By Richard Bailey and Krystal E. Richards
There is a moment that can happen when you listen to George Martin’s orchestral music from Yellow Submarine apart from the movie.
Something starts to sound familiar.
Not familiar in the sense of recognizing a stolen melody or hearing a direct quotation. It is something broader than that. The brass becomes threatening. Rhythm turns movement into character. Strange combinations of instruments create places that could never exist. An orchestra stops sounding like a collection of musicians and begins sounding like an imaginary world.
Then Gustav Holst’s The Planets comes to mind.
At first, comparing the two seems a little far-fetched. Holst composed The Planets between 1914 and 1916, decades before the Beatles existed. George Martin wrote his score for the animated Yellow Submarine, released in 1968, during one of the most experimental periods in popular music. Holst wrote for the concert hall. Martin wrote for psychedelic animation populated by Blue Meanies, strange seas, enormous monsters, and a place called Pepperland.
One composer had Mars.
The other had Meanies.
Yet the distance between them is not nearly as great as it seems.
George Martin’s Yellow Submarine score does not copy The Planets, and there is no reason to pretend that every similarity represents a direct quotation. What we can say is much more interesting: Martin was a classically trained composer and orchestrator, and published accounts of his work specifically identify touches of Holst in his Yellow Submarine score (McKim).
When the two works are compared as orchestral storytelling, the relationship becomes easier to hear.
Both composers use rhythm, timbre, orchestral weight, contrast, and musical personality to transform abstract ideas into places the listener can enter.
Holst paints planets.
Martin paints Pepperland.
And both understand that sometimes an orchestra can tell us where we are before anyone says a word.
George Martin Was More Than “The Fifth Beatle”
George Martin is so closely associated with the Beatles that it can be easy to reduce him to their producer.
That leaves out an important part of the story.
Before Martin began working with the Beatles, he studied composition, conducting, and orchestration at the Guildhall School of Music. He also spent time working in the BBC’s classical music department. Those experiences gave him a musical vocabulary considerably broader than popular music alone (McKim).
That background became increasingly important as the Beatles’ recordings grew more adventurous.
The string arrangement on “Yesterday,” the chamber-music intensity of “Eleanor Rigby,” the piccolo trumpet of “Penny Lane,” and the enormous orchestral buildup in “A Day in the Life” all demonstrate how easily Martin moved between the recording studio and the concert tradition.
With Yellow Submarine, however, Martin was given something different.
He was not merely arranging somebody else’s Beatles song.
He was composing.
The original Yellow Submarine LP placed six Beatles songs on its first side and Martin’s newly recorded orchestral score on the second. The official Beatles discography lists seven Martin compositions:
- “Pepperland”
- “Sea of Time”
- “Sea of Holes”
- “Sea of Monsters”
- “March of the Meanies”
- “Pepperland Laid Waste”
- “Yellow Submarine in Pepperland”
The album was released in Britain on January 17, 1969, following the animated film’s 1968 premiere (“Yellow Submarine”).
There is an amusing structural coincidence here.
Martin produced seven orchestral pieces.
Holst’s The Planets consists of seven movements.
That does not prove Martin deliberately modeled the soundtrack after Holst. Seven planets were represented in Holst’s original suite because Earth was omitted and Pluto had not yet been discovered.
Still, it creates a useful way of listening to the two works beside one another: two seven-part orchestral journeys in which every section establishes a different personality.
Holst Was Not Really Writing About Astronomy
The title The Planets can also be misleading.
Holst was not trying to describe the physical appearance of Mars, Jupiter, or Neptune. His inspiration was primarily astrological. Each movement portrays a character or emotional force associated with a planet.
The suite consists of “Mars, the Bringer of War,” “Venus, the Bringer of Peace,” “Mercury, the Winged Messenger,” “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity,” “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age,” “Uranus, the Magician,” and “Neptune, the Mystic” (Hanssen).
That distinction matters.
Holst did not need to tell listeners what Mars physically sounded like. There is no such sound.
Instead, he created the idea of Mars.
War becomes rhythm.
Peace becomes texture.
Old age becomes pace.
Magic becomes orchestral mischief.
Mysticism becomes something almost weightless.
This is precisely where the comparison with Martin becomes interesting.
There is no natural sound for a Sea of Holes either.
Mars Meets the Blue Meanies
The most obvious place to begin is “Mars, the Bringer of War.”
Holst opens The Planets with one of the most recognizable rhythmic ideas in orchestral music. “Mars” is driven by an aggressive five-beat pattern. The strings strike with the wood of their bows, brass gradually adds enormous weight, and the orchestra grows into an almost mechanical engine.
The strange meter is important.
This is march music that a real army would have trouble marching to.
Rather than producing an orderly military parade, Holst creates something relentless and unstable. The Berliner Philharmoniker describes the famous 5/4 march as deliberately subversive, while noting how often later film composers drew from Holst’s orchestral language (Hanssen).
Now listen to Martin’s “March of the Meanies.”
The scale is smaller. The purpose is different. The Blue Meanies are supposed to be threatening, but they are also ridiculous.
Nevertheless, Martin faces essentially the same compositional problem Holst faced with Mars:
How do you make an approaching threat audible?
Martin’s answer is again rhythm, repeated figures, brass, percussion, dynamic escalation, and the recognizable language of a march (Martin, “March of the Meanies”).
The Meanies do not simply enter Pepperland.
Musically, they advance on it.
But this is also where a one-to-one comparison with Mars starts becoming inadequate.
The Blue Meanies have another relative among Holst’s planets.
His name is Uranus.
Uranus May Be the Meanies’ Closer Relative
“Uranus, the Magician” is one of the strangest movements in The Planets.
A forceful brass idea announces the movement. What follows is energetic, theatrical, mischievous, threatening, and at times almost grotesquely comic.
The music behaves like magic that is getting out of control.
The Berliner Philharmoniker describes the movement moving from recurring brass incantations into something resembling a witches’ sabbath (Hanssen).
That puts Uranus surprisingly close to the emotional territory of the Blue Meanies.
Mars is frightening because it is nearly humorless.
Uranus can be frightening and funny at the same time.
So can Martin.
“March of the Meanies” turns military menace into caricature. Its enemies are dangerous, but they are theatrical villains living in a psychedelic cartoon universe. Martin therefore exaggerates the musical language of threat.
That makes the strongest comparison not:
“March of the Meanies” equals “Mars.”
It is closer to:
“March of the Meanies” exists somewhere between the relentless threat of “Mars” and the grotesque theatricality of “Uranus.”
That is a much more interesting musical relationship.
Neptune and the Seas of Nowhere
At the opposite end of Holst’s suite is “Neptune, the Mystic.”
The difference from Mars could hardly be greater.
The orchestra loses its earthly weight.
High instrumental colors, unusual harmonies, harps and celesta help create an atmosphere that feels suspended rather than grounded. Eventually an offstage women’s chorus enters without words. At the end, the voices fade farther and farther away until the work seems to disappear rather than stop (Hanssen).
Holst has accomplished something extraordinary.
He makes the listener feel as though conventional musical gravity has been removed.
That same problem appears repeatedly in Yellow Submarine.
How do you compose the Sea of Time?
How do you compose the Sea of Holes?
Nobody knows what either one sounds like because neither one exists.
Martin therefore cannot realistically imitate them.
He has to invent the rules.
In “Sea of Time,” familiar musical ideas appear and then seem to move into different surroundings. Eastern musical colors coexist with orchestral writing. Rhythm and texture change as though time itself is slipping between different states (Martin, “Sea of Time”).
“Sea of Holes” goes farther into abstraction. Instead of giving the listener one obvious, comfortable musical environment, Martin uses changing textures and unusual sonic relationships to create disorientation (Martin, “Sea of Holes”).
This is not Holst’s “Neptune” rewritten.
The musical materials are different.
The purpose, however, is strikingly similar.
Both composers are trying to make us hear someplace impossible.
Holst removes the listener from ordinary reality and sends the music toward infinity.
Martin removes the listener from ordinary reality and drops us into a psychedelic ocean where holes are geographical features.
One is mystical.
The other is surreal.
Both depend heavily on orchestral color rather than conventional storytelling.
Pepperland, Venus, and the Sound of Safety
The comparison also works when the music stops threatening us.
Martin’s “Pepperland” establishes the musical identity of the film’s idealized world. It is lyrical, colorful, melodic, and reassuring (Martin, “Pepperland”).
It tells us that Pepperland is a place worth protecting.
Holst achieves something comparable in “Venus, the Bringer of Peace.”
Placed immediately after the violence of “Mars,” “Venus” changes the entire emotional landscape. Gentle orchestral motion replaces aggression. Solo instruments emerge from a much quieter texture, and the music offers calm after conflict (Hanssen).
We should be cautious here.
“Pepperland” is not a rewritten “Venus,” and there is little reason to claim a specific musical quotation.
The comparison is instead about function.
Both composers know that tranquility becomes more meaningful when the audience has also heard danger.
Martin establishes Pepperland so that its destruction matters.
Holst gives us Venus after Mars so that peace can be experienced as the opposite of war.
This use of contrast is one of the strongest characteristics shared by the two works.
And Then There Is Jupiter
A little of Holst’s “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” belongs in this conversation too.
Jupiter is expansive, celebratory, confident, and frequently exuberant. Its orchestral personality is completely different from either Mars or Neptune.
Martin’s Pepperland music likewise contains a quality of celebration and communal life.
Once again, the significance is not that one piece matches another note for note.
What matters is that both composers allow places and ideas to acquire emotional identities.
Peace sounds different from war.
Celebration sounds different from destruction.
Magic sounds different from mystery.
Pepperland sounds different after the Meanies arrive.
That seems obvious when written down.
Making an orchestra actually accomplish it is something else.
“Pepperland Laid Waste”: Destroying a Musical Place
One of Martin’s cleverest dramatic decisions occurs in “Pepperland Laid Waste.”
By this point, he has already taught us what Pepperland sounds like.
That gives him something he can take away.
The music becomes darker and more unsettled. Familiarity survives, but damaged. The listener does not simply see that Pepperland has been attacked; the soundtrack communicates that its musical identity has been violated (Martin, “Pepperland Laid Waste”).
This is an old orchestral storytelling technique used especially effectively in film: establish a theme, attach emotional meaning to it, and then alter that theme when circumstances change.
But in the context of our comparison, it also shows how Martin thinks in terms of musical character rather than merely background accompaniment.
Pepperland is not just scenery.
It has a musical personality.
So do Holst’s planets.
Seven Movements, Seven Worlds
Looking at the two works as complete sequences may reveal more than looking for isolated melodic similarities.
Holst’s seven movements are built on contrast.
Mars is followed by Venus.
Mercury is light and mobile.
Jupiter is exuberant.
Saturn moves deliberately.
Uranus explodes into magical disorder.
Neptune finally dissolves into the unknown.
Martin’s seven orchestral pieces behave similarly as a journey through changing environments:
Pepperland establishes home.
The Sea of Time destabilizes ordinary experience.
The Sea of Holes pushes farther into unreality.
The Sea of Monsters introduces danger.
The Meanies march.
Pepperland is devastated.
And finally the musical world moves toward restoration.
This does not make the two suites structurally identical.
Holst was composing independent orchestral tone poems that together form a suite. Martin was scoring scenes in a motion picture.
But both understand something fundamental:
Contrast creates identity.
Mars becomes more terrifying because Venus follows it.
Neptune becomes stranger because we remember Jupiter.
Pepperland becomes more precious because we hear what happens when the Meanies destroy it.
The Orchestra as a Box of Colors
Perhaps the deepest similarity between Holst and Martin is orchestration itself.
Holst used a very large orchestra in The Planets. The published score calls for expanded woodwinds and brass, extensive percussion, two harps, celesta, organ, strings, and, for Neptune, offstage women’s voices (Holst).
The point was not simply volume.
It was color.
A large orchestra gave Holst more shades to paint with.
George Martin learned precisely that language.
But he also possessed something Holst did not have: the modern recording studio.
Martin could combine conventional orchestral writing with recording techniques, altered sounds, popular music, Indian musical influence, backward effects, tape manipulation, and the broader experimental vocabulary that surrounded the Beatles in the late 1960s.
Holst expanded the orchestra.
Martin expanded the orchestra into the studio.
That may be where their paths finally separate.
Holst asks what combinations of acoustic instruments can create an unfamiliar world.
Martin can ask an additional question:
What if the sound itself can be manipulated after the musicians play it?
The result is a bridge between orchestral modernism and psychedelic studio culture.
Influence Without Imitation
There is always a danger when comparing two composers of turning resemblance into accusation.
That is not what is happening here.
Nobody needs to claim that George Martin sat down with The Planets and copied it into Yellow Submarine.
The evidence supports a subtler interpretation.
Martin was thoroughly educated in classical orchestration. BBC Music Magazine specifically notes that his Yellow Submarine score contains touches of Bach, Stravinsky, and Holst (McKim).
That wording is useful.
Touches.
Influence is rarely a matter of tracing one melody back to another. Sometimes a composer absorbs an approach to sound.
Holst showed generations of composers that orchestration itself could create character.
Mars became war without depicting a battlefield.
Neptune became mystery without showing a planet.
Uranus became magic without a magician appearing onstage.
Half a century later, Martin confronted the same creative challenge with a Sea of Holes, a Sea of Monsters, Pepperland, and an army of Blue Meanies.
His musical vocabulary was his own.
But some of the language had been spoken before.
From the Concert Hall to the Psychedelic Age
That is ultimately what makes the comparison worth making.
The Planets and Yellow Submarine represent two very different moments in twentieth-century music.
Holst composed at a time when enormous changes were taking place in orchestral music.
Martin worked during another musical revolution, when popular musicians, producers, engineers, and composers were discovering that the recording studio itself could become an instrument.
Martin stood in a particularly unusual place between those worlds.
He understood classical composition.
He understood popular music.
He understood comedy.
He understood recording technology.
And, perhaps most importantly, he understood that those traditions did not need to remain separated.
That idea helped make his work with the Beatles extraordinary.
It also makes the second side of Yellow Submarine worth hearing again.
Not as filler.
Not merely as the music occupying the other side of a Beatles record.
But as George Martin composing in his own voice.
Listen Again
Put on “Mars, the Bringer of War.”
Then listen to “March of the Meanies.”
Do not listen for the same melody.
Listen for weight, movement, menace, and character.
Then try “Uranus, the Magician.”
The connection becomes stranger—and perhaps stronger.
Next listen to “Neptune, the Mystic,” followed by “Sea of Time” and “Sea of Holes.”
Again, forget about searching for identical notes.
Listen to what happens when conventional musical ground disappears.
Finally, listen to “Venus” and “Jupiter,” then return to “Pepperland.”
You may begin to hear what connects these works.
It is not imitation.
It is orchestral imagination.
Nearly half a century separates Holst’s planets from Martin’s psychedelic seas, yet both composers knew how to accomplish the same bit of musical magic.
They could take something that did not actually make a sound—
a planet,
a feeling,
a magician,
a Sea of Holes,
or an imaginary country called Pepperland—
and teach an orchestra how to make us hear it.
Perhaps the journey from Mars to Pepperland was never that far after all.
Hear the Connection for Yourself
For readers who want to test the comparison themselves:
1. Holst: “Mars, the Bringer of War” → Martin: “March of the Meanies”
Listen for repeated rhythm, orchestral weight, brass, forward movement, and the transformation of menace into music.
2. Holst: “Uranus, the Magician” → Martin: “March of the Meanies”
Listen for theatrical exaggeration, grotesque humor, sudden shifts, and danger that seems to grin while approaching.
3. Holst: “Neptune, the Mystic” → Martin: “Sea of Time” and “Sea of Holes”
Listen for suspension, uncertainty, unusual textures, and the sensation of leaving ordinary musical geography.
4. Holst: “Venus, the Bringer of Peace” → Martin: “Pepperland”
Listen for lyricism, stability, gentler orchestral color, and the creation of a musical place associated with safety.
5. Holst: “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” → Martin: “Pepperland” and “Yellow Submarine in Pepperland”
Listen for celebration, brightness, and music functioning as a communal rather than solitary experience.
The point is not to prove that one composition contains another.
The fun is hearing two composers separated by generations solving similar artistic problems in very different ways.
Works Cited
The Beatles. “Yellow Submarine.” The Beatles, Apple Corps. Accessed 14 Aug. 2026.
Hanssen, Frederik. “Gustav Holst: ‘The Planets.’” Berliner Philharmoniker. Accessed 14 Aug. 2026.
Holst, Gustav. The Planets, Op. 32. Goodwin & Tabb, 1921. IMSLP: Petrucci Music Library. Accessed 14 Aug. 2026.
Martin, George. Yellow Submarine. Apple Records, 1969. Orchestral score, side two.
McKim, Neil. “George Martin—the Producer Who Added Classical Music to The Beatles’ World-Conquering Sound.” BBC Music Magazine, 20 Sept. 2024.
Copyright and License
© 2026 Richard Bailey and Krystal E. Richards. Some Rights Reserved.
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