Spaceflight was just a theoretical possibility when Gustav Holst wrote his musical exploration of our solar system. 

He began writing The Planets in 1914, the same year Robert Goddard filed his first patent for a rocket. It would be another thirty years before any manmade object would cross the so-called Karman line that separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space.

So Holst didn’t know what it was like to see a photo of a giant, striated Jupiter against the blackness of space. He had never seen how the rings around Saturn look like clusters of floating pebbles.

He was inspired to write The Planets by a series of conversations he had with a friend about astrology, and his musical depictions of the planets draw from mythological stories.

Where the character of his melodies work — or don’t — as a match for the actual planets, it’s a sign of how well astronomers did in assigning the names of gods and goddesses to the objects they saw in the sky. Even so, there is a shimmering and awe-filled quality to The Planets that captures what it feels like the first time you see photos taken on the craggy surface of Mars or pictures of Uranus taken by the Voyager probe.

Writing The Planets was a passion project for Holst. He worked on it during free time on weekends and vacations. At first, it was to be a piano duet. But as his imagination turned to the vastness of space, the piano proved to be too limiting. Ultimately, he ended up scoring his music for a large orchestra and women’s chorus, maximizing his ability to create a rollicking, huge sound for his Jupiter or a mysterious, ethereal one for Neptune.

This weekend, as the Nashville Symphony performs The Planets, high-definition imagery from NASA is being projected on screens above the orchestra. The idea to pair the live music with the real footage comes, appropriately, from the home of the space agency’s mission control. The Houston Symphony commissioned filmmaker Duncan Copp to edit together the visuals for a 2010 performance (one of the orchestra administrators who helped organize the project, Steve Brosvik, is now the Nashville Symphony’s Chief Operating Officer). The HSO has since given similar treatment to Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, pairing that music with images of Earth as taken from space.

For its shows, the Nashville ensemble is pairing The Planets with a dreamy waltz by Josef Straus I, The Music of the Spheres. The program also anticipates Philip Glass’s 80 ^th birthday with a performance of his first Violin Concerto, featuring concertmaster Jun Iwasaki.