Motherboard

Pairing a nearly century-old symphony by Gustav Holst with images of our solar system provided by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sounds like a cheap ploy to stem the inevitable rush of symphonygoers to 3D Imax films about blue aliens. But The Planets — An HD Odyssey, which recently had its Carnegie Hall premiere with the Houston Symphony, is actually, well, a match made in the heavens. (Yup, sorry.)

Holst wrote the Planets as a tour through our solar system via astrology, not astronomy (Mars is a vengeful and belligerent lord of war, Saturn is a peaceful giant, and so on), with a highly cinematic flair. The music virtually demands and often gets some kind of visual accompaniment. But instead of the slide shows of you-know-what that concert directors tend to match with it, the JPL and director Duncan Copp drop some heavy-duty animations and high resolution photo-composites that make Avatar’s landscapes look like a bad zoo exhibit. (Skip to 1:45 in the teaser trailer above.)

Old fogies will point out the dangers of turning a contemplative experience into spectacle, flooding our senses, numbing our attention and detracting from the imaginative aspects of listening. That the music doesn’t always jibe with the images of the planets underscores that problem. Orchestral music like this isn’t written for visual accompaniment, and it’s often metaphorical, not literal. The video symphony gives a scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory occasion to confuse the two, saying in a video interview before the piece that Holst “got Venus all wrong,” because he had “no idea that Venus was such a hellish place.”

Surely, no sound system can compete with the sheer sound and emotional force of watching and listening to an orchestra play live, especially when you’re doing it beneath the exalted ceilings of Carnegie Hall or the Musikverein. But the movies have gotten us so used to music and visuals paired together (often without a live symphony present of course) that much of the popular experience with symphonic music has already passed through the visual filter (try listening to Straus’s Blue Danube waltz for instance without thinking of the space station in 2001). And movies—and now the internet—are why it’s hard to pay attention to anything that doesn’t come with a screen. So Earth to the “music of the spheres” purists: this kind of multimedia symphony may be orchestral music’s answer to a world made fat on high-bandwidth video and 3D movies. Video DJing at the symphony isn’t the death of symphonic music; it’s more like a bid for its cultural survival.

On that note, survival is a subliminal theme in An HD Odyssey especially when it comes to the highlight of the show; the images of Mars that hint at some future salvation for our whole species. (Holst didn’t include Earth, or the then undiscovered and lately demoted Pluto for that matter, in his symphony.)

And in the philosophical mood that music and images like this can inspire, the experience of this multimedia “Planets” serves as a disorienting, mind-blowing reminder. Humans have ventured far beyond the limits of earth, sending robots to photograph a planet 50 million miles away. And they have learned to make sounds that can send other humans, sitting quietly in their chairs, into other worlds too. Those two pursuits don’t just produce an exciting show; they’re monuments to who we, strangely, are.