Hilary Hahn

Seven of her ten planets sit in mutable signs, with two fixed and only one cardinal. Fire, earth and water take three each and a single planet sits in air. Mars, Jupiter and Saturn spread across twenty two degrees of Virgo, and the Sun, Venus and Neptune across twenty four of Sagittarius. The record calls Hahn an American violinist known for technical precision.

Seven mutable planets is the fact to take from this chart, and it sits awkwardly beside that record, which is worth saying rather than smoothing over. Mutable is the mode that revises, adapts and changes tack, and a chart holding seven of them with one cardinal planet is arranged to adjust rather than to hold a line. Technical precision is close to the opposite quality, and a reader expecting fixed signs and earth behind a reputation for exactness will not find them here.

Mercury sits in quiet contact with Neptune at under a third of a degree, the closest contact here, and the reading is intuitive understanding: picking things up without being told, and an ear for what somebody means rather than for what they said. The phrase an ear, landing in the chart of a musician, is an accident of language and this entry will make nothing of it beyond noting that it happened. Mercury also sits a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at under a degree, learning that comes easily: breadth, genuine curiosity, and an ability to make complicated things sound simple, which in a performing life is the more usable of the two.

Mercury sits in quiet contact with Pluto at under nine tenths of a degree as well, depth without strain: strategy, persuasion, and an unusual tolerance for uncomfortable information, so three of the six closest contacts in the chart run outward from Mercury. Mercury itself was the only retrograde planet, on the twentieth degree of Scorpio. The Sun sits in mild friction with Pluto at just under a degree, identity in a power struggle, and Venus sits on the last degree of Sagittarius, a planet on a threshold. The Moon's sign is certain at sixteen degrees of Pisces, which absorbs the mood of a room whether or not it wants to. Jupiter came back to its Virgo birth degree on 21 September 2015, at thirty five, and two laps precede it. Virgo measures a thing by whether it was done properly.