I grew up about a 15-minute walk from the Hayden Planetarium in New York, and its great dome filled with incandescent projections of the skein of the cosmos instilled in me from a young age a love of all things astronomical. All of that goes towards saying I think the shoe may very well fit with this one.

All right, the Holst. It begins with MARS, The Bringer of War, which is a straight rip-off of the music playing during that scene in Star Wars where Darth Vadar first steps onto the flight deck of the Death Star. John Williams should seriously consider suing this guy. “Luke…. I am your composer”.

Okay, we’ve moved on to VENUS, The Bringer of Peace and I think Francis may be messing with me. Is this not actually the soundtrack from Star Wars? I’m pretty sure this is from the really gross part where Luke and Leia kiss (SPOILER ALERT) before they know they’re brother and sister. It is fairly beautiful, though.

MERCURY, The Winged Messenger next. This is marginally less Star Warsy than the first two. Although, let’s be honest: close your eyes while listening to it and it’s not hard to imagine R2-D2 rolling along on his three little legs, getting into all kinds of cosmic jinks, both high and low.

Now let’s get serious with this next one. No matter what it is, I’m going to write about it with the required gravity and solemnity. Oh, come on! Seriously? It’s called JUPITER, The Bringer of Jollity? I’m not saying I don’t like it, but names like that are precisely why the kids these days prefer to listen to rap music and play on their electronic games. Give me MARS, Bringer of War again any day. That guy is hard! Also, I’m pretty sure I heard this one in a Tom Hanks movie. One of the sad ones. Philadelphia?

SATURN, The Bringer of Old Age. I turned 33 this year, much to my displeasure. No thank you.

URANUS, The Magician. Uhm… no comment.

NEPTUNE, The Mystic. I think this is my favourite bit. It has the strongest sense of cosmology, in my humble opinion, of any of the (movements? This is somewhere you can help me. What are the different parts called?). The fadeout at the end really does lend one the impression of drifting off into space. Either that, or I’m just projecting on it my considerable professional anxieties right now.

All in all, a pretty fine piece of music, although I’m not sure that I could listen to it every day.

SUPER COOL UPDATE: It has just come to my attention that from July 8 to July 11 the Sydney Symphony will be screening something called The Planets: A Journey in HD at the Opera House. Mixing high definition footage from NASA space probes and the Hubble Space Telescope (totally the coolest orbiting telescope. Take that, Spitzer Telescope!) with the excellent piece of music I’ve mocked above. I cannot think of a cooler way to spend an evening, so if you took umbrage with the above blog, you can find me there and give me what for. The only downside, however, is that the event is BYOJ* as far as I understood.

All right, now if I can just find classical music every week that appeals to my massive inner nerd, we’ll be all right. To that end, since the bulk of this (admittedly juvenile) post was dedicated to sussing out what music had an influence on Star Wars, I’ll leave you with an example of Star Wars‘ influence on another medium, namely disco. Enjoy!

* BYOJ = Bring Your Own Jedi.

Sydney Symphony performs The Planets with spaced-out HD film accompaniment July 9 – 11.