Stephan’s Quintet

fanfare and fugue for brass quintet

In July of 2022, NASA released the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble that took more than 20 years to develop. One of these images depictes a galaxy cluster known as “Stephan’s Quintet.” This is a group of five galaxies that are unusually close together by astronomical standards. Four of the galaxies (NGC 7317, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B, and NGC 7319) are so close to one another that they are caught in a cosmic dance of gravity. They are about 290 million light years away from earth. The fifth galaxy (NGC 7320), is too far from the others to participate in their dance, yet it is the closest to earth at only 40 million light years. 

This piece opens with a fanfare to laud the technological innovation required for the telescope to have captured this image. Next is a brief interlude to portray the vastness of space. The crux of the piece comes in a four-voice fugue that portrays the dance of the four most tightly clustered galaxies. The fifth galaxy, the French Horn, plays its own melody that harmonizes with the fugal texture while staying outside of its formal structure.

As a lifelong Star Wars fanatic who was drawn to music in the first place with the significant help of John Williams’s scores, space has always fancied my musical imagination. And I love when we artists of the world get to celebrate the contributions of other fields to the human spirit. Three years removed from composing this piece, I feel the same wonder looking at Webb photos. This piece is also special to me as the first fugue I composed, a process which has since become a favorite of mine. It was my first semester at Oberlin, and after ten years of accompanying choirs, I was finally singing in one. We were rehearsing R. Nathaniel Dett’s oratorio “The Ordering of Moses” and the glorious fugue on the “Go Down, Moses” spiritual contained therein. The rising anticipation I felt as the fugue texture built and I waited join in with the rest of the basses was electric. It was like seeing an immense wave rising and waiting to jump in on a surf board to ride it to shore (not that I surf). Beyond the programmatic image of intertwined galaxies, I felt my newfound awe in fugues to be a fitting match for that with which I beheld the galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet. With every fugue I’ve written sense, I’ve tried to recreate Dett’s “wave”.

This piece is dedicated to my friend Ed, who first pointed me to the Webb images as musical inspiration.