Stability of the Solar System that keeps the far side of the Moon away from the Earth. Mercury is in a 3:2 spin–orbit resonance. The planets' orbits are chaotic over longer timescales, such that the whole Solar System possesses a Lyapunov time in the range of 2–230 million years. In all cases this means that the position of a planet along its orbit ultimately becomes impossible to predict with any certainty (so, for example, the timing of winter and summer become uncertain), but in some cases the orbits themselves may change dramatically. Such chaos manifests most strongly as changes in eccentricity, with some planets' orbits
Gustav Holst found his genuine voice in his setting of Whitman's verses, "The Mystic Trumpeter" (1904), in which the trumpet calls that characterise Mars in "The Planets" are briefly anticipated. In this work, Holst first employs the technique of bitonality—the use of two keys simultaneously. At the beginning of the 20th century, according to Matthews, it appeared that Holst might follow Schoenberg into late Romanticism. Instead, as Holst recognised afterwards, his encounter with Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" prompted his searching for a "musical idiom of the English language"; the folksong revival became a further catalyst for Holst to seek inspiration from other