Marin Alsop invited several composers to contribute a new work to her 10th Year Anniversary Celebration with the Baltimore Symphony. She had invited the BSO audience to suggest ideas they felt would offer inspiration to each composer involved in the project. We composers would read the suggestions and dibs one as the inspiration for our new pieces. Several audience members suggested that Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” was missing one essential planet – Earth. I was intrigued with the idea.

Thinking about Holst’s hyper-romantic astrological character portraits of the planets, I realized that in the ensuing100 years our concepts of the planets has been completely altered through the use of scientific technology. My "Earth (Holst Trope) is an essay from space. I imagined moving towards Earth from 200 miles out, marveling at its ephemeral atmosphere, its delicate blues and greys, its promise of life. Then, drawing nearer, detecting startling interference in its natural order. Finally, moving out of the orbit and back into space, intoning an eulogy for the beauty of the earth.

I embedded in the score musical references to the earth including fragments of earth referenced melodies, Morse code for three words: earth, water, air; and the hymn tune “For the Beauty of the Earth” - heard both forwards and backwards .