Maurice Ravel

Water takes four of his ten planets, fire three, air two and a single one earth, with five of the ten fixed and only one cardinal. The Sun, the Moon and Mercury fill eleven degrees of Pisces, and the Moon's sign is certain, so identity, need and speech are all in one sign. The record says Ravel wrote Bolero, which he described as an orchestral piece without music, and resented being known for it.

Three planets in Pisces is the place to start, and Pisces holds no fixed edge of its own: it is the sign that takes the shape of whatever is nearest. Having the Sun, the Moon and Mercury in it puts who somebody is, what they need and how they say it into one register, with nothing in the chart's own vocabulary giving any of the three a hard boundary. In a composer that is a resonance rather than a mechanism, and it is the kind a reader should be told is cheap.

The record's second sentence is that a neurological illness took his ability to write in his last years while leaving the music in his head. Saturn sits square Pluto in this chart at under three quarters of a degree, and the standing reading for that pair includes the enforced ending of something that had lasted a long time. Those two sentences must not be joined. The contact is a slow one shared by everybody born across several years, the reading was written without reference to any person, and an illness is a fact about a nervous system. The record names the loss and the chart has nothing whatever to add to it.

Mars sits in easy contact with Uranus at a quarter of a degree, quick reflexes: acting well in an emergency, and an instinct for the unconventional move. The Moon sits at an awkward angle to that same Uranus at seven hundredths of a degree, the closest contact here, security and freedom fighting, and in hard contact with Mars at a third, need and drive colliding, so the Moon is pressed from two directions at once. Venus sits square Jupiter at under half a degree, pleasure without a brake, and a T-square closes on Neptune using those two. Mercury, Jupiter and Uranus were the three retrograde planets. He died at Paris on 28 December 1937, at sixty two. Mars stood conjunct his natal Mercury at under four tenths of a degree that day, reaching the planet of speech in a record whose last fact is about losing it, and that is a coincidence of timing rather than a comment. The Moon was at its last quarter and fifteen per cent lit.