Uranus (1971)

I must have done a hundred 'Planet Suites' in my time - it's an ongoing obsession with me, seeking the correlation between mythology and cosmology. Uranus is Ouranos the Greek God of the sky and heavens, imagined by the Greeks in terms of brass spheres but opened out by science into something far more wondrous - and rather quite terrifying too : as The Pink Floyd once sang 'Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten'. How true! God knows they certainly terrify me! So I seek sanctuary in mythology in which some measure of immediate order is established by way of personable (ie all too human) pantheon. Of course the actual planet Uranus wasn't discovered until the late 18th century, which ties in nicely with classical revivalism and a sort of enlightenment as the old world begins to give way to the new. I don't know. I'm no expert. I just glean things, intuitively, as is my nature. As in life, then so in music. I am weary of prescription and I despise pedantry (as any true artist must, though heaven forfend that I am a true artist). Pedantry is the antithesis of Poetry; Poetry is wrought from that point in the soul that connects us to the commonality of creative genius. Nothing the individual does can be done without what has gone before. That is the process by which all art is CONTINUOUS - and every human word and action is an ancient one. The more immediate the creative impulse, so the truer it is to that continuity, which begins with the earliest humans seeking to understand the world into which they have suddenly sprung, and it ends with us, for now, still seeking to understand it.

I think that's what I'm trying to get at in this piece, which is part of a sequence of nine I named after the planets of our nearby star, which are themselves named after Greek Gods, but not in same way our days are named after Norse ones, or our months named after Roman ones or Easter is named after a Saxon one. It begins with Solar Winds sweeping across the night sky as seen from the moors, which are windy enough in themselves. Imagine a winter scene in which the hapless wanderer is held spellbound by the night sky and a myriad of stars and thinks to herself 'Which one is Uranus?'. Thus she is caught between the personal reality of her ignorance and the delight she takes in being able to go home and open her books and find out. To sit in her study by a roaring fire and read about them over a tawny port and several cigarettes. Better that than to stand out on the moor gazing in awe upon the unknowable, because even when you do know, it's hard to connect that knowing with the pure empiricism of star gazing. That's when the music happens.

Hermione Harvestman, note to Uranus from 'Nine Planets of a Nearby Star' (1971).