Gustav Holst said about his seven-movement orchestral suite The Planets: ...whether it\u27s good or bad, it grew in my mind slowly - like a baby in a woman\u27s womb ... For two years I had the intention of composing that cycle, and during those two years it seemed of itself more and more definitely to be taking form. This rhetoric fits squarely with the 19th-century English and German musical context where psychological mood pictures in the form of orchestral works were popular. For example, both Holst\u27s teachers Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), and Stanford\u27s colleague, Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), composed orchestral works and discussed them using psychological terminology. Similar to Holst, Joseph Joachim often wrote about musical compositions maturing in his psyche like organisms, thereby taking in the composer\u27s experiences and moods until they are immersed in subjective material. What does Holst mean by likening his composition to a series of mood pictures (Short, 1990)? Based on Holly Watkins (2011); Michael Short (1990); Richard Greene (1995) and Katharina Uhde (2014), in this research I investigate Holst\u27s mood pictures in the context of Holst\u27s letters and discussions; I compare this data to other 19th-century compositions with a psychological subtext that Holst would have, or could have, known through his teacher Charles Villers Stanford. By establishing connections between Holst\u27s music and its psychological contents and comparing these with examples by Stanford and Joachim, Holst\u27s mood pictures emerge within a wider tradition of psychological composition, which allows pinpointing and concretizing certain motivic, harmonic and formal features as particularly rich in psychological associations
