Holst

A trombonist by training whose main occupation all his life was teaching — nearly thirty years at St Paul's Girls' School and Morley College. He had a long interest in Indian philosophy, taught himself Sanskrit, and set hymns from the Rig Veda.

The Planets is not astronomy but astrology: each movement is the character a planet carries in a chart. Mars grinds through in a fixed 5/4 rhythm and was written before the war broke out in 1914, though it sounds like an announcement of the whole century. The piece was so successful that it obscured everything else he wrote; the late Egdon Heath is far bleaker and much closer to him.