The month of March is named for the Roman god of war – Mars. And of course, Mars is the planet where the aliens in “War of the Worlds” came from. Don’t worry, though, we’ll conquer those aliens and colonize Mars soon enough.

Mars is awesome. There, I said it. Gustav Holst (1874-1934) must have thought so, too, because he wrote a kick-ass piece of music about it. This selection comes from a larger work called “The Planets” (what a bizarre name for a suite of pieces about Roman gods.) Seriously though, despite the astronomical name, the piece is more about astrological matters – think horoscopes. Each planet, er, god, has its own personality.[/twocol_one_last]

And I’m pretty sure that the great composer John Williams stole borrowed from this piece when he wrote the film score to Star Wars.

Hiawatha is an epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It’s lengthy, but worth the read; the mythic story is fascinating and the rhythm of the verse will put you in a trance.

Once again I return to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. His three-part oratorio “The Song of Hiawatha” was such a hit in England that when it premiered, it was conducted by no less than C. V. Stanford, and attended by the great C. H. H. Parry and Arthur Sullivan, who practically had to be carried there because he was on his death-bed – but absolutely insisted on going to hear the performance. In the four years that followed, the work received over 200 performances in England alone.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (again, NOT Taylor-Coleridge) must have been a serious wunderkind to have been noticed by Edward Elgar and C. V. Stanford, two of England’s best-known Victorian Imperial composers. He wrote this “Ballade for Orchestra” for the famous Three Choirs Festival when he was 20; the maturity of this composition puts the genius of Coleridge-Taylor on par with Mendelssohn (who wrote his famous “Midsummer Night’s Dream” overture at 17).