Holst: The Planets (IV Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity)

If you grew up listening to the musical themes from Star Trek and Star Wars, you will find the sounds of Gustav Holst’s The Planets quite familiar. (No, I’m not even suggesting musical plagiarism, a subject on which I have some expertise in my day job.) Often when a musical work has a high degree of success, the musical sounds—or the association of those sounds with certain ideas—capture the public’s imagination. It’s only natural that film composers would later draw on those associations when trying to evoke the idea of Space.

Jupiter is the fourth in Holst’s collection of seven tone poems known collectively as The Planets. It is the fourth planet from the sun (omitting Earth, which is not represented in the work). When Holst composed the work between 1914 and 1916, Pluto had not been discovered. No matter, Pluto was recently downgraded from its planet status. So maybe it’s fortunate that Holst avoided the temptation later to add a movement for Pluto.

The hymn tune you hear prominently in the middle of the work (at 3:07) has its own musical life. Its origin is in Jupiter, but in 1921 it was adapted to the text “I Vow to Thee, My Country,” a patriotic poem from World War I. The hymn tune has been given the name Thaxted after a village where Holst lived. (Many hymn tunes have such names.)

And so in addition to strong associations with the sounds of space, we get strong evocations of English patriotism. It’s as though Holst planted the Union Jack on the surface of Jupiter.