Aaron Copland

Fire takes five of his ten planets and air three, with a single one apiece in earth and water, and five of the ten are mutable. Mercury, Jupiter and Uranus sit inside eleven degrees of Sagittarius. Mercury, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. The record says Copland wrote Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man, more or less decided what American classical music was going to sound like, and was investigated by McCarthy's committee.

This chart is thinner than it first looks, and the reason is worth stating before anything else. His Moon sits on the twenty ninth degree of Leo at noon with Virgo still possible, so it is left out, and the three closest contacts in the chart all run through it: a sixty degree angle to Neptune at eighteen hundredths of a degree, a fifth of a turn from Pluto at over half a degree, and mild friction with Venus at three quarters. All three go, and nothing that remains comes inside a degree and a third. For a composer the record credits with settling how a national music would sound, that is a thin result, and it is the missing hour rather than the chart that is responsible for it.

Jupiter sits in direct opposition to Pluto at under two degrees, which is what is left at the top, and the reading is ambition and force colliding, glossed as overreaching for control and as zealotry. The record's last fact is an investigation by a congressional committee, and this is the point at which a reader might try to join the two. The reading cannot tell anybody which side of an investigation a person stood on, and the zealotry in that sentence belongs to the committee rather than to the composer it questioned.

Five planets in fire, in a composer the record credits with deciding how a national music would sound, is the balance, and it is a fit a reader will take at face value and should not. Venus sits sixty degrees from Uranus at a degree and a third, independent affection without conflict, read as unconventional arrangements that work, which the record does not enter. He died at Sleepy Hollow on 2 December 1990, at ninety. Neptune stood square his natal Venus at under a quarter of a degree that day and Saturn sixty degrees from his natal Sun at three fifths. The Moon was full, and at a hundred per cent lit it was as near the exact phase as the arithmetic allows.