Jupiter and its moon Io, from The Planets–An HD Odyssey.

Late next month, two South Florida venues will be on the first tour of a multimedia event that should be fascinating to see, and perhaps may point classical music concerts in a new direction.

The Houston Symphony, under its music director Hans Graf, will be offering a limited tour – Houston, New York, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach – of a program that will include the English composer Gustav Holst’s most popular piece, his 1918 suite The Planets, accompanied by high-definition images from NASA displayed on a giant 24-foot screen.

According to a little video that came with the press packet detailing this the other day, the Houston orchestra first did a program like this in 2006, using Holst along with space images it thought were pretty good, but which astronauts living in the city – home to the Johnson Space Center – said were vintage. That stuck with Graf and the symphony’s directors, according to the video, and now audiences there and here will get to see the updated version, with fresh images from spacecraft such as the Mars Land Rover.

It should be great fun, but it also raises questions about whether this kind of program will end up becoming more common as the years go on and visual technology like this gets cheaper and more portable. Up in Palm Beach County, the Palm Beach Symphony will show Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin to the accompaniment of selections from various scores by Shostakovich in a concert at the Kravis Center, where the Houston Symphony will be dropping by a couple weeks later.

While this will be an exciting one-time event, I can see where audiences, particularly younger ones, will be expecting this sort of presentation more often if they’re ever going to visit a concert hall. If the price is right, orchestras should like it, too, because it’s bound to bring in more people, and from a wider spectrum of the community than it usually sees.

The only trouble with that is that music does lose something in the hearing if it’s only used as accompaniment to visual images. Music occupies the uniquely paradoxical position of being vital and forgettable at the same time when it’s used in movies: We really miss it when it’s not there, but we can’t really recall specifics about what it sounded like.

And certainly Holst wasn’t trying only to conjure up music that expanded on the literary attributes of the planet names – Mars, Bringer of War, for instance. He also was trying to paint a picture in the heads of his listeners.

The difficulty comes when the music is subservient to the pictures; it’s a different kind of listening to see just the players and only hear the music, because with just the music, the picture you get in your head is unique to you. If you’re seeing someone else’s pictures, it’s hard to shake them from your memory, if they were powerful enough.

I could imagine a situation where it’s a Holst space special one week, and then a series of different films in subsequent weeks in a bid to attract younger audience members. What’s to stop Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony from being presented with a Napoleonic montage, Debussy’s La Mer from accompanying a sea documentary, or the Bach Brandenburg Concertos from serving as the soundtrack to astonishing photos of church architecture?

I’ll go see the Houston presentation – which is on Jan. 30 at the Kravis Center and bows Jan. 31 at the Broward Center – but I hope the pleasures of hearing music just as music aren’t one day forgotten should this kind of presentation become the norm.