelling journey across many centuries. Furthermore, as Kubrick’s oeuvre recedes into film history, the debate over the film’s parentage will be moot…if it hasn’t already become irrelevant. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is a Spielberg film created with John Williams, who composed a two-hour score unlike any other. Williams worked alongside the truly musical sound designer Gary Rydstrom.

Every machine in A.I. has a sonic character. This soundtrack partnership was no less important than the script development with Kubrick. Together they galvanized a super talented visual effects, sound design, and production team and a superb cast. The relatability of David’s human “parents” and his unexpected human “brother” in Act I makes the odyssey of the three surviving “mecha” characters that dominate Acts II & III all the more eerily profound. The relationship of Haley Joel Osment’s mecha David and Frances O’Connor’s human Monica is painfully real, incisive, callously heartbreaking, and ultimately serenely meta-static. This robot’s accumulated memory, and a lock of Monica’s hair, creates a virtual DNA-simulacrum that allows the loving-boy-mecha to “die” with the illusion that it is real and really in the arms of “his” dying mother—all for the enlightenment of humanoid robots millennia in the future.

Along the way, David is guided by Teddy-bear-mecha voiced by Jack Angel, Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe lover-mecha, and the transient adoration of Clara Bellar’s poignant French-Nanny-mecha melted by acid in the horrifying “flesh fair”, where robots are “tortured” and “executed” for the entertainment of humans at the behest of Brendan Gleeson’s brutal master of ceremonies. Important and memorable character voices included Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Ben Kingsley, and Meryl Streep. Together, Spielberg’s flawless ensemble created a film that can be compared only to an operatic gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art.

Back to Berlioz

Hector Berlioz’s five-act opera Les Troyens is the first “cinematic” gesamtkunstwerk.

The last three acts were premiered in Paris as The Trojans in Carthage in 1863. Each act lasts one hour. Depicting the destruction of Troy, the costly first two acts were only joined with the three Carthage acts to make the opera complete in Germany 27 years later. after Berlioz’s death. The story’s protagonists inhabit the operatic stage as fully-dimensional characters singing words written by Berlioz. When the Big Three combine forces whole worlds result with palpably real characters whose emotions throb with a sense of destiny: Dido and Aeneas, Cassandra and Coroebus, alongside a panoply of related cameos: King Priam, Hecuba, Hector, Astyanax, and Dido’s sister Anna. Anticipating Benjamin Britten, a first day Sagittarius born November 22, 1913, Berlioz has a homesick Trojan sailor sing from the ship’s rigging to open Act V. For each scene the Berlioz orchestra generates detailed cinematic sensations while using harmony for expression rather than for structural reasons resulting in a lightness and fluidity notably lacking in Wagner.

“If I could live until I am a hundred and forty, my musical life would become decidedly interesting,” wrote Hector Berlioz in the postface of his 1864 Memoirs. That time leap would have landed his passing in 1943. Were it so, fellow Sagittarian and kindred spirit Olivier Messiaen would be making the most of Nazi-occupied Paris with the who’s-who premiere in an art gallery of his dramatic Visions of Amen for two-pianos. Meanwhile, settled comfortably in Beverly Hills, established composer Igor Stravinsky would begin to score the 20^th Century Fox production of Jane Eyre, only to be replaced by Oscar-winning film composer Bernard Herrmann. In Brentwood, Arnold Schoenberg would be working on his Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, for narrator, piano and string quartet, using Lord Byron’s poetic denunciation of the despot to channel his hatred for Adolf Hitler. Artistically, all these composers owed much to Berlioz, who invented the modern orchestra three years after the death of Beethoven in 1830 with his much vaunted premiere of Symphonie Fantastique.

In 1943 Steven Spielberg’s father would be finishing his military service in WWII, while his future mother was studying piano at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Three years later In December, Steven would be born with a loud echo of Berlioz’s identical Big Three. The film scoring genius of Hermann would be eclipsed 20-years later when the emerging film composer John Williams’ career intersected that of the young filmmaker Steven Spielberg in Hollywood.

A Side Trip to Hollywood

Let’s also place me in Hollywood as a an extra near the time of this intersection. During the summer of 1968, I was a scholarship student at The American School of Dance founded by choreographer/ teacher Eugene Loring (Billy the Kid). With eight years pf tap, ballet, and modern training at age nineteen, this study was to prepare me to dance in his fully-staged live music production of Carl Orff’s Catulli Carmina at UC Irvine as a sophomore art major. That summer I lived in a deeply shaded rooming house set back on Orange Drive between The Magic Castle, and—across the street from Grauman’s Chinese—the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, site of the first Academy Awards on Hollywood Boulevard. The American School, with its mirrored subterranean studios near La Brea was the western boundary of my car-free existence for three months. My usual eastern boundary was the legendary store Hollywood Magic. Staffed mostly by performers, it sold costumes, toys, disguises, wigs, and magic tricks. The aspiring celebrity artists Tony DeLap and Ed Moses, my teachers at UC Irvine, hung out there sometimes.

In between was Pickwick Books, the three-story mothership of bookstores founded in 1938 and patronized back in the day by authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, William Faulkner, actors Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando, and speculative fiction writer Ray Bradbury. Tall rolling ladders were used to access books in a musty towering cave of bound paper with an upstairs warren of rooms filling out most of a city block. One day in 1973, I arrived in Hollywood for my regular rounds only to find a large section had been removed encompassing all the books about alien visitation. I knew the section well because of my fascination with the subject dating back to a 1957 childhood memory in remote Holden Village nestled high in the Cascade Mountains of Wenatchee National Forest in Washington under a full moon. A clerk told me that Steven Spielberg had bought all of the books and they had been taken by a crew from Universal Studios. I checked People Magazine to make sure I would recognize him. Six years later, I was making specialty wardrobe at NBC for the Bob Hope Show and Tonight Show, big name entertainers, film segments, and Vegas Shows. Some time-sensitive banking necessitated a mid-day trip from the Burbank studio to Crocker Bank’s Universal City branch. There in line at the teller was Steven Spielberg.

Decans and Planetary Placements

As promised in Part I, given the near-perfect match of the sun, moon, and rising sign, we can talk comparatively about the role of the three decans, lasting ten days each within a given month. Our baby centaurs land in the 2nd decan, with Hector’s birthday on December 11, and in the 3rd decan, with Steven’s birthday one week later. To avoid confusion about the many references to rulership ahead, think of Venn diagrams where influences overlap, sometimes cancelling out, maybe reinforcing, then occasionally transforming. Each decan has a ruler that gives nuance to the month’s ruling sun sign. Each house has a ruler, and each planet has rulership stronger or weaker depending on its placement. Rulership is a cosmic dance.

With the second decan of December ruled by Mars reinforcing little Hector’s Mars in Sagittarius, he was feisty and impulsive, action-oriented, determined to achieve against all odds—which were major. He was an explorer who needed survival tactics. Hector’s key motto was—determination to innovate. In a parallel way, Steven’s decan is ruled by the sun giving little Steven a double dose of Sagittarius. He becomes a bold leader driven by justice, comfortable in the spotlight, exuding charisma and drawing people out while sharing his visionary approaches. Steven’s key motto is—opportunity to innovate.

Twelve Houses

The twelve houses follow the characteristics of the twelve signs of the zodiac, but the ascendant—the moment when the sun rises above the horizon at the native’s birth—establishes where the houses start in a given chart. The rising sign always shows at the 9 o’clock position. While the fourth house in both charts is revealing, the planetary placements in the fifth and sixth houses stand out for Hector and Steven.

Both men have their fourth houses—childhood, family dynamics, home, and emotional needs—ruled by Virgo, thus bringing the practical and organizational concerns of domestic homelife to the foreground. Hector’s Saturn is there in Libra and Steven’s Neptune in Libra is in the fourth too, with these outer planets exerting their power from a distance. While Saturn is exalted in balance-seeking Libra, Hector’s career planet struggles in the home to find true commitment, harmony, and fairness without losing self, but he wins. With Neptune at detriment, or fall, in Libra, dreamy confusion and misplaced idealism upset Steven’s childhood and family connections but help him find his way. In Spielberg’s recent autobiographical film, The Fabelmans, this planetary condition and house placement couldn’t be more clearly depicted. Berlioz’s strong- willed parents, their battles with young Hector over his education, and his class standing in a small community dominated by their large family estate are spelled out in great detail within Berlioz’s famous Memoirs.

The fifth house (Leo/Sun) is the domain of love, romance, self-expression creativity and pleasure, while the sixth house (Virgo/Mercury) rules work, career, duty, routines, service, and the well-being of the body.

Looking at the respective fifth houses is revealing since both men have Venus in the fifth house. Hector’s Venus is ruled by dark, obstinate, and rather obsessive Scorpio. Steven’s fifth house Venus is ruled by cool, balance-seeking, beauty-loving Libra. These contrasts reoccur in Steven’s sixth house ruled by comfortable and magnanimous Sagittarius. Hector’s sixth house is ruled by dark, obstinate, and rather obsessive Scorpio. Both artists have communication-ruling Mercury well-placed in the sixth house under fiery mutable Sagittarius. Both have mojo-ruling Mars there too—with Hector’s Mars ruled by reinforcing Sagittarius, and Steven’s Mars ruled by sure-footed and pragmatic Capricorn. Additionally, Hector has Pluto in moody vacillating Pisces in the sixth house adding emphasis to his persistent health concerns and his romantic obsession with the Pisces actress Harriet Smithson which deeply affected his work.

That obsession led to an opium dream which begat the Symphonie Fantastique, the first triumph Berlioz enjoyed, and the work, composed only three years after the death of Beethoven, which established the modern orchestra. Because it rivals Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, and Beethoven’s superb Seventh Symphony among the most often programmed, I will limit my comments about it except to say that John Eliot Gardiner’s orchestra of authentic instruments and period style research is unbelievably exciting to watch on screen. Here is an excerpt from an all-Berlioz concert on YouTube that I consider NTBM.

Water & Power

Spielberg’s chart shows 52% of planets in water signs to Berlioz’s 47%, and 28% of planets in fire signs to Berlioz’s 25%. The filmmaker masters exceptional storytelling intuition/imagination with large teams, but the composer’s voluminous public writing belies the finer balance of elements with 15% in air to the filmmaker’s 10%, and 13% in earth signs to Spielberg’s 10%, giving Berlioz more singular autonomy as an artist.

The Berlioz conductor and champion Colin Davis has described the composer’s ability “to generate terror” as unique in 19^th century music and biographer Cairns elaborates that his music creates “an electrical atmosphere by which some people are unsettled as by certain kinds of weather.” The contemporary German poet and literary critic Heinrich Heine compared Berlioz to “a colossal nightingale, a lark the size of an eagle, such as we are told existed in primordial times.” These qualities certainly explain the difficulties Berlioz faced in having his music performed and appreciated. Those same qualities, however, wouldn’t detract from the appeal of Spielberg’s films. They are almost always unsettling, and many have raised the production of terror to a high art.

In writing about his frustrations with the pettiness of Italian academic culture in music, and the relentless conservatism of Parisian musical taste, Berlioz wrote of “the life I crave: volcanoes, rocks, rich piles of plunder in mountain caves, a concert of shrieks accompanied by an orchestra of pistols and carbines, blood and lachryma Christi [btw, this wine from Mount Vesuvius is still produced], a bed of lava rocked by subterranean tremors.” I would be remiss in discussing Sagittarius not to include Messiaen’s statement: “My secret desire of enchanted gorgeousness in harmony has pushed me toward those flows of blue-orange lavas, those planets of turquoise, those violet shades, those garnets of long-haired arborescence, those wheelings of sounds and colors in a jumble of rainbows…”

The operatic scope of Spielberg’s magisterial A.I. was given a trial run a quarter century earlier in the first act of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Nerve- shattering to first audiences was an opening plunge into blackness made more suspenseful by long-attenuated crescendo suddenly ripped away with a deafening John Williams tutti chord and a blinding white screen! What follows are vivid and baffling images, complex mixes of spoken dialogue treated as choral texture, and the mysterious unfolding of a story that barely relied at the time on any recognizable conventions in film, if not in opera.

Les Troyens

Act I of Les Troyens is centered on dramatic soprano Cassandra, a Phrygian princess cursed by clairvoyant visions of death and destruction visited upon her by Apollo. The Greeks have retreated from Troy. Cassandra’s father King Priam dismisses her visions of her dead brother Hector as ravings. She beats against the armor of her lover and fiancé Coroebus, who cluelessly enjoys the fair weather seeing only good omens. She will not join them in peace celebrations near the Greeks’ wooden horse abandoned on the beach. The warrior Aeneas rushes to the palace to report that Laocoön, a priest and his sons, suspecting a trick hurled a burning spear at the horse. They were seized by two mighty sea serpents who devour them after a spectacular struggle. To appease Athena, goddess of war, Priam and Aeneas order the horse be dragged into Troy.

Act II continues Cassandra’s plight. Now the horse is in the City. Aeneas has seen Hector’s ghost, who urges him to escape proclaiming his destiny is to found a new empire that will rise to greatness. News of Troy’s destruction underway compels him to join the fray. The trojan women gather in horror and beseech the gods for deliverance. Cassandra tells them she has seen Aeneas’s flight and his future founding a new city in Italy. She learns that Coroebus has been killed and so prepares the women to resist being raped and made into slaves. Aeneas secures the treasure of Troy and escapes. As Greek soldiers close in, Cassandra plunges a dagger into her belly while inciting the Trojan women to mass suicide.

Act III sees the Carthaginians hailing Queen Dido who has overseen the construction in North Africa of a new city. They fled Tyre after the murder of her husband seven years ago. Dido’s sister Anna is eager for her to open her eyes and arms to a new consort for the future security of Carthage. Shipwrecked sailors from Troy are welcomed. Dido greets Aeneas who is among them. Soon news arrives that her nemesis the Numidian ruler Iarbus is rallying his troops to attack. Aeneas offers to join their counterattack, while entrusting his son to Dido’s care.

Act IV welcomes a victorious Aeneas with a royal hunt. Dido and Aeneas seek shelter from a sudden storm in a cave and discover that they are falling in love. Months later, Dido’s trusted advisor Narbal worries that the queen is neglecting her duties and he distrusts the Trojan strangers. At an opulent entertainment, Dido is curious about the last days of Troy. Aeneas confides that Hectors’ widow ultimately married his enemy. Hearing this Dido cannot escape the possibility of a parallel fate. Alone they reaffirm their love while Mercury reminds Aeneas of his destiny.

Act V opens with a homesick sailor singing a ballad form the rigging of a rebuilt Trojan ship in the harbor. Restless captains are reading omens and expressing concerns. Facing their worries, Aeneas resolves to see the Queen, but confronted by the ghosts of Cassandra and Hector, Priam and Coroebus, he orders his men to set sail before sunrise. Dido appears. When Aeneas again professes his love but tells her he must leave Carthage, she curses him. As dawn breaks she implores Anna to persuade Aeneas to stay, but the ships have already set sail. In desperate anger she demands that any Trojan gifts and remnants of their stay be gathered into a pyre, which she mounts. Holding aloft the sword Aeneas gave to her, Dido declares that she has seen a vision of a future Carthaginian general. She proclaims that Hannibal will avenge her as she plunges the weapon into her breast. With her vision of the future Roman capitol is seen above the burning pyre, the Carthaginians curse Aeneas, and his descendants.

The Berlioz Odyssey on Stage

Complete modern productions of Les Troyens correspond chronologically to Spielberg’s rising career. After a London production in 1974, the Metropolitan Opera in Manhattan mounted Les Troyens with Jessye Norman and Placido Doming to celebrate its 100^th Anniversary. This production is available only on a DVD that does not show well on today’s flat screens. However, most memorable is this YouTube scene of Norman, who vocally is considered the finest Cassandra to date:

Of the three currently available hi-def Blu rays, Royal Covent Garden’s 2013 production of Les Troyens is far and away the most effective—all things considered. The choral singing is tremendously visceral. Anna Caterina Antonacci’s acting as Cassandra more than compensates for the slight loss of her vocal bloom as compared to the interesting Gardiner production at Théâtre du Châtelet from 2005. The rest of the London cast is ferociously brilliant. A more recent but ugly futuristic Spanish production is misguided in every way, with tortured signing, and conducting by Putin’s friend Valery Gergiev sorely missing the mark. This exciting trailer for the Opus Arte online subscription service shows the extraordinary cinematic potential of this opera on the modern stage with its tremendous technical advances and capacity to utilize vertical space.

This additional content is for subscribers only. In the months ahead, I will expand on the traits of each particular sign through unwinding the “etymology” and accumulated observations that led to The Drag Zodiac—over a decade that spanned the seventies and eighties. Whimsical even satirical like a roast, this inherently anti-patriarchal take on the signs of the horoscope lovingly takes no prisoners.

Read more

A song sequence in Eccentrics, Seers & Fools, December’s Ultra Eclectic playlist, dived into fire and water. First Eartha Kitt flamboyantly sings “I Want to be Evil”, then Brian Eno & David Byrne appropriate a revival tent preacher to exorcise her brazenness with “The Jezebel Spirit”. The Sensational Nightingales next warn us gawking sinners “It’s Gonna Rain Again”, and Steve Reich—the art rock duo’s original stimulus—sonically atomizes with a tape loop another vehement street preacher bellowing It’s Gonna Rain: “God showed Noah the rainbow sign, it won’t be water but fire next time!” Yikes! For a spell now, such catastrophic flooding and devastating infernos have subjugated cities and rural settings—offering parallels to global political turmoil.

I initially set out to write about moon signs for this fourteenth edition of AstroMusic, having now traversed the twelve sun signs and introduced The Drag Zodiac last month—particularly moon in Scorpio, my own natal position. For “We have to Talk About Scorpio” (November 2024), I used the life and music of the wildly popular composer and violinist Nicolo Paganini to dig beneath some demonic Scorpio myths with a more nuanced view of this famously misunderstood sign. Paganini was a contemporary, a fan, and a patron of Hector Berlioz—whose moon is in Scorpio—so a natural sun/moon sympathy existed between them.

Even though we can agree that people are not corporations, and the opposite is true, I offer an instructive comparison here. The moon rules the inner emotional life, intuition, and creative impulses (research & development), while the sun embodies the full expression of the entity pursuing its daily ambitions and surmounting challenges (executive & operational functions). I think of the rising sign as a fishing lure (public relations & marketing)—what we show on the outside, our mask, our first impression, perhaps our winning formula. So, what happened to my moon in Scorpio assignment?

BIG THREE

As Fortuna would have it, behold, Berlioz and Steven Spielberg share the identical BIG THREE – sun, moon, and rising sign. Wow! Here is an irresistible opportunity to compare—through their prolific and highly public art—two enormous personalities sharing the adventurous spirit of sun in Sagittarius, the dark art of moon in Scorpio, and the emotional allure of Cancer rising. Here is a story to engage the astro-doubters, including many in my generation who have yet to find this pursuit a worthwhile way of navigating the world – looking forward and making choices informed by birth energy—traceable impulses, and patterns from the past. Here also is an engaging story for younger people to find surprising rewards exploring classical music.

Let’s begin by laying out the BIG THREE artistic terrain. Both Spielberg (December 18, 1946) and Berlioz (December 11, 1803) are storytellers who animated the largest canvasses available—opera and oratorio; film and television.

Steven Spielberg

To date Spielberg has directed 40 films including his first science fiction film Firelight at age eighteen, and a yet-untitled science fiction film due in theaters June 15, 2026—in his eightieth year! More than half of Spielberg’s films can be grouped by genre: eight science fiction, eight action/adventure, five wartime stories, and four historical dramas. That being said, each of the films seem to reinvent those genres and increasingly dominate them with uncanny production design, compelling screenplays, advanced cinematography, undisputed technical acumen, and riveting performances.

The most significant contributor to Spielberg’s success is his career-spanning partnership with John Williams. The hardworking film composer’s encyclopedic musical intelligence is alchemically channeled into to an infinite range of emotions—all driven by Williams’s uncanny executive command. Such genius is manifestly evident in Williams’s horoscope. His inventive Aquarius sun and messenger Mercury is exalted in out-of-the-box Aquarius. The emotional Pisces moon and sensual Venus is exalted in spiritual Pisces. Lacking his birth time, Williams’s rising sign is unknown. His very powerful career-minded Saturn is in disciplined Capricorn, and the predominance of sensitive water signs in his chart is buttressed by a gang of stand-taking fixed signs. The near absence of fire in Williams’s chart invites Spielberg’s sun in Sagittarius to take the director’s reins, while the near absence of air in Spielberg’s chart invites Williams to underscore with a generous flow of emotional intelligence.

Together they invented the movie blockbuster, based on the popular 1974 novel Jaws by Peter Benchley, optioned by producers Richard Zanuck & David Brown in 1973, substantially rewritten, then released in 1975, after overcoming near-insurmountable production obstacles. At the outset Brown told a reluctant 26-year-old Spielberg, that after directing Jaws “you can make all the films you want”.

Since Spielberg has attained such astonishing levels of popularity, you might ask, how could the BIG THREE also give birth to the most misunderstood composer of the generation following Beethoven? The struggle for recognition of Berlioz in 20^th century concert halls has been surpassed only by those of Arnold Schoenberg. In abject frustration, the French avant-garde composer predicted it would take 140 years before his career attained full visibility. Measured from the date of Symphonie Fantastique—his first success at age 27—that would land Berlioz in 1973, when the 27-year-old Spielberg began production on Jaws.

Decades before the Lumière brothers gave birth to film in France on that fateful night December 28, 1895, Berlioz—who died in 1869—concocted large scale dramas as would a film director and gave them vivid life and scenic splendor as would a film composer. The centenary of his death focused enormous attention on Berlioz with proliferating stereo LPs that captured for the first time the scope and complexity of his music. Revelatory new scholarship, media interest in the composer’s hallucinatory drug use, and groundbreaking opera house productions, especially in London, fulfilled the composer’s prediction.

Hector Berlioz

Over the 40-year span of his career, Berlioz composed more than 100 works including four un-numbered symphonies beginning with Symphonie Fantastique; six operas including the monumental Les Troyens as well as lost, unperformed, and unfinished ones; twelve sacred choral works including the massive Requiem; fourteen secular works including dramatic oratorio La Damnation de Faust; seven stand-alone overtures—precursors to the tone poem; four early cantatas for the Prix de Rome competition; four keyboard works for piano or organ; as well as 50 songs including the transcendent orchestral song cycle Les Nuits d’été—Summer Nights.

As for the stories that captured his imagination, Berlioz focused on ancient history, mythology, and literary adaptions with some overlap. His unremarkable Catholic upbringing was expressed by the politically motivated commission of his 90-minute Requiem, and an even longer oratorio depicting three scenes from Christ’s childhood, which revived his stalemated career. But it would be his medical and recreational use of opium as a young adult that unlocked the cinematic dreamscapes of Symphonie Fantastique. The Trojan war, as described by Homer and Virgil, Goethe’s Faust, and Lord Byron’s epic poem Childe Harold are joined by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliette, Antony and Cleopatra, and Much Ado About Nothing as the composer’s most prized source materials.

Given his deeply literary bent, brilliant career as a music critic, and precedent-setting memoir, it’s not surprising, if unusual for the times, that Berlioz wrote his own oratorio texts and opera libretti—with the exception of Benvenuto Cellini, a treatment by three librettist’s of the Renaissance sculptor’s memoir. The musical setting of Berlioz’s own words established an organic unity of expression that continues to impress audiences with its fluid dramatic forcefulness and subtlety.

The collective genius of Spielberg and Berlioz is so generous and indefatigable that the story of this BIG THREE Substack will span two parts. While they share much in common, we will also clarify how they are different—in spite of the BIG THREE. We will look at differing planetary placements in the twelve houses, and the solar decans—when in the thirty day cycle the birthdays occur and what shading that might explain.

To paraphrase, extrapolate from, and quote Berlioz’s most authoritative biographer David Cairns, the nerves of both Spielberg and Berlioz are exposed. Their notable BIG THREE enthusiasm and exhilaration is disturbingly alive to the internal and external suffering of human existence—“[their] passionate sense of beauty carries an acute awareness of how frail and ephemeral beauty is.” Its striking how aligned as a child of his time is Spielberg’s sensibility, and how maligned as other was the awareness of the eminent outsider Berlioz.

Both artists possess an understanding of, as Cairns continues “the tragic limitations of life, the discrepancy between imagination and fact, the chaos that waits beyond the edge of civilization, the terror of isolation in an empty universe.”

To be continued…

____________________________________________________________________________

This additional content is for paid subscribers only. In the months ahead, I will expand on the traits of a particular sign through unwinding the “etymology” and accumulated observations that led to The Drag Zodiac over a decade that spanned the seventies and eighties. Whimsical even satirical like a roast, this inherently anti-patriarchal take on the signs of the horoscope lovingly takes no prisoners.

Read more

Whenever her velvet-gloved fist of iron opens, Libra’s hand reaches out in equanimity, the graceful fingers-resting on the pulsebeat of culture. Libran megastars, such as John Lennon and Franz Liszt, had an uncanny feel for where the public’s sensibilities lay and how best to occupy the attention-getting space of their time—even after death. Far from mere public pandering, Libra’s fabled powers as a cultural barometer may, however, divert attention from their serious quest for fairness and justice.

Libran fame is at service to humanity in a symbiotic relationship that encompasses a complexity distinct to this sign. Under their winning exterior is a kind of insecurity that drives achievement. Libra is the only sign represented by an inanimate object—scales for dispensing judgement: “thou art weighed in the balance…” accompanied with a sword for wielding power. This distance from the animal kingdom, however subliminal, is powerful and inescapable. To help bridge that gap, the scales of justice are historically held by a female figure, sometimes blindfolded, much in the way that ships are given the reciprocal protective/nurturing mantle of gender. The mythologies of Egypt, Greece, and Rome each embodied justice as a goddess.

Libran Kamala Harris’s new account of her 107 days on the campaign trail underscores the monumental challenge of her stylish cool-headed battle for freedom against the erratic hot-tempered Gemini now occupying the White House. Only 2.3 million out of 152.3 million votes decided the 2024 presidential election. I would offer that the contest was not decided just by the enormous challenges Harris’s gender and ethnicity posed, growing up on the sidelines of social justice protests as she did, but an inner self-doubt compensated for by achievements perceived by some of the public as self-righteous. Libra cooly wishes to avoid the distastefulness of confrontation, resorting to lofty or tactful abstractions. but is nonetheless compelled to set wrongs right. Perhaps more preparation and time on the campaign trail could have allowed Harris’s gloved fist and cultural finesse the advantageous purchase needed to overcome public distrust.

The various ancient mythologies of Libra shed little light for the curious contemporary reader, however, the Autumnal Equinox, September 22, when day and night are equal, and when the apparent noise of Summer gives way to the interior tug of Winter, speaks to the sign’s essential balance. The two Libran musicians we are considering here, who defined musical superstardom in the nineteen and twentieth centuries, can demonstrate balancing the apparent noise of public adulation and the interior tug of pursuing justice.

Franz Liszt & Lisztomania

A Hungarian in Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, and fatherless at age 15, Liszt (1811-1886) was ever-aware of his outsider status, however easily he overcome it with his uncanny virility, magnetic style, and supernatural gifts as a piano virtuoso. His Sagittarian father Adam was an unusually talented land steward working for Prince Esterházy of Galántha. Adam’s natural musicality was expressed as an amateur on the piano, cello, flute, and guitar in local taverns, sometimes alongside Roma musicians—but he was also on friendly terms in the palace with the great resident composer Franz Josef Haydn, and his underappreciated pupil Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Adam collected rents, kept ledgers, managed budgets, and calculated revenues, oversaw livestock and crops, negotiated leases, supervised staff, and handled the upkeep of the palace buildings. So, it was possible that Adam’s child, his prodigy son Franz, improvising on the piano before the age of five, could receive every advantage of high birth. Adam died of typhoid fever.

The virtuosic violinist Nicolo Paganini (1782-1840)—alarming to behold—inspired a diabolical fascination bordering on cultish fanaticism (see “We need to talk about Scorpio”, 11/2024), but no one before Liszt achieved such megastar status that the contemporary poet Heinrich Heine (1821: “Wherever they burn books, will in the end burn human beings.”) dubbed the popular phenomenon “Lisztomania.” Yes, panties were smuggled to him, and his cigar butts were treasured as sachets pressed into the cleavage of fashionable bodices. He was the first to memorize music for the recital, which he invented. He planted the seeds of impressionism and experimented with harmony and thematic development crucial to the achievements of Wagner and later Arnold Schoenberg. He invented the symphonic tone poem, the “transcription”, and the musical “paraphrase”, all the better to promote the music of his contemporaries. He invented the masterclass, all the better to reach more students—hundreds of them!

Yet on a deep level Liszt felt his uncanny genius as a burden for atonement through acts of generosity and self-sacrifice. He organized the first ever benefit concert—for Hungary’s 1838 “Danube Flood”. Four years later he raised funds with performances for the victims of the “Great Fire of Hamburg”. To ensure Beethoven’s stature to posterity, he solicited support for a monument erected in Bonn, the revered composer’s birthplace.

Liszt championed the early careers of Chopin and Wagner with performances, funds—and helping to forge a passport for Wagner when in exile as a progressive political firebrand. Alarmed by the haphazard teaching of music that prevailed with no professional standards, in 1875, Liszt founded the Academy of Music in Budapest that would eventually graduate Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, to name only the most famous. After moving to Rome, and a residency at the Vatican, Liszt received the tonsure and four minor orders of the Catholic church—acolyte, porter, lector, and exorcist. Abbe Liszt died twenty-one years later, unmarried with three illegitimate children after two sensational affairs conducted notoriously in public. His reputation is only now gaining the appreciation this great artist deserves.

John Lennon & Beatlemania

Expelled from kindergarten after being abandoned by his father, a ship’s waiter, the wildly incorrigible John Lennon was raised by his aunt and uncle. Barely succeeding in school, his weak eyesight was corrected by round wire-rimmed glasses that became his signature look. Lennon’s mother Julia may have exposed him to rock & roll on the radio, but Aunt Mimi bought his first guitar. Finishing last in his class, Lennon soon met Paul McCartney at age 17 while attending a Liverpool art school. After experimenting in the skiffle scene (a hybrid of American folk and British music hall), coping with the death of his mother struck by a car, and growing success in Hamburg; and after several name and personnel changes, John’s band the Beatles soon generated what was dubbed “Beatlemania.” Eventually the band set the world record in album sales. Well-documented is Lennon’s notorious drug abuse, infidelities, and his seemingly revolutionary relationship with performance and conceptual artist Yoko Ono—as is his tragic assassination. Lennon’s philanthropy is less appreciated, owing to its unconventional means, low-key strategies, and compulsion for balance.

John and Yoko used their 1969 honeymoon to protest the Vietnam War first in Amsterdam, and then in Montreal where they recorded Give Peace a Chance. The “Bed-Ins for Peace’ were press events where the artists remained in bed all day advocating for peace. The following year Lennon donated $75,000 (about the equivalent of $625,000 today!) to the Black Panther Party’s social justice cause. In 1971, Lennon performed with other rock luminaries in the unprecedented “Concert for Bangladesh” organized by George Harrison with Ravi Shankar to address the political cause of liberation and famine relief in Madison Square Garden.

Support for children with intellectual disabilities followed in 1972 with the “One to One Concert” for Willowbrook. In the years that followed Lennon’s assets were used to support Liverpool’s Strawberry Field’s Orphanage, orphans in Ireland, and New Beginnings therapeutic foster homes. In 1975 he answered phones for WFIL-AM’s “Helping Hand Marathon” in Philadelphia, when the station was a cultural juggernaut. Anti-war initiatives and struggling artists consistently inspired him to make anonymous gifts, as well as his work with UNICEF, WhyHunger, and the Playing For Change Foundation. With a life cut short at age 40, Lennon’s timeless 1971 anthem Imagine, self-renews its ultra-idealistic message with each major political crisis.

The Drag Zodiac

Ruled by Libra, fashion is a key driver of culture, but setting public style is a notoriously treacherous business. To quote the double Scorpio with Gemini rising superstar RuPaul, named by Time magazine in 2017 among the 100 most influential people in the world, “We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” The Time 100 high fashion Manhattan gala rivals the Met. In his speech, the “Queen of Drag”, singled out George Orwell’s Animal Farm as profound for its revelations about the perils of our quickly evaporating cultural memory.

In the late 1980’s, RuPaul and I had a chance encounter on a Southwest Airlines flight from LA to San Francisco. The unmistakably tall 6’7” freckled and bespectacled actor and I locked eyeballs as we were both dressed in Willi Wear! The company WilliWear Ltd. was the first to create womenswear and menswear under the same label, and among the first to offer unisex clothing. Pisces businessman Willi Donnell Smith was regarded as the most successful African American designer, grossing sales over $25 million in 1986. HIV positive, he contracted shigella, a bacterium affecting only primates, while traveling in India, where many of Smith’s unique and affordable fabrics were woven. He died of pneumonia in 1987, and the company folded three years later.

In the groundbreaking 1990 documentary “Paris is Burning,” the lodestar of contemporary drag culture, a category for competition at the great Manhattan balls of the period was “Executive Realness.” This revolutionary fillip established once-and-for-all that straight white men may dominate the world, but they are born naked and assume their power through charade. RuPaul was a regular at the Wigstock Labor Day festival. After his Supermodel of the World album’s enormous 1993 success on rap label Tommy Boy, he appeared in another documentary Wigstock: The Movie.

As we arrive at the one-year anniversary of AstroMusic with this edition’s focus on the Libran world of fashion and superstardom (other prominent Libra natives: Truman Capote, and Divine, another drag queen acquaintance of mine) it seemed a timely way to honor Virgo Timothy Troy, my astrological mentor, musician, and co-author of The Drag Zodiac.

We met in the heady days of 1971 and remained close through that tumultuous decade, growing apart once I began working as a designer and craftsman in the film and television industries. Like Willie Smith, Tim died of AIDS complication in the mid-eighties.

Apart from working with Tim as pianist/arranger and music director on projects that I designed and spearheaded—the musical Guys & Dolls, in which we interpolated Carmen Cavallaro’s piano fantasy Voodoo Moon with Vickie Randle (later the first permanent female member of the Tonight Show Band since 1992 with Jay Leno) singing wordlessly in the style of Yma Sumac to Tim’s florid piano and orchestra takedown; and Cinderella At Midnight the actual final production of The Cockettes at San Francisco’s Palace Theater in North Beach starring the infamous drag queen Goldie Glitters—our ongoing project was to give the twelve astrological signs of the zodiac drag names.

Tim and I drew associations from old movie stars and pop culture figures, a bit of history and mythology infusing them with witty stand-in code names for the foibles of the signs—as though the Zodiac were being given a roast. We were inspired by the dance company en travesti Les Ballets Trocadero de Monte Carlo founded in 1974, (I had a fling with Tory Dobrin, artistic director, who joined the troupe in 1980). Who could forget Peter Anastos as Olga Tchikaboomskaya! We struggled to avoid lionizing favorites, as well as applying cruelty to signs that annoyed the hell out of us at any given time. Always classical composers and their music gave us spiritual and behavioral guideposts.

Many iterations were tried out until a particular name finally stuck. We used these names as descriptive shorthand for behaviors we thought emblematic. I have now added groups of metaphors to each name in that spirit, with a current sensibility.

Each month going forward I will share more detailed ruminations about how Tim and I arrived at the names—and further musings in the spirit of his self-described “wiggy” sense of humor, as well as telling information. The Drag Zodiac addenda will be available each month exclusively for paying subscribers.

THE DRAG ZODIAC by Patrick Scott & Timothy Troy

ARIES Betty (Bette) Clout

• Simple as a gingham-covered cookbook, magnetic as a movie star

• Subtle as a hammer, determined as a mogul

TAURUS Gwen Meadows

• Mellow as a lozenge, earthy as a picnic blanket

• Soothing as a crooner, social as a coffee klatch

GEMINI Daphne Totter

• Erratic as a radio, plucky as a first-timer in high heels

• Flirtatious as a thirst trap, extreme as a full-moon eclipse

CANCER Carmen Sue Klymacks

• Sexy as a rivulet of sweat, domestic as a playpen

• Dramatic as a demolition derby, independent as a great white shark

LEO Regina Louise Bluster

• Deluxe as a high-rise apartment that rhymes with fine china

• Stormy as a blowhard, warm as a mink stole, imperious as a diva

VIRGO Servette Mundaigne

• Helpful as a Roomba, inventive as a virus, systematic as a librarian

• Discreet as an FBI agent, useful as a thesaurus

LIBRA Faye Powers

• Tactful as an iron fist in a velvet glove, balanced as a runway model

• Calculating as a chess grandmaster, insecure as a lie detector

SCORPIO Adele Blood

• Passionate as a praying mantis, serious as a heart attack

• Enigmatic as a sphinx, sharp-eyed as a bald eagle

SAGGITARIUS Gloria Deo/Golda Gottlieb

• Adventurous as an aviatrix, entertaining as a triple threat

• Optimistic as the founding fathers, curious as an octopus

CAPRICORN Rhoda Royal

• Humble as an astronaut, single-minded as a majordomo

• Blind as an overachiever, nimble as a mountain goat

AQUARIUS Lotta Banter

• Ravenous as a researcher, idealistic as a whistleblower

• Teasing as a towering hairdo, forward as a pathfinder

PISCES Blanche D’Almonds

• Pale as a wallflower, refined as a tipsy socialite,

• Wise as the Magi, bright as the light of a long-dead star

At least she had somewhere else to go!

Disgusted with the wickedness and corruption of human beings on earth, one by one, the gods departed for the heavens. The last one to throw up her hands in exasperation was Astraea the virgin goddess—becoming the constellation Virgo. Patient to a fault, like an indefatigable community organizer, Astraea had a plan, until she didn’t.

Like an angel, Astraea is shown with wings. Holding a sheaf of wheat, she is associated with the harvest and the season of plenty. Her mother was Eos, goddess of the dawn, who coupled with Astraeus, father of the stars. A prominent star tattooed on her right arm, Vindemiatrix is associated with gathering grapes. Despite her rigorous self-discipline Virgo revels in abundance. This seeming dichotomy, once layered over with religious moralism about female sexuality, led to a common good/evil interpretation of Virgo that is wrongheaded. Modern astrology distinguishes the self-possession and service ethic of Virgo from notions of sexuality. The Jezebel dualism of purity attracting venality is a construct of the patriarchal Abrahamic tradition discredited by astrologers today. Which isn’t to say—double negatives be damned—that Virgo doesn’t know when to let her hair down!

At her left hand is Spica, or Alpha Virginis, the brightest star in the constellation, some 250 light-years from earth. We now know that Spica’s brightness emanates from a binary star system orbiting so closely their interlocking gravities deform the two into massive blue-white eggs of heat and light—whirling end-to-end in a cycle lasting four days! Using the massive now-collapsed radio telescope in Puerto Rico’s Arecibo, Virgo was the constellation where the first extra-solar planets (equal-sized exoplanets Poltergeist & Phobetor) were discovered in 1992—orbiting Lich, a rapidly rotating pulsar. Pol and Pho are each four-times the size of earth circling an electromagnetic pharos. As of last month, 5,989 exoplanets have been discovered with thousands of candidates currently being investigated.

A glance at Jacaranda Media’s September playlist—renamed ULTRA eclectic to make way for the repurposed Patrick’s Picks, a weekly Instagram guide to cool classical concerts—shows a dumbfounding diversity of Virgo-born composers. This is truly an extraordinary list: George Gershwin, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage, Arvo Pärt, John Coltrane, Antonin Dvořák, Darius Milhaud, Leonard Bernstein, and Gustav Holst, who starts the playlist with his “Mercury.” Add to that jackpot the great film composers Alexandre Desplat, Hildur Guonadottir, Johann Johannsson, Hans Zimmer, and for good measure, the super-star singer/songwriters Beyonce and Michael Jackson.

Virgos analyze, organize, make maps, and channel inspiration in service of the higher good. They are practical, reaching their hands into the real tactile minutia of creation. In music this dissimilar bunch of Virgo composers actually share more than a commitment to craftsmanship and perfectionism. When I think of Virgo the Hebrew phrase Tikkun Olam often follows—to repair the world with social justice, acts of kindness, and philanthropy—all seeming in such short supply today!

Consider how many members of this group have in common a disposition toward social justice. Michael Jackson became synonymous the “We Are the World” as the voice of the 1985 campaign to end the famine in Ethiopia raising the equivalent today of $229 million with the first quadruple platinum hit single. Beyonce established the BeyGOOD Foundation in 2013 to ensure clean water for the children of Burundi, support Historically Black Universities, and provide wildfire relief for affected residents in Altadena and Pacific Palisades in 2025.

By his request, all performances of Arvo Pärt’s music in 2006 and 2007 were dedicated to the memory of murdered human rights activist Anna Politkovskaya. His 2008 Symphony No. 4 “Los Angeles” stands as a protest against Vladimir Putin. It is dedicated to Putin’s political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the richest man in Russia, founder of Open Russia, now exiled to London. One hopes that Esa-Pekka Salonen, in his new role as Artistic Director of the LA Phil, might bring the symphony back with full public attention to the context of its creation and reverberations today. Salonen’s 2009 premiere recording of the symphony with the LA Phil is currently available on Spotify. The Estonian composer, born Sept. 11, 1935, condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine stating, “humankind is one organism.” Pärt elaborated that position during the COVID-19 pandemic: “this tiny coronavirus has showed us in a painful way that humanity is a single organism and human existence is possible only in relation to other living beings.” Sadly, Pärt’s hope seems overlooked today that the health-related economic crisis would focus the world on what is “Important, essential”.

Antonin Dvořák championed the cause of marginalized composers and musicians during his tenure (1892-95) as director of New York’s National Conservatory of Music with free admission for talented Black and Native American students in direct opposition to exclusionary policies and practices. He took a then-radical public position that the future of American music should derive from the folk music of African Americans and Native Americans. His Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” was a case in point inspired in passages by spirituals sung to him by his student Harry T. Burleigh. Both William Grant Still (1995-1978) and Florence Price (1897-1953) were inspired by Dvořák. As a measure of his pervasive influence, “Goin’ Home” was arranged from the moving Largo of the New World Symphony by William Arms Fisher, an Anglo student of the composer, given words, and published in 1922. Is seeped so deeply into the American culture, despite the melody having no ostensible African American roots, that a performance of Goin’ Home on the accordion by a weeping African American Chief Petty Officer captured as President Franklin Delano Roosevelts funeral train passed by, became an icon of FDR’s commitment to civil rights. Fisher observed that Dvořák’s homesickness for his native Bohemia was steeped in the tragedy of the Native American genocide, and the nobility of the African American struggle against oppression.

As early as 1957, “Bakai” the opening track of the super-Virgo of Jazz John Coltrane’s first album, was dedicated to the teenager Emmett Till, brutally murdered in 1955. He composed a eulogy “Alabama” for the four girls killed in the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing following the cadences of Martin Luther King, who he paid homage to in the 1966 “Reverend King”. No less interested in the ideas of Malcom X, he explored themes of Pan-Africanism in such works as “Africa”, Liberia” and Dahomey Dance.” In 1966 he wrote “I know there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world. I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.” Coltrane suffused his many-sided comprehension of the African American music traditions with a dose of Schoenberg’s theories via the Hollywood transplant’s student Dennis Sandole in Philadelphia, where Coltrane grew up and where his teacher exposed many future jazz luminaries to the 12-tone method. While we observe the 60^th anniversary of Coltrane’s one-take recorded masterpiece, the hymn-like “A Love Supreme” is being celebrated for its fulfillment as the saxophonist/composer’s “definitive tone poem” of the human role in God’s plan.

Gershwin’s all-Black Porgy & Bess was a breakthrough in opera depicting a completely realized world of African American characters in a compelling story. He was a regular tennis partner with Schoenberg, painted the composer’s portrait, and leaned on him at times of flagging confidence. His close friend was first to announce Gershwin’s death over the radio followed by an affectionate obituary. The Canadian composer Eldon Rathburn, awarded a prize from a committee of the Los Angeles Philharmonic that included Schoenberg, wrote a guessing game piece of piano music imagining both composers in a tennis match here played by Scott Dunn.

Both Milhaud and Schoenberg were Jews who fled Nazi persecution in the United States—in 1940 & 1938, respectively. Milhaud’s increasing disability from severe rheumatoid arthritis by the late 1930s made him even more “disposable” by Nazi standards. Both landed in California, Milhaud in Oakland, and Schoenberg in Los Angeles. Both were esteemed and effective teachers (Dave Brubeck & Steve Reich; Lou Harrison & John Cage respectively) prizing their students’ individuality. Milhaud & Schoenberg deplored racism, and both of Schoenberg’s famous students were gay. Milhaud celebrated racial diversity in his diplomatic travels to Brazil (1917-18) and incorporated his jazz experience in Harlem clubs with his famous 1923 ballet Le Creation du Monde. Bernstein described Milhaud’s ballet emerging “not as a flirtation but as a real love affair with jazz.” Schoenberg taught the baseball legend Jackie Robinson when a beginning music student at UCLA and fought for William Grant Still’s admission to a prestigious Los Angeles composer’s society against the wishes of its racist director. His effective solution: have all the members resign leaving the director behind. The indominable Milhaud struggled with canes and wheelchairs in an indifferent world to regularly travel, attend concerts, and teach. Despite great suffering he “remained happy and hopeful” according to a student. His thirteenth and last symphony (1963) for alto, baritone, chorus, and orchestra avoided the number by focusing on its message Pacem In Terris.

Schoenberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia—fear of the number 13—he was born on September 13, 1874 and died on July 13, 1951. Doesn’t it seem oddly natural that this increasingly fathomable composer would invent the 12-note system? Especially so since the quintessential Virgo was obsessed with systems and all manner of practical abstractions, in service to a lifelong interest in extending the emotional language and viability of the Germanic tradition. His pupil, Virgo John Cage, had no such interest in tradition, but instead investigated the nitty-gritty of music systems to the very brink and beyond. In 1950 his radical composition 4’ 33” liberated silence and sound itself. For Atlas Eclipticalis Cage superimposed transparent templates over a massive atlas of star maps to plot the score. He specified up to 86 musicians, but allowed any sized group, lasting about 80 minutes, or any length depending on sections of the work selected.

In his concern for audience development, Leonard Bernstein created the legendary Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic that ran for 53 episodes over 13 seasons beginning in 1958 on CBS. Unfortunately, Bernstein’s program including Atlas Eclipticalis upset Cage, as the orchestra was seen as mockingly unsympathetic, while the young audience giggled and whispered. More successful was Bernstein’s performance of A Survivor from Warsaw by Schoenberg. While ostensibly teaching the young audience about the 12-tone system, the narrated 7-minute monologue with orchestra and male chorus gripped them with shockingly detailed descriptions of the horrors of Nazi brutality based on various first person accounts fictionalized by Schoenberg. While the final chorus intones Shema Yisrael is not uplifting, it evokes the pathos of Jews singing as marched to their extermination. Today, one must ask how Schoenberg’s sympathies would be torn by the horrifying situation in Gaza? One cannot listen to his powerful denunciation of the dehumanization of Polish Jews without dwelling on the utter decimation of the Gaza Strip.

Arnold Schoenberg: A Survivor From Warsaw (1947) Franz Mazura, narrator; City of Birmingham Orchestra and Male Chorus, Simon Rattle”

Bernstein’s advocacy of fellow Virgos Cage, Schoenberg, Gershwin, and Milhaud on his longest-running classical music series came to a climax with Gustav Holst’s The Planets March 26, 1972. Bernstein excerpts the famous orchestral suite waxing poetically in his descriptions with astronomical information, but more tellingly with the astrological characteristics of the planets used by Holst as a guide to the length/size of the movements/planets and their personalities. Holst was obsessed with astrology often doing the then-cumbersome work of casting the horoscopes of his friends. This final astrological episode of The Young People’s Concerts is worth watching on YouTube and a transcription of Bernstein’s commentary throughout can be downloaded.

With this the twelfth edition of AstroMusic dedicated to exploring the convergence of astrology and mostly classical music, I have Holst and Bernstein together to thank for introducing the world to this rich sensory source of intellectual and spiritual guidance free of religious dogma and beyond political shortsightedness.

Note: This remembrance of Fred Strickler, an ingenious dance artist born August 5, works in tandem with the August playlist PHRASING—a 180-minute survey of the music that Fred loved—often inspiring him to choreograph and perform. Our friendship began in 1970.

Fred Strickler’s warm leonine personality was expressed both on stage and in many mirrored classrooms—where a dancer’s artistic lifespan depends largely on the body being in constant training or teaching modes. Fred’s pathbreaking 40-year tenure at the University of California Riverside (UCR)—ultimately as a Distinguished Professor—was designed at the outset in 1967-68 to enrich his teaching by being an active performer in the Los Angeles dance community with Eyes Wide Open Dance Theater and Rhapsody in Taps, and touring the world, first with the Bella Lewitzky Dance Company, then the Jazz Tap Ensemble—and afterward as an international soloist. He performed the Tap Dance Concerto by Morton Gould 75 times over 25 years with 45 orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburg Symphony, Houston Symphony, Puerto Rico Symphony, and for an audience of 70,000 with the National Symphony on the DC capitol mall, a week before 9/11, on Labor Day under a full moon. Despite this immense performance legacy, Fred regularly created original work of great diversity from 1968 to 2019.

Columbus

Fred’s two sisters and three brothers were raised by a single mother working in a factory assembly line, and at White Castle in Columbus, Ohio. In 1947, their alcoholic father abandoned the family. A stay-at-home grandmother Helen Beatty insisted they all play musical instruments, with penultimate Fred learning violin. She told him, “Your future is in your feet,” but as she heard his daily reports of what he was learning, she began saving to buy an electric typewriter for college. As a young scholarship student, Fred was trained as a ballet dancer by Jorg Fasting, a Norwegian immigrant who helped found the Columbus Metropolitan Ballet.

Fasting studied with Mary Ann Welles, as did Robert Joffrey, founder of the Joffrey Ballet, and Marc Platt of Broadway and Hollywood movie (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, 1954) fame. Welles was the founding ballet teacher at the Seattle-based Cornish School later associated with the emerging dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham and his musical muse John Cage. Fasting also studied with the dance legend Adolf Bolm, a collaborator with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, inheritor of the Russian tradition, and founder of the San Francisco Opera Ballet.

By age twelve, Fred was recognized as the most promising ballet dancer in Ohio with all the pedigree one could get in a Midwestern state. But the rhythm gods had other plans, so Fred also enrolled in the tap and ballroom dance studio of Jimmy Rawlins, an extraordinary entrepreneur (500 students a week!) with multiple studios in the region, and a weekly Sunday afternoon television show on local CBS in Columbus. Fred regularly appeared as a soloist on the 30-minute Jimmy Rawlins Dance Show. Lynn Dally, Rawlins’s oldest daughter, was also a featured soloist. In the summer Fred toured Ohio as a chorus boy with Kenley Players to earn money as a teenager. John Kenley’s equity summer stock theater company pioneered the practice of booking big-name stars in familiar plays and musicals—such as Gypsy Rose Lee in Auntie Mame and The King and I starring Betty White. It was a grueling bus schedule with 12-14 shows in rotation each summer in Dayton, Akron, Warren, & Columbus, Ohio, plus Flint, Michigan.

In 1968, Ohio State University (OSU) officially became a national leader in higher education when their humble physical education program was transformed into an esteemed dance department. Along the way, OSU hired many important guest artists from highly visible dance companies, including Viola Farber, Judith Dunn, Jose Limón, and Anna Sokolow—mostly from Manhattan. Through these interactions, and a curriculum that emphasized contemporary music, Fred developed very sophisticated musical interests enriched by his steadfast curiosity about style, his basic violin skills, his dance practice, and a strong ability to understand music theory. His hiring upon graduation with a BA to teach modern dance was engineered by OSU’s Helen Alkire and UCR’s ambitious dance historian Christena Schlundt. Both women worked tirelessly to change their university “phys-ed” programs—the status quo at the time—into enterprising dance departments. UCR would go on to establish the first and only PhD in Critical Dance Studies.

Riverside

Fred choreographed solos for himself, group pieces, and incidental dances for the play Medea upon arriving at UCR in 1968, the same year Bella Lewitzky recruited him to join her first full company. Bella had been the protégé of Lester Horton, the first American to choreograph Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring—at the Hollywood Bowl in 1937! Bella danced “The Chosen One.” Fred is cited in Wikipedia asserting that Horton, “built his technique, which is now known as the Horton technique, on her body. Specifically on her body.” Fred was honored at the 20^th Annual Lester Horton Awards in 2011.

In the early days in the Lewitzky company Fred performed a solo choreographed by Murray Lewis, later named Fred & Rorem. At the time, Lewis with his life partner Alwin Nikolais were a strong presence at UCLA. Music by Ned Rorem occupied Fred’s attention in the late 1960s. An important early group dance was set to Eleven Studies for Eleven Players, which garnered considerable New York attention in 1960, while Broadway was ablaze with Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story. It is striking now to hear how much Rorem’s witty orchestration evokes the scoring of Sondheim’s 1987 musical masterpiece Into the Woods.

Fred appeared in Kinaesonata, Bella’s first international signature work that premiered in at Idyllwild School of the Arts in August of 1970. Bella was 54. Her company made their sensational New York debut at BAM the following year. Every night that the Piano Sonata No. 1 by Alberto Ginastera was performed live by pianist Cara Bradbury Rhodes, Fred would watch Bella’s compelling slow movement solo from the wings before joining fleetingly as her partner with the company in the third movement—a bravura burst of hemiola footwork and jutting arms in a near impossibly fast finale. Bella’s core strength was undiminished and transfixing to behold—her darting rhythmic precision the envy of much younger dancers. Bella’s understanding of Ginastera’s music was total, and the final impression of the dance on stage was profoundly satisfying.

Fred and I met at a party that he hosted in a deep-gabled craftsman house under very old trees that he rented in early fall of 1970. That spring we collaborated on our first stage work Candle for 25 dancers. With the curtain lowered during intermission paper-backed silver foil flooring was rolled out to fill the stage. The many dancers assumed poses alongside 100 tiny candles burning on 36” poles evenly, but not geometrically deployed. Clad in pale long-sleeved leotards and tights, the totally still dancers were given several positions, some, the most experienced, all the way to the floor. As imperceptibly as possible, they freely descended or twisted invisibly, ad libitum. The curtain only fell as the flames flickered out.

In 1967, I heard Zubin Mehta conduct the U.S. premiere of Iris for large orchestra by Per Nørgård. After the LA Phil’s open rehearsal, I was invited to look at the enormous score the Danish composer derived from a graphic representation of the Fibonacci series. By 1973 an LP of Iris was released, and we used it to accompany a second iteration of Candle. That same year for Night Pieces, using monofilament, I hung seven enormous tumbleweeds gathered by stopping alongside Highway 60 before it was a freeway. These brittle clouds could be raised and lowered on two stage battens, concealing/ revealing the dancers with highly atmospheric lighting. George Crumb’s Night Music with piano, percussion, and soprano set poems by Gabriel Garcia Lorca. The soprano was Dorothy Crawford, who later wrote the definitive history of Monday Evening Concerts (1939-1971) under its founder Peter Yates and polymath Laurence Morton, who was one of my role models.

Night Pieces/Night Music was the first of several collaborations Fred initiated with UCR’s annual Contemporary Music Festival that would soon include four movements from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time performed live with my set, costume, and lighting design. Pushing through a sheer radiant veil, Fred appeared as the “Angel who Announces the End of Time.” His costume was painted with legs of flames and shoulders of clouds. A Japanese Heraldic “mon” of three white squares joined by three converging lines became his mask with matching white squares attached at this forearms allowing the head and elbows to form changing configurations. Discarded bedsheet squares streaked with brilliant color were arranged as an open checkerboard interacting with nine unison dancers, an everchanging cyclorama, and kaleidoscopic floor.

Several other large-scale collaborations were more conceptually complex. Attic (Spring, 1974) for ten dancers and three distinguished faculty speakers delivering their own texts, employed a four-track sound collage. At the end, Christena Schlundt rose from the orchestra pit, arm raised with a torch, blindfolded, and clothed in an aluminum foil toga in recognition of the Watergate Scandal. Months later, a solo was spun off from Attic with the title LA Stories, to my texts from 1971, which I read live.

While Waiting for the Muse (1977) collected nine very brief solos developed from student improvisations during one-hour private sessions with Fred. He described the process: “My dances call for memory, thought sensations in the body, attitudes, emotions, AND reactions like familiarity, meaning, engagement/interest—or their opposites.” He drew out each dancer to freely experience through pure movement exactly what they were experiencing—the past present, and future—right then, right there. Fred shaped the movement into a solo that the student could take home and practice. More often than not Fred didn’t wait, he made an appointment with the Muse.

The nine student solos were performed simultaneously and as duos, trios, etc. to the slow movement from Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 running some nine minutes. Next, while the dancers changed costumes, Fred performed a dazzling tacit showstopper, later excerpted, and renamed Cadenza—his first tap dance solo since becoming a modern dancer! For the closing number to Glen Miller’s big band Sunny Side of the Steet, Fred’s nine backup dancers wore black lacquered cotton high-waisted pants with copper satin tuxedo stripes, and black polished cotton shirts, sleeves rolled above the elbows, covered with a checkerboard of copper-colored extra-large square art-deco metallic paillettes—and on the dancers’ feet translucent copper-colored jellies, an extruded plastic sandal shoe that was new to the market!

Veil/Interface (1987) for seven solo dancers and a chorus of thirteen dancers was built from a graphic score we collaborated to create. The scroll measured 12” high and 60” long displaying 13 color-coded tracks—whispering and talking against music collages blending stereo sources in the hall with portable “blasters” on stage playing cassettes that were continuously walked in, placed, and later picked up by dancers making crossovers. Costumes were designed by Verité, my stage name for when garments were gathered from the dancers’ wardrobe, or thrift stores, including some pieces of uniforms of all sorts. Slide projections and light patterns from gobos activated the vertical space.

Los Angeles

Coming of age professionally when East Coast modern dance was mostly pre-occupied with the mundane movements of executing tasks—expunging all expressive gestures rooted in ballet, or any form of entertainment where virtuosity was valued—Fred rebelled, while relishing the new freedom to experiment. After an earth-shattering half-evening solo dance theater performance by powerhouse dancer Gary Bates, to music by Peter Maxwell Davies conducted by Arnold Schoenberg’s assistant Leonard Stein, and art directed by me for Monday Evening Concerts—attended by the entire LA dance scene—Fred initiated the five-member dancer/choreographer cooperative Eyes Wide Open Dance Theater. He later thought of its as simultaneous apprenticeships. I served as music director, designer, de-facto manager, on few occasions as a dancer, and notably as the narrator of Proximity, an evening length dance drama I wrote, designed, and directed in 1979. In the piece, Fred was The Protagonist and Gary was The Deceased. Their relationship was explored with flashbacks and dream sequences.

Exactly one month after President Nixon’s resignation, EWO made its debut Sunday September 8, 1974, in the atrium lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. To inaugurate the Rug Concerts, so-named by Ernest Fleischmann, general manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, we performed on a parquet dance floor laid over the luxe carpet and beneath the grand chandeliers. The audience sat on the carpet, with cushions, or stood. Some watched from the balcony above. Our grand entrance was made sliding down the staircase banisters in costumes that embodied the name of the opening piece Tarzan Sprites. Fred choreographed a cheerleading routine with gigantic variegated black and yellow crepe paper pom pons. Gently mocking the national disgrace, Stars & Stripes Forever by Sousa arranged for 16 pianos by Louis Moreau Gottschalk provided the deliciously over-the-top accompaniment. In a mash up of an animated TV show The Flintstones and the very serious ballet Les Sylphides Fred, Gary, and I wearing dagged faux leopard shorts with a leopard drape, ballet style, while the women Katherine Howard (then Kathe Copperman), Melanie Snyder, and Teresa Dvoracek (then Andersen) wore spinach-colored puckered sateen tube tops (common at dance school recitals) with dagged faux leopard miniskirts and buckram sylph wings at their backs. We all wore hand-painted leopard spot sneakers. Sadly, the astonishing Columbia Masterworks LP of this thrilling music was never digitized and remans inaccessible.

A bank of borrowed televisions sets strung across the dance floor against the towering screened windows were each de-turned to the random background electromagnetic noise known as “snow.” The loudspeakers emitted a recording of the “Snow Scene” from the Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky. This ironic nod to the emerging world of video art provided cover for our costume changes—in changing booths below at the plaza level. In the center of the program was a double collaboration. For Sunday Best, Fred read my droll fashion copy describing my series of quick changes—with me ascending from the booth below. Then, changing places, I read the aforementioned LA Stories while Fred vigorously danced. The concert ended with Phrasing fashioned from four phrases made that summer by the individual dancers in separate UCLA studios, shaped by Melanie Snyder and performed to dazzling 15^th century onomatopoetic vocal music: The Song of the Birds by Clement Janequin. Other EWO composers included Charles Ives’ The Pond and At Sea for Near Dusk, a lyrical duo Fred danced and choreographed, and Françoise Couperin’s harpsichord masterpiece Les Barricades Mistérieuses for a beguiling amalgam of social dances named Trellis fashioned by the company.

Jazz standards and improvisation became a large part of Fred’s musical diet once he co-founded the Jazz Tap Ensemble (JTE) in January of 1979. The group emerged from an unprecedented all-tap dance concert called Riffs presented in Venice at Pacific Motion Dance Studio, the home of Eyes Wide Open—which also functioned as an alternative performance space that presented 30 concerts in two years. Popeye, the Robert Altman film, and Twyla Tharp Dance held auditions there, and I produced the American debut of the Bharata Natyam master Medha Yodh, dancing inside a 12-foot circle of large pungent marigolds. Riffs was such a resounding success that a company of jazz tap percussionists quickly formed the first touring dance company of its kind.

At Large

At age 35 Fred was joined by the soulful Lynn Dally and elfin Camden Richman. Their founding drummer Keith Terry, who soon founded Crosspulse, enriched the rhythm banquet with body music and Asian instruments. Tom Dannenberg brought a jazz-rock sensibility with his electric bass, and pianist/arranger Paul Arslanian grounded the group with his experience playing for silent movies. Due to the then-emerging tap Renaissance fostered by a cadre of powerful East Coast women, JTE was networked to a cavalcade of Black tap dance legends—including the great Charles “Honi” Coles, Buster Brown, Cookie Cooke, Eddie Brown, Jimmy Slyde, Sandman Sims, Foster Johnston, and more. Many became guest artists appearing wherever JTE went. Cholly Atkins of the Coles & Atkins dance team dubbed Fred “Professor” and assured young students studying on tour stops of JTE that they were at the “University.” A commanding New York agent Sheldon Soffer was secured.

The sextet was a sensation at Theatre de la Ville in Paris, Maison de la Danse in Lyons, London, Joyce Theater in Manhattan, Herbst Theater in San Francisco, Jacob’s Pillow in the Berkshires, as well as Charleston’s Spoleto USA, Chicago, Honolulu, and the first “Arts in America” tour of Southeast Asia sponsored by the U.S. State Department. At The Kennedy Center October 18, 1984, with Linda Sohl-Ellison replacing Richman, the reception was described by the Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Alan Kriegsman excerpted here:

“The explosively enthusiastic welcome received by the Jazz Tap Ensemble at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater last night…was a sign of a powerful new constituency in the dance world. It’s not just the hard core tap addicts, who spend every free hour honing their own skills, and have been preaching the tap gospel for more than a decade. These people show up at the drop of a heel and were no doubt on hand in numbers last night. But the size and combustibility of the house also proved that devotion to tap has grown prodigiously among the general audience as well—it’s an encouraging sign for the future of an art recently thought to be on the verge of extinction. The troupe has been in Washington before. In 1982, they gave a dazzling series of performances in the Smithsonian’s “American Dance Experience” series with Charles (Honi) Coles as guest artist…Strickler showed his blistering virtuosity and showmanship with two solos—“Excursions” to piano music of Samuel Barber, climaxed by a stunning dynamic crescendo, and the overlong but electric, neo-flamenco “Tone Poem” which starts and ends with the dancer seated on a stool, feet chattering like a thousand woodpeckers. He was also splendidly paired with Dally in the red-hot “Jordu”, a tour de force of challenge dance. Sohl [-Ellison]’s finest moments came in a scintillating, volatile solo by Eddie Brown, a highly reputed San Francisco dancer who taught both [her] and Richman. As a finale the troupe served up “Jam With Honi”, a sunny, all-stops-out marathon that’s become something of a signature number for the Jazz Tap Ensemble. The roof shook with cheers.”

Soon Fred’s fancy footwork came to the attention of Morton Gould, the dean of American music, who registered Fred’s name with his publisher—and Gould’s long-neglected Tap Dance Concerto was revived. At a conference of the American Symphony Orchestra League, Gould arranged for Fred to a perform a piano reduction of the score for the Conductors Guild with Maurice Peress conducting. Orchestras often asked for a companion, so Fred obliged with Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony, seen excerpted in the PBS production Tap Dance In America with host Gregory Hines, who recognized Fred’s experimental leadership. Wearing a white silk suit, he beguiled the studio audience performing Simple Symphony by Benjamin Britten with a live string orchestra. Strickler’s elegant arms and torso caress the music while his percussive feet trace an entirely new rhythmic overlay.

Fred listened to coloratura singing as would a vampire receiving a fresh transfusion. The sound seemed drawn into his blood. He adored the clarity and technical aplomb of soprano Joan Sutherland, especially in Rossini—likewise, the virtuosic pianism required by the American creole pioneer musician Louis Moreau Gottschalk, ragtime master Scott Joplin, and Joplin’s innovative disciple William Albright inspired Fred to dance. He and I shared an abiding fondness for French music of all periods ranging from the knuckle-busting crunch of Messiaen’s landmark 1949-50 Four Rhythmic Etudes that Fred made into an astonishingly advanced solo, and Maurice Ravel’s suave Sonatine, a beautifully deft modern duo he partnered with ballerina Victoria Koenig.

Pianist Althea Waites, who had gained a reputation of working with dancers on the East Coast, accepted a position with the UCR music department in 1975. She was befriended by Christena Schlundt who introduced her to Fred. Their collaboration would flourish in the eighties, notably with the Barber “Excursions” at Jacob’s Pillow, which was well documented. The inevitable rightness of her interpretation of Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose”—composed for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth—with Fred’s poignant and unexpected flourishes, stood apart in their Ellington Suite.

Fred loved driving. He regularly made the 70-mile drive from Riverside to Santa Monica to attend Jacaranda concerts and was a generous supporter. He performed Steve Reich’s Clapping Music to inaugurate the concert series October 8, 2003—and many times afterward with different partners including his erstwhile collaborator, percussionist Ray McNamara. On July 15, the Orange County Tap Festival honored Fred posthumously with their 2025 Annual Legacy Award.

Ms. Sohl-Ellison, Mr. McNamara and Ms. Waites will each perform, and Ms. Dally will speak at a concert in Fred’s memory Sunday, August 24 at 2pm at the Downtown LA Colburn School’s intimate Zipper Hall. Fred’s last and potentially most enduring legacy is the online research site Dance History Project of Southern California. A Go Fund Me page has been established to support this concert and the Dance History Project in Fred’s honor.

Images courtesy of the Fred Strickler Archive to be housed at OSU.

If you are lucky, you have heard a piece of music that totally changed your life. After listening to a mind-blowing recorded performance of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection” at age 16, I became obsessed with it and with choral symphonies. My big final high school essay was “The History of the Choral Symphony from Beethoven to Mahler.” Although there were no readily available recordings back then, I read about Franz Liszt’s “Faust “ Symphony, and Felix Mendelsohn’s “Song of Praise” Symphony No. 2 at the library. I had long since devoured the Beethoven symphonies at my boyfriend RCA III’s house—in “Casa Blanca” Riverside’s barrio where music could be listened to loud—and was ready to move on. My essay was riddled with opinions and hardly a good piece of scholarship, but it made a big impression. The picture above is from my high school yearbook as secretary of publicity, rocking a “Good Vibrations” shirt with my portrait of Mahler.

As soon as RCA III got his driver’s license, we hit the road in his brand new Chrysler—with the Thomas Guide in the glove box—to Wonderland Avenue in LA’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood where we became the youngest members of the Gustav Mahler Society. We attended the society’s Mahlerthons and met the composer’s daughter Anna Mahler, a sculptor.

It would be another several years until I started studying astrology with my best friend pianist and arranger Timothy Troy. Music was the way he taught me the art of interpreting an apparently infinite system of archetypes. Tim conveyed such arcane nuances through the purest time-based art form that a person can express themselves and share that world with another, music.

Moon Children

As we continue to explore the moon children of music, Mahler could be considered the quintessential Cancer composer—one of twelve composers at the center of my universe. Worth mentioning again, some sun sign natives tend to possess common facial characteristics. Bach’s forehead has that strong force field associated with the ram Aries. Terry Riley exemplifies the “moon face” of Cancer, while Mahler’s face embodies Cancer’s “crab claw”. The sign’s ruler—the moon—rotates in a perpetual cycle of renewal. Each month she disappears into darkness only to grow to full luminescence. The tides are timed to the moon’s orbiting gravitational pull, so this cardinal water sign, with its heightened emotions, is strongly associated with the ocean, and feminine energy. Like all cardinal signs, Mahler had the ability to make sharp turns, engage with people, changing their life and the lives of others, as is borne out by his biography. Crabs are happiest relaxing by the water.

The mythology associated with the crab cast it as an antagonist in one of the labors of Hercules. The giant crab Karkinos (Carcinos, root of carcinoma) would have been merely collateral damage in a hero’s battle with the Hydra had not Hera intervened. She was the jealous wife of Jove, father of Hercules whose mother was a mortal. In spite, Hera immortalized the witnessing crustacean by casting it into the sky to become a constellation. The technical word for such transformation is catasterism.

So, is there anything to glean about cancer from this story? The whirlpool of emotions around Hercules having to atone for killing his entire family due to a madness instilled in him by a vengeful stepmother may resonate with a moon-child’s soap opera taste for emotion-centered drama, but the hapless crab remained a bystander. Not so much to read here.

The domain of Cancer is the family unit and home, tragically so for Mahler. While child mortality was higher in the late 19th century than subsequent eras, the coffin was too familiar in the Mahler household. Of his thirteen siblings eight died including the suicide of his musically talented 21 year-old brother Otto, when Gustav was 35. Growing up as a German-speaking Jew in Catholic-dominated Czech-speaking Bohemia, Mahler was always an outsider—and haunted by mortality. His daughter would succumb to scarlet fever two years after the premiere of his song cycle about dead children—to the mortification of his wife Alma, made superstitious by grief.

The ”Resurrection” premiered in 1895. The 20-minute first movement “Totenfeier” (Funeral Rites) was written when Mahler was 28-years-old. The harsh opening tension of agitated strings feels like being thrust into a shocking world more action-adventure than the Germanic order of Beethoven or Brahms. A difficult and demanding conductor Hans von Bülow was the first to hear Mahler play the movement on the piano. Stunned, he said it made Wagner’s revolutionary opera Tristan und Isolde sound like a symphony by “Papa” Haydn. The conductor’s funeral in 1894 ignited the symphony’s choral finale with a hymn setting of an ode to resurrection written by a poet and contemporary of Haydn that captured Mahler’s imagination. In need of a peaceful retreat, that year Mahler built a one-room composing cottage next to a lake in Upper Austria. There the composer could process his grief over the loss of his brother and brood over the setback a powerful advocate gone from the world. He listened deeply to the sounds of the water and was known to talk to the lake.

For obvious reasons Mahler was attracted to the Catholic church’s central doctrine of resurrection. He was also navigating the treacherous cultural politics of Vienna as a Jew from Bohemia with megalomaniacal ambitions. The Second Symphony, with its vivid emotions running through idyllic scenes of nature derived from songs that Mahler had already set, was as boldly extravagant as it was poignant and profoundly moving.

Obsession

There are many phenomenal recordings of the symphony, but I single out those conducted by Gilbert Kaplan, a Wall Street financier who raised the idea of musical obsession to an unparalleled level. This gateway drug, “Resurrection”, catalyzed his probing scholarship about the symphony and compelled him to conduct it. A Pisces born March 3, 1941, Kaplan followed the stereotype-busting tradition of the spiritually-minded dreamer making a huge fortune. But, also like many Pisces natives, his vision quest was all-consuming. The partnership of Pisces and Cancer is among the most powerful in the Zodiac.

In 1988, Kaplan hired the London Symphony after being extensively coached by Bernhard Haitink, heir to the tradition of Mahler-conducting dating back to Willem Mengelberg (1871-1951) at the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Kaplan then engaged the most authoritative vocal soloists, not exactly fresh sounding but with impeccable commitment and stature. The lavishly underwritten MCA boxed-set includes a full score in miniature, and a thick booklet brimming with letters, images, and notes—along with piano roll recordings and historic audio remembrances. The set was even more handsomely reissued as The Kaplan Mahler Edition on Conifer Classics. No one had ever pulled off a “vanity project” with such impossibly high standards and amazing results. CD sales went absolutely bonkers making Kaplan’s the best-selling Mahler recording in history by far. The New York Times named it “Record of the Year.” A weighty and glamorous black and white coffee table book published by Abrams came next. Eventually Kaplan conducted more than sixty orchestras worldwide and gave over 100 performances of the “Resurrection” always waiving any fee. He patiently taught the uninitiated Beijing Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1977, how to perform Mahler by overcoming all communication barriers in just ten rehearsals.

Kaplan next partnered with DGG. He had learned so much from confidently walking through the many doors his money opened, that a prestigious second “Resurrection” recording with the Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus followed in 2003. His interpretation and the meticulous scholarship underpinning his understanding of the score had evolved. Kaplan died of cancer in 2016. For reasons that cannot adequately be explained, the screenplay for the 2022 movie Tár pits a talentless wannabe conductor named Gilbert Kaplan against the conflicted protagonist Lydia Tár, played by Kate Blanchett. The real Gilbert Kaplan could not have been more dedicated to Mahler. He also possessed talents that transcended boundaries. Kaplan was the Johnny Appleseed of Mahler symphonies who left behind a foundation to continue his good works.

The Mahler symphonies, once deplored by critics as over-long, bombastic, and vulgar, now dominate the symphonic repertoire in the world’s concert halls. Mahler’s “Resurrection” is among the top five favorite symphonies of conductors polled by BBC Magazine. His symphonies are mostly the length of a film and provide a thrill ride that fills an evening with an inevitable climax. His boundary-crossing popularity speaks powerfully to the human condition. Mikhail Gorbachev, Former President of the Soviet Union, described the experience of listening to Mahler’s Second Symphony for the first time as “shattering.”

The composer takes the notion of yearning for home to a near cosmic level while giving it a nationalist texture that overlays on the experience of most everyone culturally attuned to the symphonic argument. That texture is deeply rooted in old Germanic folktales and infused with the loneliness of the Jewish experience. Mahler’s first four symphonies have in common song texts set for piano and then orchestrated as Das Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). In 2006 Jacaranda set forth to create a subset of the thirteen songs, a cycle Six Songs from the Wunderhorn Symphonies, with piano accompaniment transcribed for the bass-baritone Dean Elzinga, who is gifted with a remarkably flexible tone.

From our Jacaranda Legacy Recording, most effective among the songs is a text setting of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Urlicht“ (Primal Light) for mezzo-soprano as the fourth movement of Mahler’s massive six-movement Third Symphony. The movement was originally subtitled “What Man Tells Me.” Pure poetry. Listen to pianist Mark Robson accompany Mr. Elzinga:

As I write, the Jacaranda trees are in full bloom across Los Angeles. It was late May in 2003 that the Santa Monica-based concert series was named Jacaranda Music. The intense color of the trees is usually described as lavender, but remembering my favorite children’s book Uncle Wiggly, the color occurs to me as “sky blue pink.” Terry Riley’s 1964 masterpiece In C closed our inaugural concert October 8, 2003. Back then, In C was annually performed at the California Institute of the Arts and informally elsewhere. Drawing from CalArts musicians, plus friends, Jacaranda’s performance may have been the first time in Los Angeles that In C was given a ticketed public-facing performance—and more than that, closing a then rare all-minimalist program with music by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who are also reaching toward their 90th birthdays! Critic Alan Rich responded, “the right music in the right place at the right time.”

Unlike previous AstroMusic editions, this month’s Substack is focused on the available recordings of In C with my recommendations, and samples of live unreleased Jacaranda performances including Riley’s very rare Olsen III, to be discussed further on. You can also check out June’s Patrick’s Picks: The Art of the Playlist (2.5 hours) to hear two complete performances of In C, two unusual excerpts, and some other Riley gems.

The time of Terry Riley’s birth in Colfax, California north of Sacramento, is unknown, so when casting Terry’s horoscope AI defaults to noon. All the planetary information is known, but his rising sign is missing, and so are the accurate house placements of the planets. This situation gives us a perfect opportunity to explain the relative importance of the twelve houses and what they signify. Terry’s missing rising sign would be at the horizon on the left side of the wheel divided into twelve slices numbered clockwise starting there at nine o’clock. Like the advancing twelve signs, the houses contain traits and concerns evolving from the basic self to the family, community, society, and beyond. The planets in these twelve contexts are often likened to actors lighting up any of twelve stages they encounter from 99-seats to global media platforms. Tellingly, some houses may be devoid of a planet altogether!

Here is a laser version of the house progression: 1. Self, body, identity, and approach to living; 2. Values, habits, customs, money, jobs, possessions and work; 3. Thinking, communication, siblings, local matters, sharing and social activity; 4. Home, family, ancestry, foundations, feminine energy, and emotions; 5. Outward self-expression, romance, drama, play, and creativity; 6. Health, fitness, pets, systems, organization, and service to others; 7. Sense of fairness, balance, relationships, contracts, fashion and style; 8. Sex, intimacy, mystery, transformation, inheritance, taboos, death, and legacy; 9. Higher education, travel, philosophy, ethics, cross-cultural relations, pomp, and religion; 10. Status, reputation, long-term goals, masculine energy, business operations, expertise, politics, and fame; 11. Technology, futurism, hopes, wishes, social awareness, and humanitarianism; 12. The subconscious, healing, limiting beliefs, closure, old age, the collective, spirituality, secrets, and karma. The initial six are understood as the personal houses, the latter six as the interpersonal houses.

Cancer is ruled by the moon, and Terry’s moon is in fiery Aries. Water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, & Pisces) comprise 40% of his chart, fire signs (Aries, Leo, & Sagittarius) make up 30%, air signs (Gemini, Libra, & Aquarius) are 22.5%, and earth signs (Taurus, Virgo, & Capricorn) only 6.5%. Terry’s emotional sophistication is driven by a sense of adventure, social engagement, and egalitarianism without much concern for material wealth and possessions, hierarchies, or pragmatics. He possesses a stable balance of behavioral modes: 47% Cardinal (engaged, interactive, open), 28% Fixed (bold, stubborn, self-centered) and 25% Mutable (flexible, altruistic, reflective).

Nearing age 90, it is safe to say that the composer has earned the appellation of Guru. His 1964 masterpiece In C is universally credited with launching the so-called minimalist movement in music, going broadly public in 1968 with a best-selling LP. The crab can exist comfortably in the underwater realm of the emotions or navigate up the shore to the glare of material terrain. Cancer individuals can effortlessly read the energies in a room, a skill which is built into the very architecture of In C and is why it endures as his masterpiece. For a world that is losing its ability to listen, In C is a ready antidote.

In C’s ultra-egalitarian score—any sized ensemble playing any available instruments for as long as the group wants—only a single page specifies 53 motives to be played in order while overlapping freely and interpreted spontaneously for a span usually lasting 40-70 minutes with no apparent conductor.

There are nine distinctly different recordings readily available including the original 1968 Columbia Records [Sony] LP created by the SUNY Buffalo Center of the Creative and Performing Arts led by Terry Riley playing saxophone with ten others. That brisk 43-minute classic became a sensation helping to create the genre of crossover album as a bestseller while sustaining the 1967 cannabis-perfumed summer of love well into the seventies. A 25^th Anniversary concert was recorded January 14,1990 with 31 players including Terry, his son Gyan, the Kronos Quartet, and composer Evan Ziporyn led by Loren Rush and released in 1995. Two years later, performing live in Brussels, the 12-member ensemble of multi-instrument players, Ictus was joined by the four saxophones of the Blindman Kwartet released in 2000. Bang On A Can followed in 2001 with eleven all-star players introducing the pipa and electric guitar. Musicians from the European Music Project cooperated with an electronic overlay in 2002. Five years later a 55-minute version with twelve singers, Ars Nova, was directed by the early music specialist and ECM luminary Paul Hillier. The eight marimba players of Percurama Percussion Ensemble are joined by Gert Mortensen on vibraphone and Balinese gong. After this flurry of CD releases paused, in 2017 Brooklyn Raga Massive transformed In C with Carnatic, Hindustani and jazz traditions played and sung by eighteen musicians. Last year In C veteran and path-breaking cellist Maya Beiser, paid tribute with 55-minutes of the artist many times overdubbed. The newest release, by the 21-member Israel-based Castle in Time Orchestra directed by Matan Daskal, stretches the experience to 71 laid back minutes. Altogether I listened to 12 hours of In C, including repeats.

Today the always compelling original recording sounds bracingly fast while the new Castle in Time release sounds too leisurely indulging all manner of sound effects—natural, man-made and electronic, with a whiff of jazz, and a hint of disruptive pop sensibility. The 45-minute Bang on a Can All Stars CD gained rapid status as a classic by bringing serious chops, new music cred, and a taste of world music that sealed masterpiece status for In C—after the legendary 25^th Anniversary concert with the largest ensemble on record, running 76 minutes, often seemed wayward and diffused.

NOTE: Bang on a Can All Stars will celebrate Terry’s 90th birthday September 7, 2025, in the Ford Theater performing In C under the full moon! Absolutely don’t miss this enchanting one-night-only gathering—with the participation of guitarist and composer Gyan Riley under the stars.

The contemporary music rigor of European Music Project applied a sometimes ill-fitting veil of sonics with uneven results. More interesting by far is the “Indian In C” which produces ecstatic waves of richly colored sound, but often loses touch with Riley’s disarming simplicity. This problem is exacerbated by the monotony of Maya Beiser’s gorgeous overdubbed cello sound. No matter how exquisitely mixed and arrestingly her tones reverberate, Riley’s 53 mottos get lost.

That leaves the steadfast Belgian group Ictus with a saxophone quartet from 2000, and Amsterdam’s Ars Nova with a marimba sextet from 2007. Paul Hilliard’s enterprise was chosen because of the amazing promise this vocal group’s performance holds for future, perhaps for younger groups like Tonality or Room Full of Teeth. Imagine an orchestral compendium of vocal types, colors, cultures, and inflections! The wall of marimba sound more often insinuates than takes charge, and the Balinese gong emanates a primal physicality. There are moments that lack finesse, and the metallophones might be better if more varied, but the sheer humanity of this version invites repeated listening. It grows on you.

The live performance from Belgium gets everything right—Ictus held my rapt attention for 65 minutes. The brisk all-important pulse is ideal in pitch, pace, and centrality to the marvelously inspired playing around and through this north star beat. Terry’s saxophone has infused In C as an outsider to classical music, an insider to jazz, and a friendly personality in any kind of wind band. Here Blindman, a virtuosic quartet of sax players—soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone—insinuates like a harmonica or blasts like a pipe organ. Their interplay with four resourceful percussionists, oboe, clarinets, violin, cello harp, guitar, two double basses, piano, and accordion can be witty and anecdotal, or darkly portentous with a whirlwind of iterations in between. All is captured by superb sound engineering.

A likely contender, yet to be released, is Jacaranda’s 2006 live performance of In C in Santa Monica’s Barnum Hall—newly restored from earthquake damage. Riley’s great structured jam session climaxed a marathon of three concerts mingling music from North, Central and South America, as well as Cuba. What sets this fresh-sounding In C apart are the keen sensibilities of seasoned classical chamber music players, ever-attentive studio orchestra musicians, and a core group with a deep history of playing In C. In the mix were four percussionists including the distinctive sound of steel drums. By 2006 Jacaranda had absorbed LA’s first conductorless ensemble Mladi (Youth), named for a wind quintet by Leos Janáček. Piccolo, all manner of flutes, oboe, clarinets, bassoon, cello, joined with the large voluptuous sound of the late harpist Maria Casale. Robert Thies played the electric organ and Brian Head added a sitar patch to his MIDI electric guitar. Fourteen instrumentalists including six women spun Pan-American magic that now and then hinted at the perfume of Franco-Brazilian Impressionism, or the spliff-scented atmosphere of the Caribbean. Here is a sample.

When the classic recording of In C became a worldwide sensation, Swedish Radio commissioned a youth-oriented vocal and instrumental piece from Riley, a sequel if you will—to be premiered with a live broadcast. For reasons that are still not clear, the piece was titled Olsen III. Unlike the lithe and transparent In C, its companion turned out to be much louder, denser, and while hypnotic, demanded more attention and patience from the live audience to navigate all of its layers—and it lasted 53 minutes! The live audience grew increasingly hostile, and the radio audience had to contend with the audio limitations of sixties radio. An aircheck circulated on the internet until it was remastered in 1998, and now Olsen III has made it to Spotify. While a lot of the loud heckling and door banging on either side of the house has been minimized, the sound is harsh, and the performers struggle to keep focused on their intonation in riot-like circumstances. Their energy flags, only to rally for a determined finish. With a quick fade-out enthusiastic cheers contend with children screaming, catcalls, the sound of stadium horns, and mean-spirited booing.

The so-called riot after Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is now understood to have been quite overstated and was likely organized. While Olsen III is no masterpiece, we listened though the genuinely riotous aircheck in 2011 to what optimal conditions might be created to give Olsen III its due—for our admirably game audience. In 2012 Jacaranda gave Olsen III its U.S. premiere and made a well-engineered archival recording.

We hired the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, with whom we had done excerpts from Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass. They were joined by the short-lived Jacaranda Youth Chamber Orchestra, who had participated in the massive U.S. premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Song of the Deported and in Sinfonia India by Carlos Chavez. With Olsen III’s flexible form reduced to 27 minutes and paired with Lou Harrison’s Suite for Violin and Strings, the concert made an enormous impression. Here is a sample of In C’s little known companion, Olsen III.

The Story of Ferdinand, a children’s book, became wildly popular months after the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. Never out of print since, the book was the #1 bestseller in 1938 surpassing even Gone With the Wind. The story by Munro Leaf illustrated by Robert Lawson was loosely based on Civilón, an actual bull in Ronda, where Spain’s oldest bullfighting ring still operates.

As it happened, Civilón would not be provoked to charge a red flag, preferring to placidly smell the flowers. The Spanish press secured a pardon for the popular bull, but Civilón was slaughtered anyway by Franco’s fascists at the war’s onset—news eclipsed by screaming headlines. The popular tale of flower-powered non-violence was considered subversive on several fronts. Life magazine noted that various critics saw the book as promoting fascism or passivism or the sit-down strike—among the feisty labor movement’s preferred tactics. The Cleveland Plain Dealer denounced The Story of Ferdinand for corrupting American youth. Adolf Hitler, while claiming it was degenerate propaganda, ordered the book burned. Admired by Thomas Mann, Gandhi, and the Roosevelts, 30,000 copies of The Story of Ferdinand were rushed to the children of Germany after WWII ended in 1945.

What does this controversial children’s fable tell us about the power of Taurus? What can we learn from astrology about a haul of famous Taurean composers: Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, and Satie? Why select from such an impressive group the unassuming figure of Eric Satie for special attention?

Taurus is among the sky’s most dazzling constellations made up of the super-brilliant stars Aldebaran and Elnath with two glittering star clusters. In Greek mythology Taurus is lusty Zeus disguised as the great white bull who abducts the Phoenician maiden Europa in one of his extramarital escapades. Aldebaran’s red glow marks the bull’s eye. Elnath defines the uppermost horn’s point. The bull is often depicted with its front legs folded to allow the enchanted Europa to festoon his horns with flower garlands and to invite her to climb his back, whereupon he gallops away like the wind. The face of Taurus is the Hyades, a star cluster associated with spring rain. Not far away is a companion cluster of “seven sisters” called the Pleiades defining the hairy arc of his shoulders. Six of these sisters married gods prompting more mythic dramas for each, while the faintest star Merope married a mortal—Sisyphus forever rolling a stone uphill.

Taurus is a fixed sign ruled by Venus, goddess of love and beauty. Natives may sometimes be dismissed as lazy but are actually quite diligent with high standards and a good work ethic. Standing its ground with earthbound contentment in a state of wonder for the natural world, Taurus is practically a music-making machine. Courtney O’Reilly in Astrology (Taschen, 2020) tells us “…Taurus rules the throat, vocal cords, and thyroid as well as the ears. Taureans are sensitive to sound—as a sign ruled by Venus, they have a refined ear for music and often have quite skilled vocal abilities. They adore the arts…”.

Most Taurus singers wade in the water of popular culture like sacred bulls in the Ganges, sometimes crossing over into classical and other music genres—e.g., Adele, tenor Andrea Bocelli, Cher, Kelly Clarkson, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, Enrique Iglesias, Janet Jackson, Billy Joel, Lizzo, Patti LuPone, Willie Nelson, soprano Birgit Nilsson, Luther Vandross, and Stevie Wonder. Of this group, Ella Fitzgerald & Barbra Streisand can be thought of as paradigmatic.

Perhaps our quartet of Taurus composers can give us more creative fodder for following personality traits in their musical output. The solidly reliable and generally unsurprising craftmanship of Johannes Brahms with his stolid comfort food orchestration reaches transcendent heights of Taurean humanity in the composer’s choral music. The profoundly sustained ardor of “Then all flesh is as the grass” from A German Requiem stands out, as does the ravishing Song of Destiny, another burnished choral work with orchestra. Tobias Brommann, Choral director at Berlin Cathedral offers, “Like no other composer, Brahms mastered what in jazz is called ‘voicing’, with his feel for tessitura of the choral parts and his skill in combining these to create a marvelous sound texture.” He cites the sustained vocal demands and technical challenges, as well as the deep rewards as reasons for why singers especially love performing this repertoire. Here the Brahms orchestration with choral tapestries becomes a force of nature.

Our two Russian composers dominate the world of ballet. Taurus is wholly conversant with and can dramatize with conflict the appetites of life—food, pleasure, and sleep. The three-act story ballets of Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev have no equals in the repertoire. Tchaikovsky liberated the ravenous passion of Taurus with his fantasy ballets Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty, drenched in observation of nature and the human condition, while Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliette and Cinderella surround smoldering love—real and imagined—with earthbound intrigue, political avarice, and trivial domestic machinations. Better than plays or opera, with ballet these far-sighted composers patterned the cinematic experience sustained over several hours with vivid details and grand gestures underscored by soaring melodies, repeated motives, clues, codes, messages, subliminal sounds, and importantly—kinetic rhythms. Taurus is able to create entire worlds, while sitting in his pasture smelling the flowers.

Given all of this large scale Romantic expression (not to mention seventeen symphonies and a dozen-or-so concertos among this trio), even some astrologers are ill-equipped to understand how the modest and eccentric Eric Satie embodies his sign. He challenges our observational skills. We must always remember that the personality tells us about the sign, then collectively over time the sign tells us about the personality.

Since recorded music became ubiquitous in the 1950s with the advent of the LP, the general public knows Satie mostly in the serene orchestrations that fanboy Claude Debussy made of the 1888-95 piano work Trois Gymnopédies to help the struggling composer earn royalties. This musical marriage is not ironic or impressionistic. It is certainly French but with the distant air of ancient Greece. Instead, the music seems to inhabit a world apart—timeless, placid, suffused by the light of morning, midday, or twilight—a sad sunlit saraband played with gravity.

Today the popularity of Trois Gymnopédies has only increased with an arrangement for cello and orchestra receiving 75,375,000+ plays on Spotify! Nothing else composed by Satie broadly resonates, as he remained stubbornly experimental, yet his ideas broke ground and exerted influence. The one-act absurdist ballet Parade paired him with Cocteau and Picasso giving high-profile focus to the anti-Romantic ideas of the Dada movement while yielding a score replete with typewriter that can best be described as a collage. His “Furniture Music” intended to be largely ignored by the listener ultimately gave birth to Ambient Music, a well-established genre.

Perhaps his most radical music composed in 1893 was Vexations, less than a page of keyboard music to be performed 840 times:

Unpublished and never performed in his lifetime, this page mystique was discovered, as the story goes, on the floor of Satie’s undisturbed apartment by John Cage in 1949. Cage was in Paris at the behest of his friend Pierre Boulez (a quintessential Aries, born March 26, 1925), who had arranged a musical exchange. Cage’s nineteen-movement Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano lasting about eighty minutes was performed for Boulez’s mentor Olivier Messiaen, who reciprocated with a performance (presumably by his other mentee pianist Yvonne Loriod) of Vingt Regards sur l’enfant Jesus, in twenty movements, lasting nearly two hours.

Cage published Vexations in 1949 and arranged for its somewhat truncated premiere in 1963 lasting 18 hours. To celebrate Cage 100, the composer’s centenary in 2012, Jacaranda Music engaged 36 pianists to each perform 23 repetitions, with twelve pianists adding one more to reach 840. The pianists were: Adam Tendler, Scott Dunn, Aron Kallay, Mark Robson, Susan Svrček, Yevgeniy Milyavskiy, Richard Valitutto, Bryan Pezzone, Emi Tamura, Hojoon Kim, Hannah Hudson, Wendy Tahara, Veronika Krausas, Melissa Alcazar, Tali Tadmor, Ingrid Lee, Ming Tsu, Helane Anderson, Mark Menzies, Matthew Lucas, Twyla Meyer, Joanne Pearce Martin, Gavin Martin, Antoinette Perry, Vicki Ray, Isaac Shankler, Dzovig Markarian, Genevieve Feiwen Lee, Markus Pawlik, Christoph Bull, Steven Vanhauwaert, and Mark Alan Hilt.

This unprecedented continuous performance lasted over 24 hours in Santa Monica’s Miles Playhouse. Performed by Aron Kallay around 8:30 pm, the sample of the concert below lasts 4’33” (a nod to Cage’s most notorious composition). The sounds of the audience coming and going can be listened to as music.

Vexations was composed the same year that Satie’s only romantic liaison ended after five months. He proposed marriage after the first passionate night of lovemaking, but the independent-minded painter Suzanne Valadon, who had moved next door, declined leaving Satie devastated. A somewhat cropped version of her c. 1892 portrait of him can be seen at the heading. Any correlation to this life-changing rejection is pure speculation, but Satie was known to liberally consume alcohol, and died at age 59 of cirrhosis of the liver.

Although impeccably dressed in a series of uniforms, starting with seven identical smoky gray velvet suits, Satie lived alone in abject squalor. He was affectionate with groups of friends but would eventually dismiss them without explanation. Satie’s break with Ravel was so resolute Ravel refused to attend his former friend’s funeral. To add further complexity to his profile, Satie made a living writing for many publications including Vanity Fair using 25 pen names including that of a woman.

Here is a case where only deeper examination of Satie’s whole chart can divine what his earthy sun sign tells us. An AI-generated reading online of his chart draws attention to the dominance of fire and the extreme sensitivity of his moon in Cancer. This potentially revolutionary new tool demands careful attention.

Also, to my knowledge, astrology has yet to reconcile the latest thinking in psychology with birth chart information, but it’s not difficult to conclude, as they say, that Eric Satie was likely on the “spectrum.”

When you are twenty-years-old and bursting with awareness of your own destiny, the chance to learn from the world’s most important role model is irresistible. Such was Johann Sebastian Bach’s compulsion to connect with Dietrich Hansen Buxtehude, then Germany’s leading organist and composer. The ostensible reason for the visit was to hear an ambitious pair of cantatas (now lost) that the Danish-born master composed in honor of the late King of Germany Leopold I, and the crowning of his elder son Joseph I.

Bach’s first church job in Arnstadt provided him barely enough money on which to live. Transportation north to the border near Denmark was a non-starter. Two years into the job, his request for a one-month sabbatical shocked the town council while giving them no room to meaningfully object. Further, Bach offered them a one month return date that in his mind was never binding—despite the important Advent and Christmas services ahead in December. No matter that it was October and Lübeck the Imperial “city of seven towers” was nearly 270 miles away. Undaunted, this ambitious Aries had the fire in his belly and his bones walking for ten days in the deepening winter of 1705. He hiked on Germany’s Old Salt Route used for trade since medieval times.

Bach stayed with the master for nearly four months studying and performing. The walk back to Arnstadt, now burdened by full satchels of handmade copies of Buxtehude’s manuscripts, returned just in time for Ash Wednesday, February 17. Buxtehude’s unique autonomy as a church musician had already become the career model for Aries Georg Philipp Telemann and Pisces George Frideric Handel visiting him in 1703. Bach’s visit and his dedicated productivity as a copyist preserved Buxtehude’s music for posterity. Soon to be twenty-one, Bach now possessed all the skills and historical knowledge needed as a career composer to establish the foundation of Western music—as unlikely as that goal must have occurred to him.

His mentor’s death in 1707 coincided with Bach’s departure from the Arnstadt church he found so limiting. His big personality and unapologetic nature racked up too many offenses to stay. The elders and congregation were not pleased by the “strange sounds” and protracted length of his new music. Jealous of his time, Bach refused to train children entering the boys’ choir. Adding offenses to his failure to apologize for the long absence in 1706, was the organ loft courtship of Maria Barbara, his second cousin and future wife. Bach’s choice of advancement at any cost personified the force of nature that is Aries.

Aries, the infant of the Zodiac, boldly declares, “I AM! Pay attention to me.” Aries individuals are self-confident, often blunt, but the cardinal nature of this fire sign requires engagement with other people. They can be courageous and energetic, but to the point of ruthlessness when badly aspected in the chart. Astrologer Timothy Troy claimed to perceive a “force field” emanating from the foreheads of many Aries natives—he counselled me to beware of butting up with the ram as they are ruled by aggressive Mars.

By the Gregorian calendar, established 1700 in Protestant Germany, Bach was born March 31, 1685. However, the old Julian calendar recorded his birth as March 21 on the cusp of Pisces. The change actually happened in 1582, by dictate of the Catholic church, because inaccuracies in the Julian calendar had caused the spring equinox to drift by an accumulated ten days. The length of days was adjusted, and leap years were established. Most important for the church, the date of Easter is calculated from the spring equinox. Easter is the first Sunday after the full moon following the equinox. The Zodiac wheel begins with the Spring Equinox, thus the position of the Sun in Aries is exalted. Each planet is exalted in the sign with which its energy resonates most. Let’s take a moment here to clarify some common and vague conversations about being “born on the cusp.”

Given that a horoscope is calculated from the most precise birth time available, it is extremely rare to be born on the exact minute of this transition—it’s one side or the other. Furthermore, the inner planets—Mercury, Venus, (between Earth and the Sun) and sometimes nearby Mars—are often likely to array in ways near the sun sign that can tip the behavioral balance in favor of one sign or the other. However, the proof of the question is simpler still when observing the native’s evident characteristics. I offer that Bach hardly resembles a Pisces at all and quite plainly personifies Aries despite both his Mercury (in detriment and in fall) and Venus (exalted) occurring in the spiritually cumulative sign of Pisces. In fact, Bach is the ultimate Aries.

Bach is believed to have Aries rising thereby outwardly reinforcing his Aries Sun self. His Moon hovers near innovative Aquarius, a sign associated with intellect despite contentions that the moon is in a very late degree of Pisces. Importantly Bach’s action-oriented Mars is clearly in the fire sign Sagittarius, forecasting the expansive public nature of his work and the grandeur associated with liturgical celebration [e.g., Beethoven and Messiaen, see December]. Bach humbly signed his work “SDG” for Soli Deo Gloria, glory to God alone.

The mythology of Aries arises from Chrysomallos, the tireless winged ram with golden fleece, who saved Phrixus, son of the goddess Nephele, from a murderous intermarital vendetta. Riding between the wings on the animal’s back, the young Phrixus was carried from Thebes across the known world to Colchis and the safety of King Aeétus. Longing to possess Chrysomallos, the ruler offers Phrixus his daughter in marriage. According to Philip Wilkinson (Myths & Legends, DK, 2019), Phrixus instead sacrifices the winged ram to Ares (Mars), the god of war. The priests of Ares hang its golden fleece from the branches of a sacred tree in a great garden protected by a sleepless dragon. Thus, the backstory is set for Jason, the Argonauts, and their epic journey.

Bach’s ambition took him from Arnstadt to Mühlhausen for one year, then to the court of Duke Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar where he remained as organist and concertmaster until 1717—composing mostly cantatas and organ music. Bach then took a better position as Kapellmeister (music director) at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen where he was able to focus on composing instrumental music such as concertos, orchestral suites, and sonatas until 1723. But, his waning years in that court were unsettled. After 14 years of marriage, Maria Barbara suddenly died in 1720; the following year Bach married Anna Magdalena.

Bach’s final job as St. Thomas Church’s Kapellmeister in Leipzig, was distinguished by an amazing stream of cantatas, masses, and oratorios that flowed until his death in 1750. But in reality, he took the job out of desperation. Bach ultimately fathered 20 children, only half of which survived to become adults. His first child was born in 1708, and his last in 1742. He would sire thirteen children with Anna Magdalena.

Leipzig was hardly a city where fashion was set, and Bach’s popularity had long been in decline. The church fathers were not very musically sophisticated, and their preferred candidates for the position refused the low salary offer. At age forty Bach was the city’s third choice to run both of its main churches; their new composer was more tolerated than appreciated. Even so, three new cantatas each month were expected, totaling some 300, of which about 200 survived! Elsewhere Bach’s ingenious counterpoint was falling out of style with a public enamored of brighter, lighter, and more emotionally volatile music.

Carl Philipp Emanuel, or CPE, his second surviving son and fifth child would eventually eclipse Bach as exemplar of the emerging new “sensitive” style. This Pisces boy was ten when his father’s Easter Oratorio first appeared as a birthday cantata composed for a friend in 1725. I contend that this unique work, so unlike the sprawling and popular Christmas Oratorio, or the great and portentous passions, had a formative effect on the budding composer.

The willfully challenging but utterly rewarding Easter Oratorio didn’t receive its Los Angeles premiere until April 16, 2022! In almost any other major city such a recent Bach premiere would likely be an obscure piece recently brought to the light of new scholarship. But this lively 40-minute masterwork has been languishing in plain sight since the LA Phil first performed Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1946, first introducing the master’s choral music to Angelenos almost 200 years after his death.

Bach was so fond of the oratorio, he revised it four times while in Leipzig. In 1727 he took charge of the secular ensemble Collegium musicum founded in 1701 by Telemann based at the large popular coffeehouse Café Zimmerman and employing upwards of sixty musicians. Since 1723, Bach had been drawing on the ensemble’s ample resources for his secular cantatas. Up until his death from a stroke after eye surgery that blinded him, Bach regularly adapted the oratorio’s original 1725 score and individual parts to the skills of available musical soloists—first in 1738, then over a three-year period 1743-46, and lastly in 1749 as his eyesight was failing.

The issue of changing fashion and CPE’s trendsetting talent may shed some light on the oddities of the Easter Oratorio at a time when many other of works were also being revised by his aging father. Bright sonorities, sprung rhythms, emotional contrasts, turbulence, and theatricality were valued by the “sensitive style.” Most of these characteristics can be found in this oratorio.

True to its origins as a cantata, elaborate choruses open and close the work following a scintillating instrumental sinfonia stylistically akin to the 1721 Brandenburg Concertos alive with carefree panache. Each of the vocal soloists is given spare texts and contrasting moods. The story of the empty tomb, the meeting on the roadway, and the resurrection resemble framed vignettes. The emotions are palpable and involving but stylized. Flutes (recorders), oboes, and trumpets—instruments favored by the “sensitive style”—are given prominence and high degrees of difficulty. The singers must bring intelligence and empathy to tap Bach’s elusive emotions in these scenes.

Why is the Easter Oratorio so little performed and how, for all these decades, could it have been completely overlooked in Los Angeles? Perhaps the virtuoso necessities of its vocal and instrumental soloists, chorus, and orchestra, were too daunting or too expensive to rehearse for such a compact work to be undertaken in Los Angeles. And what about companion music to fill out a program?

In Bach’s time many hours of music were performed at Eastertide. The Saint Matthew Passion can take more than four hours with an embedded sermon. The Saint John Passion, roughly half as long, was composed during Bach’s transition from Cöthen to Leipzig. The Easter Oratorio was first revised as a fast-paced companion to the lugubrious latter passion, which is now tainted by the anti-Semitism of its text reflecting the era in Germany.

Unlike the Christmas Oratorio, the work never developed an international performance tradition, yet the dazzling and fiery final chorus signaling the resurrection, excerpted here, should inspire audiences to demand Bach’s pivotal work to be performed more often. This 2022 Los Angeles premiere was performed by the Jacaranda Chamber Ensemble, vocal soloists, and members of the 2025 Grammy-nominated choral ensemble Tonality—under the direction of Jacaranda Music Director Mark Alan Hilt.

I regularly check popular astrology sites to find out what Google is telling people about classical composers and their music. Georg Predota wrote in 2021 for The Interlude, a prominent Hong Kong-based internet site: “…there is little that would identify Ravel as a Pisces…he almost certainly never had a relationship with a woman, or a man, for that matter...he was physically weak…and experienced anxiety, sadness and apathy…he really doesn’t fit the Pisces profile at all.” I share this writing as an acknowledgement of how myopically subjective astrologers can be, and in some cases, quite indefensibly wrong. From my lifelong experience in this space, as a Pisces, I find Ravel’s life and music sheds so much light on his birth sign as to be absolutely emblematic!

Maurice Ravel, a shy, jockey-sized bachelor whose social life centered around the ballet and opera, was overshadowed for much of the 20th century by composers considered greater than him: Claude Debussy, a Leo (fire), whose controversial opera Pelléas et Mélisande shattered conventions, and Gemini Igor Stravinsky (air), whose notorious ballet Sacre du Printemps turned the world upside down. In this century, thankfully, such imbalance is being set right. Today, Ravel has had a more pervasive impact on the whole of music (film scores, jazz, classical, and popular song genres) than either of these remarkable composers. His masterpieces in all forms, except the symphony, have been internationally embraced. Receiving posthumous recognition for ushering in change of a pervasive nature is too often the fate of sensitive complex visionaries such as the far-sighted Pisces.

Messy Mythology

An image of Pisces inscribed on the lid of an Egyptian coffin, dating back to 2300 B.C., is the earliest known representation of any Zodiac sign. The twelfth sign, Pisces is represented by two fish swimming in opposite directions connected by a cord signifying its dual nature. In ancient astrology, the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology interacted in complicated and messy ways regarding Pisces. Venus and Cupid transformed into sharks to escape Typhon—the Meg of sea monsters—or alternately, an egg (formed from the sperm of Zeus cast on the waves?) was rolled ashore by two fishes, brooded by doves, then Venus hatched from it in all her sensuous glory! The takeaway: Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, and her planetary position is “exalted” in Pisces. That is astrology-speak for the ultimate alignment of energy. Each planet is exalted when positioned within its most harmonious sign.

Another mythological beast is also associated with Pisces. To better warn all the gods about rampaging Typhon, Pan the randy goat-bottomed party-boy with horns, sprouts a fishy tail. You may recall the horse/man centaur Sagittarius from December. He was followed in January by goat/fish Capricorn. Aquarius, the human bearer of wisdom and energy of February, then passes the relay’s final baton to an Ichthyocentaur, called a Triton in March. Associated with seafoam, this three-part beast is a man with the front legs of a horse and the tail of a fish. I dwell here on such arcane morphology because it actually speaks to the mysterious, complex, and often misunderstood culminating power of Pisces before the cycle renews again in Aries.

My friend and mentor Timothy Troy explained to me fifty years ago that Pisces (my birthday is St. Patrick’s Day) “is like whale poo-poo on the bottom of the ocean.” This unflattering descriptor is actually quite profound. The great Levithan, dubbed a “marine ecosystems engineer” moves inexorably through the ocean with its mouth scooping up millions of tiny ultra-nutritious krill. This super-abundant and near-invisible crustacean is filtered, digested, and excreted. As Tim imagined, these great turds then become the anchors of the oceanic food chain that is ultimately crowned full circle by the whale. Science, however, describes the less solid spurts of whale excrement as rich in iron and nitrogen while capturing carbon. As a waxy particulate substance excreted by sperm whales (remember Zeus?), the effluvia never actually lands on the bottom of the sea but instead washes up on the shore as foamy ambergris (remember the Tritons?) only to become a key ingredient in perfume—the ultimate in alluring Venusian refinement!

To extrapolate, the evolved Pisces gathers terabytes of information through experience, watching, listening, feeling, sensing, as well as reading, and has a tremendous capacity to store it all in the native’s memory. It is not unusual for a Pisces to be highly creative in all fields, as well as clairvoyant. Such passive power to accumulate and refine requires abiding patience. Perhaps indicative of the sign’s oblique nature, the elegant constellation Pisces contains no prominent stars.

Ravel was born March 7, 1875. Of Basque and Swiss heritage, he was quickly transplanted from near the Spanish border to the center of Paris. A decided sympathy for Spanish music, and refined appreciation for painting was deep in the wine connoisseur’s DNA. As a teenager he reveled in the great orchestrator Rimsky-Korsakov’s Orientalized palette, but Ravel also inhaled authentic Javanese gamelan music at the 1889 Exhibition Universelle in Paris – a world’s fair that lasted six months and left behind the Eiffel Tower.

In 1889, the 14-year-old Ravel enrolled in the Paris Conservatoire where he would stay until 1895 and return again over a six-year period. He was expelled more than once during that span of fourteen years despite such early triumphs as Pavane pour infante defunté (Pavane for a Dead Princess) for solo piano published in 1900 by Durand, his lifelong source of income. While inspired by Las Meninas, the iconic 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez portraying the Spanish Infanta, and commissioned by Winaretta Singer, the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, Ravel’s choice of name had more to do with the prismatic poetry of how the French words sounded together. English speakers mostly can’t pronounce the words and are left with the decidedly unpoetic English translation. Consistent administrative bias against Ravel at the Conservatoire was exposed in a scandal that rocked Paris and resulted in the elevation of Ravel’s admirer Gabriele Faure, charged with major reorganization of the academy.

Ravel was closely associated with the Apaches, an all-male group of artists and intellectuals who saw themselves as hooligans and outcasts. The name was chosen by the Spanish pianist Ricardo Viñes, Ravel’s best friend since they were thirteen years old and (presumed by some) his first lover. Viñes, an Aquarius who noted apropos of his friend’s disposition, that Ravel craved “pickles, mustards, and spices of all kinds.” Viñes also introduced Ravel to the dark writings of Edgar Alan Poe and Aloysius Bertrand. The Apaches met on Saturday nights either in the studio of painter Paul Sordes, or poet Tristan Klingsor’s home. Debussy was an Apache too, so the group rallied around his 1902 opera and helped usher in Pelléas et Mélisande as a succès de scandale that lasted until 1914, when all the opera houses across Europe were shut down by World War I.

At age forty In 1915 Ravel eagerly enlisted in France’s Thirteen Artillery Regiment. Despite his short stature and proneness to infirmity, he drove trucks to deliver munitions under bombardment, and collect the dead helping to load corpses onto stretchers. During his period of selfless call to duty, Ravel endured frostbite, was hospitalized for amoebic dysentery, and suffered the deaths of friends and family members. He was not weak as a person, but certainly experienced sadness.

Purported Liaisons

Sometimes the Apaches met in the apartment of Maurice Delage, who would later travel to India and experiment with inserting extraneous objects into pianos decades before John Cage made such tinkering an artform. Delage and Stravinsky lived together at the time. They both shared a deep regard for Ravel’s music. Speculation was fanned in Robert Craft’s final book Stravinsky: Discoveries and Memories (Naxos Books, 2013) that Stravinsky, a fellow Apache, and Delage were involved in a love affair. Craft, who was Stravinsky’s amanuensis, biographer, and conductor, also waggishly confirmed a persistent story about Ravel and Stravinsky sharing a bed in 1913. Craft wrote, “People would laughingly ask: ‘How was it?’ to which his laughing answer was always, ‘You will have to ask Ravel.’” However fleetingly, Manuel De Falla has likewise been rumored to have been one of Ravel’s intimate partners, without any clear evidence.

Libra Ralph Vaughn Williams was Ravel’s student for three months 1907-08. He chronicled later that Ravel had patronized brothels. However, given the long oppressive shadow of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 libel trial, his imprisonment, and death in Paris in 1900, this moral paragon of Britishness may have wanted to give his teacher a protective cover story. Others cited two women he unsuccessfully courted, always self-conscious about his height—5 foot 2. Given Ravel’s shyness and his secret stash of gay pornography, these may also have been cover stories invented to guard his reputation. Among the Apache brotherhood, it was said Ravel entertained them en pointe dressed up as a ballerina in a tutu and bodice with falsies. All this being said, in public Ravel was always dignified and restrained.

After successive failed attempts to win the coveted Prix de Rome, Ravel’s graduation piece, the 1903 String Quartet, was so perfectly formed and technically advanced that it immediately drew excited comparisons to the Debussy quartet, written ten years earlier. The quartet’s 1904 premiere in Paris led to incessant newspaper and café debates about the relative merits of the two works—false charges of plagiarism—and ultimately to the estrangement of the two composers.

Ravel described his tense friendship with Debussy as: “on frigid terms for illogical reasons.” Ravel brought a vital energy to the classic quartet form with its luminous sensations, and mood-evoking spaces. The ambitious scale of it, and the exhilarating virtuosity demanded to play it, established Ravel’s as the first great string quartet of the 20th century, becoming truly popular in the 21st. Performances are ubiquitous today and serve as entry-level chamber music for audiences new to classical music.

By 1905, a busy Ravel had perfected another solo piano work Sonatine, he fashioned Scheherazade, the ravishing orchestral songs for mezzo-soprano, and polished Introduction & Allegro, a radiant touchstone for harp, flute, clarinet, and string quartet. The Apaches were first to hear Sonatine complete. Its range of material was limited mostly to the middle of the keyboard in order to achieve unity, clarity of detail, and interdependence of the lines – like a cat’s cradle infused with light.

Though Sonatine partakes of Japanese-sounding harmonies, the work’s departure from the pictorialism of Ravel’s previous piano music caused many to wonder what direction this new approach to the mostly-dismissed sonata form would take—given that the fashion of looking back to the sonata and other classic forms would be decades in the future.

Notorious Orphan

Questions about Ravel’s short-lived neo-classical proclivities were soon answered by his three boldly contrasting movements for piano inspired by Bertrand (1807-1841), a French Romantic poet championed by the Apaches when his out-of-print masterpiece Gaspard de la Nuit was reissued by the literary review Le Mercure in 1908. Some consider Bertrand the grandfather of the symbolist movement and great grandfather of the surrealists. Max Jacob, the Jewish poet, painter, writer, and critic, who would perish in the holocaust, named Bertrand the inventor of prose poetry.

Gaspard de la Nuit was first published posthumously in 1842. Bertrand had died of complications from tuberculosis after three failed marriages and a catastrophic career as a journalist. The first edition was rife with manuscript errors. It sold only twenty copies but emerged decades layer in Le Mercure as a notorious orphan. Other editions and translations soon followed. However, Gaspard de la Nuit’s 52 poems wouldn’t finally be published as he originally intended until 1992, with eighteen of Bertrand’s own illustrations.

The name Gaspard is a cognate of Jasper or Caspar, names strongly associated with the three starlit Magi of the Christian nativity, sometimes depicted as turbaned and dark-skinned. The etymology of the name is Persian and renders most accurately as treasurer. Bertrand’s opus is often translated “Treasurer of the Night – Fantasies in the manner of Rembrandt and Callot” the latter artist being a gritty printmaker and draftsman of a decidedly contrasting nature to the revered Dutch master. Jacques Callot would also fascinate Gustav Mahler with an etching of animals bearing aloft a dead hunter. This ironic funeral march would show up in Mahler’s First Symphony.

To accompany her concert performance of Gaspard de la Nuit, considered a pinnacle of pianism and often used as a competition piece, the acclaimed pianist Inna Faliks commissioned California-born composers Grammy-nominated Timo Andres and multiple Grammy-winner Billy Childs to write solo works inspired by the last two movements of Ravel, “Le Gibet.” and “Scarbo”, respectively. Among Ravel’s proliferation of fresh ideas, Faliks finds passages in “Le Gibet” that prefigure minimalism.

“Ondine” is among Bertrand’s most famous poems. It opens Ravel’s suite depicting a seductive water sprite, splashing, and diving into her underwater domain. Ashore, cloaked in a downpour outside a window looking in, she begs the object of her desire to put on a ring and for him to become her king, but he is faithful to another. With wet shattered laughter Ondine vanishes across his rainy windowpane.

In English Le Gibet is a gibbet, an archaic word for various contraptions used to publicly execute scoundrels, including suspended human-shaped cages attacked by raptors to prolong the captive’s agony. Bertrand’s illustration is a simple crossbow in a wide-open landscape with a corpse hanging on a rope and nearby carrion birds in flight. The composer Andres observed: “Ravel’s ‘Le Gibet’ fascinates and repulses me:

“It’s a brilliantly succinct textbook of harmonic possibility, but I’m simultaneously uncomfortable with its extra-musical program, which depicts a hanged corpse at sunset. The music luridly romanticizes the already too-picturesque prefatory poem, reducing the hanged victim to a scenic backdrop against which the poet projects his disturbed thoughts. Ravel represents the roles of observed and observer using an asymmetrical ostinato around which a palette of murky ambiguous chords slowly churns.”

Ravel may have identified with Scarbo’s magical ability to grow gigantically from his lilliputian size, for certainly the work’s darkly suspenseful sleight of hand and immense contrasts is a towering pianistic achievement. One could view Ravel’s Pre WWI imp as a harried freed slave in America, or a vagabond Roma gypsy in Europe hiding in culverts and underbrush desperately looking for coded signs, and safe haven – perhaps the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad that would guide refugees north past the Mason- Dixon Line.

But, as Childs explains, while he’s thought long and hard about the facts and fables associated with the legendary network for freeing escaped slaves, his sense of menace is more urban and contemporary in context—the all-to-common police pursuit of a Black person today. As such, you hear reflected in the music that Childs credits to the influence of Herbie Hancock a stark street scene lit by moving vehicles and lurid mercury vapor lamps high overhead.

Ravel’s jazz-inspired Piano Concerto in G stemmed from his only visit to New York City where he met George Gershwin at a dinner party March 7, 1928, in honor of his birthday, and Gershwin famously asked for lessons in composition. “Why do you want to become a second-rate Ravel, when you are already a first-rate Gershwin?”, Ravel replied. Of course, he had absorbed jazz in Paris from the legion of Black musicians who flourished in Parisian clubs after WWI. Ravel and Gershwin spent several nights in Harlem at the Savoy Ballroom, at a popular watering hole Connie’s Inn, then catching Duke Ellington and his orchestra at the Cotton Club. To close the loop with Childs’ homage, listen to pianist Hancock’s interpretation of second movement of Ravel’s concerto on YouTube.

While not particularly materialistic, Pisces can become wealthy through creative persistence driven by intuition while following their bliss. Ravel’s fortune at his death was not particularly notable, but his heirs inherited nearly $110,000,000 in royalties before his music went into public domain in 2008—except in France where copywrite extensions expired in 2016. Ravel’s last work was a 1933 song cycle about the improbable love of Don Quixote and Dulcinea. In 1927, he began experiencing organic brain disease affecting his speech, ability to read and write, and the loss of purposeful motor function. Coincidentally, both Ravel and Gershwin died five months apart while undergoing brain surgery in 1937.

Should you wish to delve more deeply into the content of this Substack, I have attached an hour-long video including an interview with Inna Faliks, her performance of Old Ground by Andres, Pursuit by Childs, and a complete rendering of Gaspard de la Nuit by Ravel. This Jacaranda Media project includes animation by Lily Ericsson collaborating with me, as director and production designer.

Confusion persists around the element of Aquarius because the sign is symbolized by the water bearer. Rather than water, however, the substance pouring from her vessel is mental energy. It’s air. The flow of water is a visual metaphor for the current of electricity, the issue of spiritual wisdom—the bounty of new ideas. Within air’s intellectual realm, Aquarius is paramount. Air evolves from the youthful breaking news of Gemini to the autumnal deliberations of Libra, to the future-forward potential of winter’s Aquarius—the Zodiac’s penultimate sign!

Astrologers since ancient Greece have suggested that this bearer of wisdom is actually an angel. Once you have seen Wings of Desire, the (mostly) black & white masterpiece by Wim Wenders, this interpretation can easily take hold. Like the film’s angels Damiel and Cassiel, Aquarians observe minute details of the human condition with compassion and detachment while listening to a multitude of inner voices—all the while cognizant of human destiny and purpose. When negatively expressed, Aquarians can often entertain vicious gossip and indulge dangerous conspiracy theories. They like to talk.

The ruler of Aquarius is the planet Uranus. “Uranus rules innovation, sudden change, and revelation…writes Taylor Moon (The Zodiac Almanac, 2024), “[it governs] future and new technology, including all that is newly designed and yet to be perceived. Un-predictable, determined, imaginative, quirky, and willing to do what has never been done before, Uranus also rules creativity, and scientific genius. Uranus is considered to be revolutionary—ready to break rules and demolish established patterns or structures, creating sudden and radical change.”

Reading Mr. Moon’s last sentence in February of 2025 gives an entirely different slant on any utopian thoughts about the “Age of Aquarius”—it’s unquestionably here. I discussed this subject in my first edition of AstroMusic. Despite the sign’s appearance of endless spiritual fluidity, the character of Aquarius is fixed. The change Aquarians bring can only take hold with fierce determination and absolute conviction of the rightness of their vision, come what may.

NOTE: I would be remiss not to point out that Elon Musk’s Mars is in Aquarius. In a person’s horoscope, the planet Mars channels aggressive, can-do action, and “masculine” energy. Under some signs such power can be muted or indirect. Beneath the banner of Aquarius, however, Mars doesn’t just flout conventions, it abruptly surprises itself with the things it does, and considers the implications of their actions later. This planetary position is the epitome of willful and contrarian behavior designed to confound expectations. The best explanation of Mars in Aquarius comes from Alice Sparkly Kat. Don’t be put off by her name, the writing is shockingly precise, and the description has an OMG accuracy. Everything you wondered about Mr. Musk’s behavior is fully unmasked there in Kat’s essay “Mars in Aquarius: Power.” Read it here.

Transformational Aquarian scientists Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Edison dramatically advanced the progress of humanity with their discoveries. Trailblazing Aquarian political leaders Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed the course of human advancement by being high-minded, stubborn, and ultimately convincing. But the singular Aquarian who exemplifies brilliance and lasting innovation in the realm of human creativity is Mozart.

Born Johannes Chrysostom Wolfgang Theophilos Mozart, the child became a prodigy at age five. So extravagant was his talent that little Wolfie’s controlling Scorpio father Leopold toured him throughout Europe as an income-generating attraction. The Greek-derived name “Theophilos” (Beloved of God) was often translated to “Gottlieb” in German-speaking countries and “Amadeus” or “Amadé” where Romance languages prevailed. By his adulthood this flurry of names settled to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

There is enough historical accuracy in Milos Forman’s vastly entertaining film “Amadeus” —despite the lurid and wildly fanciful plot—to see a fully fleshed-out depiction of this paramount conductor of energy. At every turn the worshipful mediocrity of court composer Antonio Salieri provides the listening viewer with ways to measure Mozart’s nonchalantly produced miracles, while the young firebrand’s ideas generate new fashions, and demolish weak and pointless conventions in music and theatre.

In “Amadeus,” the moment that Mozart is thwarted and diminished by the Archbishop of Salzburg, the hot-headed composer exits to a swarm of eavesdropping fans on the other side of the grand chamber doors. As they swing open, he deeply curtsies to the house staff extending his pink satin-covered ass to the powerful ecclesiastic and makes the sound of a fart with a giggle. No pre-meditation involved, consequences be damned.

Another telling scene has Mozart challenging the Emperor to imagine how long an operatic ensemble—a duet becomes a trio, then a quartet, quintet and finally as sextet—can be sustained to develop each situation in which the characters find themselves—then double it! He explains that in a play so much simultaneous acting would result in an unintelligible glut of words, while everything can be revealed through the interweaving of singers! Mozart’s answer “twenty minutes” leaves the wide-eyed Emperor nonplussed.

Moreover, this Aquarian could hold all six singers’ vocal lines and the orchestra’s detailed accompaniment in his head needing no drafts or piano sketches with the instrumentation to be puzzled out later. It just needed to be downloaded from his head to the manuscript paper. Such astonishing music in all its detail was formulated in Mozart’s mind and then duly notated with the rare correction.

Similarly, near the end of Mozart’s last symphony, later nicknamed “Jupiter”, a work reaching over forty unprecedented minutes, Mozart distills the themes into a pageant of distinct mottos and, in the final moments, tosses them into the machine of a mind-bogglingly short fugue with five subjects!

Most scholars attribute the symphony’s nickname to the greatest prevailing god of antiquity so as to emphasize the music’s expansive nobility. The planet Jupiter could be seen with the naked eye in the Ancient world. But viewed through the lens of his homemade telescope, Galileo vastly expanded the planet’s complexity and importance when he discovered four orbiting moons: Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io—on January 7, 1610. Through scientific observation this Aquarian discovery allowed for the radical and at-the-time heretical concept that our solar system revolves around the Sun.

Unlike perhaps any other symphonies in the standard repertoire, Mozart’s last three, written across eight weeks in the summer of 1788, have thrived under the batons of radically different conductors advocating strikingly varied attitudes toward historic performance practice. Harmonia Mundi released a riveting 2020 set including “Jupiter.”

The opening movement is infused with the electric zing of adrenalin coursing through the material as though Ricardo Manasi and Ensemble Resonanz, based in Hamburg, had just rehearsed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Yet it is a model of reconciling historically informed period instrument scholarship with modern attitudes and skills. The winds and strings are modern instruments played with restrained vibrato and clean articulation. Valveless eighteenth-century natural horns and trombones join them with leather timpani played with small wooden mallets. Minasi’s exceptional precision and the Ensemble Resonanz’s unity serve an ecstatic impulsiveness that is percussive, operatic, and muscular. Here is an introduction from the conductor of electricity.

The 3-CD set with illuminating notes and handsome packaging is also available on Spotify. Up next month you will find out which composer(s) this Piscean writer will choose to represent the final sign of the Zodiac.

However, on the Sunday of that week 1/12, as I bid farewell to Marilyn Madsen—boarding a flight to Ushuaia, via Buenos Aires, at the tip of Argentina for an 18-day voyage to Antarctica—telling the story of my most remarkable Capricorn friend seemed more time-sensitive to share than the lives of these very consequential historic figures. Near the top of Lake Avenue, Altadena’s vertiginous main drag, that vehement tempest burned to the ground Marilyn’s home, her two workrooms, and a uniquely valuable archive on the first day. This is a story of literal grace under fire—a story of gale-force catastrophe answered by shining providence granted to a person of life-long dedication to service and excellence.

Poulenc did make the cut because this is AstroMusic after all, and I have beautiful music excerpts to share.

High Definition

Anyone who has watched the documentary Planet Earth knows how nimbly and sure-footed mountain goats can scale steep escarpments and leap from pinnacle to peak. Camera edit: close-up of a hoof hammering down, a soft whirl of air and dust rises; pan up to the goat’s intent gaze fixed on some undecipherable point in the distance that is key to this effortless performance—accurate force, minimal displacement, and three-dimensional guidance from acute proprioception.

For modern astrology Capricorn is such a goat. The sea-goat iconography of ancient astrology, however, is more nuanced and puzzling. Unlike the Sagittarius centaur that can gallop and shoot, how can a fishtail make any sense growing out of the chest of a goat?

The actual Zodiac glyph is made up of an officious check mark with a lyrical loop and a sensuous curl. Andrea Richard of Taschen’s Library of Esoterica writes “Ruled by Saturn, the planet of time and restriction, Capricorns know there are limits to our time together and respect its finality. Because of that, they get things done. Capricorn is like the sea goat, an interesting mix of water and land, sensuality and practicality, innovation, and tradition.” With the physical contradictions of a chimera, this cardinal sign is dedicated to upholding certain structures and systems by whatever means available—and necessary.

If you recall December’s explanation of modalities and elements in Ode to—Joy of the Stars’ Blood!, Capricorn, the cardinal earth sign, prefers to engage with people at a practical level.

Destiny

When I met Marilyn in 1979 at the NBC Burbank studio, I was having some success passing myself off as a special-ability milliner, with neither training in hat-making nor advanced costume construction. Several years before then, I learned from the elderly proprietor of a millinery supply company—three flights up in a dark, dusty, and decrepit commercial building in Downtown LA, “If you want to find a good milliner, go to the graveyard!” This was a well-practiced line related with weary bitterness. So, at NBC, I filled a vacancy left by one of these rare-as-hen’s-teeth milliners, Marilyn’s friend, who was pursuing greener pastures.

Marilyn is a six-foot tall Dane, with pale blue eyes, long honey-blond hair, and the complexion of a Dutch painting. Garbed in the white coat of a first-tier cutter/fitter, her affect was serious, deliberate, calm, and without affectation. She seemed slow but was actually in constant productive motion. Her job was to execute the vision of the designer no matter how vague, or indeterminate the drawing and verbal instructions. Whether making flat patterns by some arcane, if well-studied system, or draping muslin on a dress form to mimic delicate chiffon or obdurate leather, remarkable garments were made manifest by her and a bank of “stitchers” who received jobs from Marilyn’s muslin-covered table. It all seemed miraculous to me.

When Marilyn entered the chamber of mirrors that was the NBC fitting room, the star, celebrity, or actor-singer-dancer was usually already there via a separate entrance. Since she towered over even some of the men, Marilyn usually knelt down with deference and seeming humility, a box of large safety pins at hand, while radiating no-nonsense professionalism and competence. In her presence personalities rarely indulged in temperament, attitude, and histrionics. Garments always fit with minor adjustments, sometimes using ingenious tricks-of-the trade to conceal anomalies, asymmetries, and unwanted “fullness”. She was there to serve the talent and make them look as good as possible. Designers were grateful because she served their vision and made them look as good as possible.

Marilyn was an NBC fixture, while I was hired on an as-needed basis. When the word got out, however, that there was a real milliner and special-ability craftsman in the NBC workroom, I was increasingly needed for jobs that confound the imagination—a Polar bear paw for Lucile Ball to match the real thing, a gangster fedora for Kermit the Frog in a Bob Hope Show sketch, five stunt double duplicates of the Village People Indian Felipe Rose’s fake war bonnet for a campy movie, aigrette’s of contraband egret feathers for Aretha Franklin, Johnny Carson in front of the Tonight Show curtain as the sun! The work was never dull or routine. I learned quasi-couture production stitching when big Vegas shows came in and the workroom became all-hands-on-deck. Eventually Lee Smith, the designer for the soap opera Days of Our Lives, saw our utility as a team, and had Marilyn and me assigned to NBC’s Gower Studios, thus giving him extraordinary creative latitude.

Wedding—go for broke!

After Princess Diana’s epic “wedding of the century” was splashed across the television, gone were the baby’s breath wreaths, Victorian voile dresses, and bare-feet-on-the-beach weddings. Days of Our Lives used every publicity strategy available, including outright fiction, to promote the soap opera “wedding of the century.” It fell to Marilyn and me to live up to the studio’s hype. But, seeing my work on the cover of Soap Opera Digest in the supermarket check-out was the end of the line for me. I wasn’t allowed into the photo shoot for Christian Alfonzo’s headpiece and the stylist miscalculated the fit. Maybe nobody else thought she looked silly, but the stylist’s nonchalance, incompetence, or unconsciousness, was a gesture to me of indifference toward an extraordinary amount of work—and its excellence. Furthermore, it was astonishing to me that I cared. I took a job in the non-profit sector doing education reform for cadres of high school humanities teachers. I wasn’t qualified for that job either!

Marilyn branched out. After Star Trek: First Generation, responsible for Patrick Stewart and the show’s special guests, she took on Ally McBeal, responsible for Callista Flockhart. She did the specialty wardrobe for Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard. Loyal clients included Nell Carter, Natalie Cole, Melanie Griffith with Antonio Banderas, and Anne Bancroft. Responsibility for Jennifer Lawrence and Elizabeth Banks in the Hunger Games trilogy led to a long-term relationship with Marvel Studios and responsibility for a majority of the superheroes in all of their franchises. Marilyn’s final Marvel garment, the 2024 crow-inspired long coat for Agatha All-Along star Kathryn Hahn, became an internet sensation with its cleverly concealed stacked back pleats, custom embroidered lining, and exclusive crow-inspired details. Knock-offs for the 2024 winter wear market proliferated. Hallmark sold a Christmas tree ornament of Agatha wearing the coat.

Marilyn Madsen retired a year ago.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

Marvel was a relentless task master often requiring twelve-hour days with a 70-mile roundtrip commute from Altadena to Canoga Park. A production hiatus would come with uncertainty about when the next film assignment would start. During these years, Marilyn scheduled trips to study with master weavers. For three weeks in 2018, she lived with the National Living Treasure of Peru Maximo Laura, and his family, to learn his special yarn blending weaving technique. She produced nearly eleven square feet from the loom. While taking a week in Ventura, she learned to grind cochineal parasites and dye wool in shades of red from Porfirio Gutierrez, a Zapotec artist from Oaxaca. The Ornelas sisters, master weavers in the Navajo “Two Grey Hills” style, guided her to make three small Navajo rugs of her own design. Such evidence of excellence in multiple traditions was lost in the fire, along with a meticulously documented slice of Hollywood history.

Marilyn kept her original patterns for all the significant gowns and costumes with fabric swatches and beading samples since 1978. Custom-made fabric remnants shared space with autographed photos and candid scenes from locations including Vancouver, Atlanta, New Orleans, Winnipeg, Richmond, Winston Salem, Red Lodge, Albuquerque, Cincinnati, Savanah, St. Thomas & St. John Virgin Islands, as well Johannesburg in South Africa with Dustin Hoffman. Last year, Marilyn and an assistant took four months to document and organize the archive of her life’s work. Each film had its own sealed bin containing script, rewrites, call sheets, drawings, polaroids of fittings, and location ephemera. On some films, when there were doubles made for stunts, as in the case of a collar for Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard, the production would donate one for her archive.

Marilyn’s library contained over 1600 books on the history of fashion, costume construction, and every available book on knitting, crochet, weaving, embroidery, and beading. Her massive cutting table with its legs extended and wide enough for any bolt of fabric was a gift of Lucille Ball in 1978.

Hard Perimeter

Last week when Marilyn landed in Buenos Aires to catch up with her favorite travelling buddies, the celebrity knitters Arne Nerjordet and Carlos Zachrison, she had settled multiple issues with her insurance company.

While sympathetic and understanding they wanted her to shoot the ruins of her home, weaving studio, workroom, and archive. An extremely stressed but kind California Highway Patrol captain barred her way saying the streets were too hot and would burn her tires. Undaunted, she tried a back way to the foothills. Soon she was stopped by a tank surrounded by the National Guard. Hearing her story, the presiding officer said, “Tell your insurance company that there is a hard perimeter around your house and they will back off.” They did.

Within three days senior staff at Universal’s wardrobe department pulled a complete set of traveling clothes including shoes without Marilyn giving her a single measurement. It all fit. A veteran television costumer offered her a vacant house near the airport. A loyal assistant set up a Go Fund Me page and enough housing offers were made for her to be a nomad as long as she wanted. Dog sitting in the high desert with a swimming pool and balcony view was a destination already set in her February plans.

Leaping back and forth from pinnacle to peak for 45 years, this industrious Capricorn got things done. Her rich hoard of evidence encompassed the last golden age of Hollywood costume construction never to return is gone. But Marilyn’s miraculous blend of water and earth, sensuality and realism, new ideas, and tradition can still be seen everywhere—online, in living rooms, and movie theaters. It would seem that the acronym GOAT—greatest of all time—suits my dear friend.

Francis Poulenc

As a teenager Francis Poulenc overcame his feelings of ugliness by being bright, and fun to be around. He played cards and could compose amusing and agreeable songs. His sometimes impudent and always fearless persona was well-suited to Parisian society, and his music gained success during the Années folles (Crazy Years aka Roaring Twenties). But, as the Second World War approached, an unfamiliar seriousness began changing the character of his music. Diverting banality crafted to a fare-thee-well would give way to striking vistas, bracing contrasts, and flashes of spiritual insight.

Overcoming Odds

Poulenc was born in Paris January 7, 1899, to a pianist mother who died in 1915. Soon after in a Paris bookstore the teenager met France’s leading avant-garde poets, who became lifelong friends and sometime collaborators. In short order, our fearless Capricorn gained considerable notice with his first publicly performed work at age seventeen. Rhapsodie Nègre was promoted by and dedicated to no less that Eric Satie. A twelve-minute work for flute, clarinet, string quartet, baritone, and piano, Poulenc’s text was a dubious mix of supposed Liberian (or was it Hawaiian?) and Parisian slang from the street. The baritone, who was to intone the middle movement’s nonsense syllables and join the ensemble for the finale, was too embarrassed so he forced Poulenc to jump onto the platform and take his place. In the audience were Ravel and Stravinsky! Poulenc’s father died In 1917 leaving behind a well-established family business that manufactured photographic chemicals, and an older sister.

Poulenc served in the army at the front for four months in 1918. The U.S. Army’s all-Black soldier band, The Harlem Hellfighters—led by Ragtime pioneer and pianist James P. Johnson—fought in the trenches of France and entertained the troops. At the end of the war in 1918 the band’s syncopated performance of La Marseilles shocked and delighted a French crowd gathered in the Port of Brest. Coming of age together was the jazz scene in Paris, Picasso’s African mask-Inspired cubist style of painting, and an ambitious young French composer.

Poulenc’s service continued after the war as a typist in the newly formed Ministry of Aviation until 1921. This work hardly deterred the enterprising composer whose rise to international prominence was set when dubbed a member of Les Six after a concert of music by Satie’s circle: Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger, Germaine Tailleferre, Georges Auric, and Louis Durey. The name came not from any real common musical ground but from a newspaper headline—and it stuck. The attitude of Les Six suited the times and made Poulenc very busy.

Gathering Storm

How did his majestic organ concerto, finished in 1938, become so expressive of the gathering storm, while radiating an aura both spiritual and secular? Though this work wasn’t the specific turning point for Poulenc, deeply personal reasons brought on a reckoning with mortality and generated the only organ concerto currently in the standard symphonic repertoire.

A spectacularly grotesque car accident beheaded Pierre-Octave Ferroud in 1936. Rumor persisted that he was Poulenc’s friend, or perhaps one of several male paramours. Ferroud was in fact a rival composer spurned by Poulenc’s wide social circle. Poulenc heard of the tragedy while on holiday near Rocamadour, the shrine where a statue of the Black Virgin is venerated. He wrote:

“A few days earlier I'd just heard of the tragic death of my colleague ... As I meditated on the fragility of our human frame, I was drawn once more to the life of the spirit. Rocamadour had the effect of restoring me to the faith of my childhood. This sanctuary, undoubtedly the oldest in France ... had everything to captivate me... The same evening of this visit to Rocamadour, I began my Litanies à la Vierge noire for female voices and organ. In that work I tried to get across the atmosphere of "peasant devotion" that had struck me so forcibly in that lofty chapel”

The 9-minute work’s mix of stringent dissonances and serenely flowing harmonies gave Poulenc access to that mythical beast represented by a fishtail growing out of a goat’s chest—to a deeply personal blending of water and land, sensuality and practicality, innovation, and tradition. Without mentioning the trauma of being orphaned as a teenager and his near simultaneous entrance into a worldly cultural scene, Poulenc recognizes a newfound access to his innate blend of innocence, wonder and purpose.

His large scale choral works followed culminating with the unaccompanied masterpiece Figure Humaine for double mixed chorus of twelve. A setting resistance poems by Paul Éluard and composed under duress during the Nazi occupation of Paris, the score was smuggled to London for its 1945 premiere. the cantata expresses the "suffering of the people of France" waiting in hopeful silence for "triumph of freedom over tyranny." Dialogues of the Carmelites, a durable mainstay in major opera houses since 1957 and Poulenc’s crowning achievement, was based on a popular play. It depicts the political tribulations and eventual decapitation of an order of sixteen nuns at the end of the 1794 Reign of Terror.

Attention to Apprehension

While Poulenc had recommitted to the Roman Catholic faith, he was settled for life with Louis Gautier, a former soldier, despite the church’s opposition to homosexuality. Critic/writer/friend Alan Rich maintained that Poulenc's apprehension for post-World War II France, as it endured a long reconciliation with issues related to the Holocaust, the German occupation and French Resistance, was the opera’s subtext.

The Concerto for Organ, Tympani, and Strings in g minor lasting about 23 continuous minutes has seven seamless sections each with a different tempo. Its compact drama, ravishing colors and textures, and a lively sense of purpose have made the concerto popular with orchestras able to incorporate its demanding organ part. Untrained in organ technique like most French composers, Poulenc was coached by the great organist/composer Maurice Duruflé after extensive study of the Bach organ literature. Duruflé gave the premiere under the baton of Nadia Boulanger.

The two excepts below join together the thematically connected opening and closing passages that alternate austere drama with the tenderness of a brief cello solo performed by Trevor Handy. What remains for you to discover is the central journey where the mercurial blur of cancan and other lively dance rhythms keeps the listener arrested with dramatic shifts of mood and temperature.

This performance, September 21, 2019, inaugurated the new organ console and repositioned organ pipes at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica. Mark Alan Hilt conducts the Jacaranda Strings with timpani performed by Brian Cannady, and organ soloist Thomas Mellan.