Space Music III: Lucia and Friends Go to the Moon!

The planet Uranus. Credit: NASA

by Henry Myers

About a year ago, I was driving alone through New York state on vacation. With Niagara Falls still a few hours ahead of me, I had been trying (with partial success) to stave off boredom by listening to music. Typically when I’m on the road, I like to listen to the 90’s band Stereolab, which is great driving music for two reasons: first, their music is very mood-driven, which works particularly well with changing landscapes; and second, their use of Motorik beats gives me the sensation of forward motion, of going somewhere. But between the monotony of driving and the discomfort of being a tall person in a tiny car, the music wasn’t doing a whole lot for me.

Space Music II: Holst, Mysticism, and ‘The Planets’

Neptune, as captured by Voyager 2 in 1989. CREDIT: NASA

This article is a continuation of my ‘Space Music’ series. For Part 1, click here.

by Henry Myers

If you’ve never heard Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Op. 32, then stop reading this post, cancel your appointments for the rest of the day, grab your best pair of headphones, find a dark room, and listen to the freaking Planets.

Even after having known The Planets for the two decades that I’ve been self-aware, I still find it to be one of the most consistently fun, joyful, and enriching listening experiences of any piece of music (short of the soundtrack to Labyrinth). Extraordinarily colorful, delightfully varied, and  exciting as all hell, it never fails to trigger a myriad of associations, images, and emotions. Maybe it’s the orchestration, or my upbringing, or the era in which I grew up, or perhaps all of these things, but there’s something about The Planets which conveys to me a sense of immensity, of respect for the grandeur of the cosmos.

Space Music I: Kepler and the Harmony of the Worlds

PLUTO Credit: NASA

by Henry Myers

If you’ve been online recently, then no doubt you’ve heard about the NASA New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of Pluto, which culminated an almost 10-year long journey across the solar system (space is really, really big) to collect data and take a number of photos, including the one above. Until just a few days ago, the small, icy world had remained tantalizingly out of reach, close enough to know about but much too far away (in fact, almost 40 times our distance to the sun) to be knowable by any other means. For the first time in history, 85 years after its discovery, we now know what Pluto looks like (outside of a few unhelpfully blurry photos from 2003). I can hardly contain myself about it: dwarf planets aside, I’ve been daydreaming about space, checking NASA.gov daily, and otherwise finding cool space things to look at and read about.