The Highest Planet

The Highest Planet Project

In 1983-1993 I was a music teacher, product demonstration specialist and workshop-seminar instructor in multiple music stores, where I spent many hours each day playing on and learning about electronic keyboards, both analog and digital synthesizers, various types of samplers and an assortment of computer-assisted music systems from manufacturers including Yahama, Roland, Kawaii, Kurzweil, Korg and Ensoniq.

In the process, I began using sequencers and drum machines, along with multi-track recording equipment combined with Digital PCM-encoding devices. Because creating music in these new ways was so exciting to me, I was really inspired by all of this and started designing sounds, and producing and recording new types of music projects.

One of these new projects was a Suite of Songs that I called "Saturn's Rings". The main themes from that project were the beginning of what has turned into The Highest Planet Project.

Saturn’s Rings and Moons

Throughout the late '90s and early aughts, I continued to experiment with sound design and recording using workstation keyboards and computers.

I learned a lot about self-producing music, and realized that I could be quite ambitious in the scope of my musical concepts.

So about ten years ago, I started going back to previous music that I'd worked on, which included re-arranging the separate songs from Saturn's Rings.

I was motivated to produce these orginal compositions in two distinct Suites or groups of musical pieces, that consist of A) Saturn’s Rings and B) Saturn’s Satellites. Each being a sort of musical story-telling about the history of the discovery and observations of the various Rings and Moons of Saturn.

The ideas for the various themes also relate to the names of the Rings and Moons themselves, which invariably are named from deities of the Roman and Greek pantheons, or in the case of fainter and more distant celestial objects --which can't be seen with a naked eye-- generally got their titles from the people who found them.

Influenced by the composers and artists who specialized in creating an environment around the listener

Because of my background as a multi-instrumental musician and thus, my music listening habits at an early age, many of the musical ideas behind The Highest Planet Project are influenced by modern 'Experimental' composers such as Modest Mussorgsky, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Charles Ives, and Edgar Varese. But most especially the 'Electronic' Keyboard/Synthesizer artists like Philip Glass, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Carpenter, Giorgio Moroder, Raymond Scott, Wendy Carlos, Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, Patrick Moraz, Brian Eno, Jean-Michel Jarre, Isao Tomita, Vangelis, Synergy (Larry Fast), Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream, Edgar Froese, Klaus Schulze, Christopher Franke, Peter Baumann, Kraftwerk, Kitaro, Steve Roach, Yanni and many other pioneers of the Avant-Garde of electronic, ambient and new-age genres of music.

Classical-Synthesizer Fusion Instrumental music to chill-out to

The ambient orchestral music of The Highest Planet: PART 1, emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. In some ways it lacks net composition, beat, or structured melody. It is intended to be listened to as a sonic journey through the more distant parts of our own Solar System, and of course, the themes are much informed by the information gathered by the flybys of NASA's Voyager, Pioneer and Cassini spacecraft missions.

New sound designs to accompany and enhance my electronic realizations of acoustic instruments

These pieces tend to be both retro and cutting-edge experimental in their style of composition, and are an epic and bombastic pairing of classical orchestral instruments with electronic synthesis sounds.

There is a certain consistent sort of spacey ambient 'electronica' depth to the sonic environment, with lots of echoes, reverbs, delays, and other special effects based on "found sound" and ambient "noise" elements along with the more or less traditional (and newly invented) instrument voicings, harmonies and melodies of the themes of the Rings of Saturn and the Moons of Saturn.

Saturn's Rings: Intro

On the morning of July 25, 1610, Galileo pointed his telescope at Saturn and was surprised to find that it appeared to be flanked by two round blobs or bumps, one on either side. Unfortunately, Galileo’s telescope wasn’t quite advanced enough to pick out precisely what he had seen (his observations are now credited with being the earliest description of Saturn’s rings in astronomical history), but he nevertheless presumed that whatever he had seen was something special. Keen to announce his news and thereby secure credit for whatever it was he had discovered, Galileo sent letters to his friends and fellow astronomers. This being Galileo, the announcement was far from straightforward.

Each message that Galileo sent out contained little more than this jumbled string of letters:

SMAISMRMILMEPOETALEUMIBUNENUGTTAUIRAS

which when rearranged correctly spelled out the Latin sentence, “altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi”—or “I have observed that the highest planet is threefold.” As the outermost planet known to science at the time, Saturn was the “highest planet” in question. And unaware that he had discovered its rings, Galileo was suggesting to his contemporaries that he had found that the planet was somehow divided into three parts.

Although reflection from the rings increases Saturn's brightness, they are not visible from Earth with unaided vision. So when Galileo turned his telescope to the sky, he became the first person to observe Saturn's rings, but he could not see them well enough to discern their true nature.

Due to the distance it looks like Saturn has seven large rings.

The order of Saturn’s rings (starting from the inside) is D - C - B - A - F - G - E.

They were named like that in the order of discovery (A was discovered first, then B, C, and so on). This naming convention gives a hint at which are the brightest rings, and which of them are less obvious (the rings that were discovered first are the brightest and most obvious). The rings do not sit still. They circle around Saturn at very high speeds. A closer look shows that each large ring is made up of many small rings. The small rings are sometimes called ringlets.

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