Arnold Schoenberg

Earth takes four of his ten planets, air three, fire two and a single one water, with six of the ten fixed. Neptune sits on the first half degree of Taurus, retrograde. The record says Schoenberg abandoned key signatures and then built the twelve-tone system to replace them, which split twentieth century music into two camps, and that he was severely triskaidekaphobic and died on the thirteenth.

That last fact needs its arithmetic spelled out, because the chart appears to confirm it and does not. He was born on the thirteenth of September and died on the thirteenth of July, two calendar months apart. The Sun moves about a degree a day, so two months is roughly sixty degrees, and sixty degrees is a sextile. That is why the transiting Sun stood sixty degrees from his natal Sun at eleven hundredths of a degree on the day he died. The aspect is not a second piece of evidence. It is the same date restated in degrees. None of which touches the composer, who is what the rest of this entry is for.

Which leaves the fear itself, and the chart has nothing whatever to say about it. A man who arranged his life around a number and then died on that number is a coincidence inside a calendar, the calendar is a human invention with twelve months in it for reasons unconnected to the sky, and no arrangement of planets contains a phobia. The composer in that record deserves more attention than the date: six planets in fixed signs, in the man who abandoned the most fixed convention in music and then built a replacement system with a rule for everything in it.

Jupiter lies at an awkward angle to Pluto at just under a quarter of a degree, the closest natal contact here, ambition and force colliding: overreaching for control, and growth pursued past the point where it is good for anybody. In somebody who replaced a convention with a system of his own, that is a reading a reader will enjoy or resent depending on which of the two camps the record mentions they stand in. The Sun sits in quiet contact with the Moon at four tenths of a degree, what a person wants and what they need in agreement, with the Moon certain at twenty degrees of Libra. Saturn, Neptune and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. He died at Los Angeles on 13 July 1951, at seventy six. Jupiter stood in easy contact with his natal Uranus at fourteen hundredths of a degree and Mars in easy contact with his natal Venus at three tenths. The Moon was at its first quarter and sixty seven per cent lit.