Anthony Braxton

Air takes four of his ten planets, fire three, water two and a single one earth, with five of the ten mutable and one fixed. The Sun, Mercury and Uranus fill thirteen degrees of Gemini, the sign built around knowing things and passing them on. The record says Braxton writes free jazz down in diagrams, and holds a MacArthur fellowship.

The Sun sits conjunct Uranus at just over four tenths of a degree, the closest contact here, and the reading is the self as the thing that will not conform: originality, difficulty with any hierarchy, and somebody who would rather be free than comfortable. A composer who takes the least written down genre there is and writes it down in diagrams is doing two incompatible things on purpose, and a Sun welded to the planet of refusal is the contact that fits both halves of it.

Mercury sits in quiet contact with Venus at under three quarters of a degree, charm in communication, and the Moon at that same angle to Venus at nine tenths. Venus sits a fifth of the way round from Saturn at just over a degree and a half, steady affection. Mercury sits on the first degree of Gemini and Venus on the last of Aries, so two planets here sit on a threshold. His Moon sits at twenty nine degrees of Pisces at noon, with Aries still possible, so it is left out. Neptune alone was retrograde, and this chart holds no closed figure of any kind. A composer the record credits with a fellowship and a notation of his own making has two planets on a threshold and a Sun that will not conform, which is a fair enough picture of writing down a music that resists being written.

Jupiter came back to its Virgo birth degree on 8 July 2016, at seventy one, and five laps precede it. Virgo measures a thing by whether it was done properly, which for a body of music written in a notation of its own making is a question only the composer can answer. Three planets in Gemini with the Sun welded to Uranus is the shape of this chart: it knows things, it passes them on, and it will not do it the agreed way.