I take heart from the fact that I'm not the first, nor the last composer to take inspiration from the planets. As an inner alchemy, what I’ve attempted to do here is create a model that can be used for the individual themes of the music as it progresses along its own way. The model is built from the planetary spheres and a soul’s journey through them. It reminds me of and is in the same vein as the alchemical garden that I described earlier, a temenos containing all the constituents required. It leads to a final hieros gamos, or marriage of opposites, Sun and Moon, King and Queen.

Worrying, though, is my ability to translate all these ideas into the music itself. I haven't written enough to know that I can do it justice. I know that I have plenty of original musical ideas, but executing them is another matter. My confidence about all this waxes and wanes and at the moment it's waning. I guess the only thing to do is just to carry on and see how it unfolds – which was my intention from the start.

The first systematic observation and recording of the heavenly bodies and their movements was made by a priestly caste in the period of the ancient Chaldean and Babylonian cultures. Seven planets and the zodiacal constellations were identified. Because the planets, including the sun and moon, seemed to wander against the background of the fixed stars and the constellations, they were given the properties of living creatures. How else could they move unless they were alive? More than this, they were imbued with great powers and hence the belief arose that these were gods roaming the skies.

To ensure that their people were in a positive and helpful relationship with the gods, the priests devised rituals to forge this relationship. The rituals were based on their observations of the heavens and the way that the planets progressed through the background zodiac and changed their relative positions. The development of their religious worship through ritual became formalised in the horoscope, which is basically a map of the planets and their geometrical relationships for a given time and place...