Venus is scored for six percussion players and electronic sounds; it consists of three movements with the following instrumentation:
Venus [evening star]
4 vibraphones
4 glockenspiels
selected crotales
17 bell plates
Venus [invisible]
4 vibraphones
bowed cymbals
Venus [morning star]
6 sixxen
The six percussionists are standing with their respective instruments and a loudspeaker on separate islands placed in a circle around the audience:
P.1______________________________________________P.3
vib, glock, crot, cymb__________________________________vib, glock, crot, cymb
sixxen D__________________________________________sixxen C
P.2______________________________________________P.4
bell plates, cymb_______________AUDIENCE______________bell plates, cymb
sixxen E__________________________________________ sixxen B
P.6______________________________________________P.5
vib, glock, crot, cymb__________________________________vib, glock, crot, cymb
sixxen A__________________________________________sixxen F
For the premiere performance the sixxen owned by Slagwerk Den Haag were recorded and analyzed. If each of the 19 metal keys in this particular set of 6 sixxen is played in a specific order, starting on sixxen D, followed by B, A, C, E, and F respectively, the following microtonal scale will be the result:

The soundtracks for the three movements consists of numerous short electronic sounds, diffused as six simultaneous soundtracks over the six different loudspeakers around the audience. The percussionists wear headphones with a clicktrack to facilitate synchronization of the soundtrack. For Venus [evening star] and Venus [invisible] the synthesis of the electronic sounds was carried out with Csound software from data calculated with the aid of OpenMusic software. These data are intrinsically related to the musical materials that informed the writing of the score.
For Venus [morning star] the electronic soundtrack is generated by a sampler, programmed in Logic software, and based on the recorded sound samples of the particular set of sixxen owned by Slagwerk Den Haag. The samples were analyzed with help of AudioSculpt software.