A Sonic Tour of the Solar System

Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) 
Asteroid 4179: Toutatis (2005)

Synesthesia, or the blending of various senses, occurs in the minds of a fair number of musicians. In its most common manifestation, pitches and key centers are associated with colors; reds might map to “hot” keys such as D major, or greens to sonorities perceived as cooler. No two musicians have exactly the same associations, nor do synesthetes associate colors with all keys or pitches as a rule. 

The late Kaija Saariaho described herself as having a wider range of synesthetic associations than just the usual colors. “The visual and the musical world are one to me,” she claimed. “Different senses, shades of color, or textures and tones of light, even fragrances and sounds blend in my mind. They form a complete world in itself.” 

Saariaho’s multi-sensory receptors account, at least in part, for the striking coloration found in so much of her music. That’s certainly true of the evocative chill of Asteroid 4179: Toutatis, written for a 2005 recording by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic featuring Holst’s The Planets. She has left us a program note that matches the luminous clarity of the piece itself: 

“I first became interested in Toutatis when reading that it is the asteroid whose orbit passes closest to Earth...Toutatis does not have a fixed north pole like the Earth; instead, its north pole wanders along a curved path on the surface roughly every 5.4 days. The stars viewed from Toutatis wouldn’t repeatedly follow circular paths, but would crisscross the sky, never following the same path twice.” 

Asteroid 4179 is all about the colors that such a scenario suggests. The opening could be nothing other than blacks and silvers, as flutes and piccolos are superimposed over sustained strings, with celesta and harps providing subdued dots of light. A buildup begins, and the colors become brighter and more apparent, until reaching a peak at about the one-minute mark. The effect remains otherworldly but steady undulations in the lower strings add a sense of momentum. 

The piece continues to build, until a powerful outburst in the brass occurs, accompanied by pulsations in the timpani and tuned percussion such as xylophone, marimba, and glockenspiel—all high-color sonorities. The music fades slowly, ending back in the vastness in which it began, with slow, sustained strings.

Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) 
Picaflor: A Future Myth (2024)

Perhaps there are other disciplines that I could have aimed my life at—I seriously considered political science and law—and who knows where those roads would have led? But my sense of self has developed inexorably along the simple principle of storytelling and creating objects of beauty through sound, leaving the earth hopefully a bit better. 

These are the words of Gabriela Lena Frank, whose musical storytelling has been met with enthusiasm and remarkable success. Her influences and inspirations reach far beyond her native Berkeley, including Latin America (Peru in particular), Asia, and Eastern Europe. And now that success extends to the 2026 Pulitzer Prize, awarded to her 2024 Picaflor:A Future Myth, which she describes as “an original story born of my fancy, told in the language of a fable. It draws on the mythology of Andean Peru, the object of my lifelong fascination.” A co-commission from the Oregon Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, Picaflor is dedicated to the composer Kaija Saariaho, and was given its premiere by conductor Marin Alsop with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It receives its West Coast premiere at these concerts. 

The musical story is set in a sky kingdom ruled by a creator sun god, and concerns a trickster hummingbird (picaflor) that rips the sky while leaving the kingdom. Another character is the chaski, a runner who delivered messages along the Inca road. This all takes place within the longstanding indigenous concept of pachacuti that posits a recurrent cycle of worldwide cataclysms occurring every several hundred years.  Frank’s experience as a Californian contributed to this exploration of ecological tragedy; her home in the redwoods near Mendocino was perilously close to the horrendous Camp fire of 2018. 

“What happens, I wonder, when we imagine these ideas as taking place in the future rather than the past?” asks Frank. “And in a future that will bear the mark of our attitudes towards Mother Earth? How do mythologies change in such a future?” 

Picaflor is in ten movements, beginning with a great flood that leaves the world dark and wet. But a beam of sunlight shines, and the picaflor flies down. What follows is a rich mythological tale in which the disobedient hummingbird elicits the ire of the Sun God, who in his wrath spits droplets of sun fire that dry the Earth and restore daylight to the world, although the fire consumes the tiny picaflor. 

“As a generational daughter of indigenous Peru, Picaflor is what has stirred inside me, musically rendered here for the symphony orchestra.”

Gustav Holst (1874–1934)
The Planets (1914–1917)

Gustav Holst’s music is performed extensively in his English homeland, but elsewhere he has come perilously close to being considered a one-trick pony. That’s a crying shame. Part of that is the shadow cast over his catalog by The Planets, but Holst himself also had something to do with it. A publicity-shy music teacher who taught at St Paul’s Girls’ School for almost 30 years, he shunned career promotion and preferred to go on epic rambles throughout the English countryside. He was in his forties when The Planets catapulted him into international celebrity, and the resulting attention caused him no end of discomfort. “Every artist ought to pray that he may not be a success,” he declared.

Private he may have been, but Holst contained musical multitudes. Prolific and eclectic, he produced his fair share of those idyllic invocations of rural England that stand to British composers as the Wild West does to Americans. Like his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, he made abundant use of Anglic folksong. But unlike other British composers, Holst was intrigued by Hindu mythology, resulting in works imbued with spiritual and mythic themes, such as his Hymns from the Rig Veda and the chamber opera Sāvitri. There’s an opera based on Shakespeare (At the Boar’s Head) and an oratorio drawn from Gnostic texts (The Hymn of Jesus). His style leans towards austerity and an enviable economy of means. Some critics considered his music uncomfortably cerebral, even off-putting. He didn’t seem the type to produce a spectacular orchestral blockbuster. But he was, and he did. 

It was Holst’s keen interest in astrology that inspired The Planets, a suite of meditations on the characters associated with each individual planet rather than the astronomical bodies themselves. So, it’s not a real estate portfolio. Rather, it’s a sheaf of personality profiles, ordered for musical effectiveness rather than cosmological correctness. (That’s why Mars, the fourth planet, comes first; all that bellicosity makes for a punchy opening.) 

Holst himself gave us a pithy guide to the work: “These pieces were suggested by the astrological significance of the planets. There is no program music in them, neither have they any connection with the deities of classical mythology bearing the same names. If any guide to the music is required, the subtitle to each piece will be found sufficient, especially if it is used in a broad sense.” 

That said, a bit of in-depth guidance may prove useful. “Mars, the Bringer of War” opens the suite with an ominous and jagged martial rhythm—there are five beats to the bar rather than the usual three or four—that gradually rises to a roaring battle cry from the massed orchestral brass. It is followed by its polar opposite, “Venus, the Bringer of Peace” with its gentle weave of harps, glockenspiel, and celeste into silky string textures. Then comes the darting “Mercury, the Winged Messenger,” a veritable hummingbird of a piece that whirs and purrs its way along. 

Such a featherweight scamper calls for a substantial contrast, which duly arrives with the well-padded “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity,” a downright Falstaffian effusion of pride, joy, and abundance. But “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age” then reminds us of the passing of time and our inescapable date with eternity; downright horror-ridden at its climax, it eventually calms down to a sense of resignation. 

“Uranus, the Magician” is a giddy dance, aglow with divine madness, that culminates in a sizzling blast of power. Then comes the crystalline chill of “Neptune, the Mystic,” the most distant planet from the sun. Remote, icy, and unfathomable in its mystery, it brings The Planets to an unforgettable close as its wordless chorus of treble voices floats away into the great nothingness beyond.