Thread by @JasonHazeley

Prompted by something Dan ‘No Such Thing As A’ Schreiber said on some twenty-hour Comic Relief podcast marathon or other, I dived into a bit of research about Holst’s masterpiece, The Planets. (1/15)

The suite ends with the sound of a wordless female choir repeating two chords and fading away. Fading away is nothing to anyone with a mixing desk or any recording software. But doing it live is another matter. Especially when it’s a hundred years ago. (2/15)

To achieve the effect at the premiere and subsequent performances, Holst placed his female chorus offstage and had them sing the last bar few a through times, then turn and, led by a sub-conductor, walk along a corridor – still singing... (3/15)

...and into a room, the door of which was open, then keep singing and travelling to the far side of the room, at which point, while still singing, an assistant would slowly close the door. The choir knew their cue to stop singing was when they heard the audience applaud. (4/15)

Holst made anyone with squeaky shoes remove them, and any door that made a noise was similarly disciplined or dismissed.

It’s such an achievement, and such a beautiful idea. But but BUT – Here’s the bit that stopped me in my tracks.

This must have BLOWN EDWARDIAN MINDS. (5/15)

Picture it. You’re at a concert. It’s September 1918. (6/15)

In front of you is an unusually large orchestra – including two timpanists playing seven timpani, two harps, six horns, four flutes, a bass oboe (amazingly rare instrument) and a fucking organ, which kind of limits the number of places you can perform the piece. (7/15)

These enormous forces make a fabulous racket in ‘Mars’ and ‘Uranus,’ and break your heart to pieces in ‘Jupiter,’ especially the bit you later come to know as ‘I Vow To Thee, My Country’. (8/15)

And then, in the last movement, all this human enterprise just goes very, very quiet and still. Harps and a celeste twinkle away. Violins shimmer in the ozone. Nothing moves very far. Nothing gets above pianissimo. (9/15)

Most of the the eight minutes of the piece rock gently between two chords. About four and a half minutes in, you’re vaguely aware of a tiny, faraway high note - it’s marked pppp in the score – which must be coming from someone somewhere, but who? And where? (10/15)

And gradually you can hear… what? Angels? Can you hear angels? It’s a female chorus. But not singing any words. Just ‘ah’-ing. And where are they? There’s no choir on stage. And yet there are all these instrumentalists. Where are the voices? Are they behind you? Nope. (11/15)

Then how is this happening? Finally, the orchestra dissolves and all that’s left is a see-saw of two ethereal chords sung by voices coming from nowhere (heaven?) that just… fade into the distance. (12/15)

To the audience, this must have been like magic. Genuine magic. Music is magical enough anyway – much of it, and what it does, defies explanation – but this explicit bit of trickery must have taken their breath away. (13/15)

(Imogen, Holst’s daughter, wrote, ‘on one occasion, at a rehearsal in the Albert Hall, I was able to see how he did it,’ like she was the kid on the theatre roof who saw the guy climbing out of The Mechanical Turk after another win against a perplexed chess grandmaster.) (14/15)

When you listen to a recording of The Planets, you take it for granted. Of course you do: there's nothing to see. But it’s worth remembering that what you’re hearing is one of the few examples – maybe the only one – of a magic effect in all of music. (15/15)