Happy Birthday, Gustav Holst!

by Scott

Today, September 21, is composer Gustav Holst’s birthday!

Holst’s most famous work orchestral suite, The Planets, op. 32. In August, I completed a piano 4-hand transcription of the Jupiter movement, but we didn’t get a chance to learn it yet. Soon after completing it, I discovered that Holst’s birthday was in September, so I scrambled to write a birthday arrangement, based on Jupiter, as fast as I could! My parents visited for a week earlier this month, and we have upcoming concerts next week, so I thought it would be great to have the arrangement done before the visit, and early enough that we could learn it for next week’s concerts.

The arrangement is a condensed version of Jupiter, and most of the main themes have been transformed into Happy Birthday. This arrangement has the most modern harmonic language of all of my birthday arrangements so far, which made it interesting for me to write!

Here are some examples of the transformations that I did:

Opening theme from Jupiter

The rhythm and melodic structure are a bit unusual…

Opening theme transformed into Happy Birthday

…but it worked well with the transformation!

The heroic march theme in Jupiter

In Happy Birthday form, I decided to keep the language modal at the beginning of the phrase, so instead of F-sharps, there are F-naturals.

The lyrical Andante theme in Jupiter

This is not the usual straight happy birthday melody or harmonic progression - some notes/chords were altered to keep with Holst’s original phrase structure.