REQUIEM FOR A STAR - Cosmic Soundscapes of Destruction and Creation

NGC 2329 - Cat´s eye nebula (planetary nebula in Draco)
(By NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team)

I’ve always been drawn to the night sky—the vastness, the silence, the sense of something both eternal and fleeting. Growing up in a place with almost no light pollution, I often experienced truly dark skies as a child. However, it wasn’t until I was nearly 40 that I got my first telescope. Since then, I have spent countless hours under the stars, studying distant nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies. Stargazing is, to me, a profound aesthetic experience. The celestial objects I observe are beautiful in themselves, and the knowledge that I am looking at light that has traveled thousands or even millions of years before hitting my retina adds an unique existential depth. It is indeed a form of time travel—an encounter with the distant past of the cosmos that puts our human struggles into perspective. At a time when the world feels increasingly chaotic, looking up at the stars offers a sense of calm and continuity.

My fascination with astronomy has already inspired several compositions, including “Reflections in Light” with Arve Henriksen, Ståle Storløkken, Vilda&Inga and Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen, “Prism” with Audun Sandvik and Bjarne Magnus Jensen, and “Cygnus X1” for Ellen Andrea Wang's double bass orchestra, written for the opening concert of Moldejazz 2021.

The most recent addition is Requiem for a Star – Cosmic Soundscapes of Destruction and Creation, a new work for string quartet and double bass commissioned by the CIKADA String Quartet.

The Life and Death of Stars

During my studies in astronomy at the University of Oxford a couple of years ago, one topic that particularly fascinated me was stellar evolution. Like all living things, stars are born, evolve, and eventually die. They are formed in vast stellar nurseries like the Orion Nebula, where giant clouds of gas and dust are pulled together by gravity. Some, like our Sun, live long and steady lives, while others burn more fiercely, meeting a more turbulent fate. In their final phases, Sun-like stars shed their outer layers in breathtaking displays of dust, energy, and radiation called planetary nebulae, before collapsing into a white dwarf. More massive stars end their lives as supernovas explotions as their core collapse into fascinating objects called neutron stars, or - if the star is massive enough - a black hole. The matter ejected into space as stars meet their ends lives on to form new stars, new planets—and perhaps even new life. 

Our own Sun is now approximately halfway through its life cycle, around 5 billion years old. When it first formed, the leftover material became the planets of our solar system—including Earth. In a literal sense, we are made of stardust. The Sun will remain stable for another 5 billion years before entering its red giant phase, swelling in size and possibly engulfing the Earth’s orbit. After this, it will enter the planetary nebula phase, shedding its outer layers into space in a dazzling but brief display lasting only around 10,000 years—an instant in cosmic terms.

The inspiration for Requiem for a Star comes in part from the stunning Hubble Space Telescope images capturing different phases of the final stages of stellar evolution, such as the planetary nebula seen above.

Messier 42 - The Orion Nebula (star forming region in Orion)
By NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

More massive stars skip the planetary nebula phase completely, and explode in violent supernovae as their cores collapse to form stellar black holes. While black holes themselves are invisible, the remnants of supernovae are among the most breathtaking objects in the sky. Unlike planetary nebulae, which glow with vibrant energy, supernova remnants have an almost ghostly quality. The Veil Nebula (NGC 6992) as seen in the image below, for example, is a delicate web of filaments—the remnants of a once-massive star that exploded thousands of years ago.

The musical textures in the piece will be directly influenced by some of these images, translating shape and color into sound, and using unconventional playing techniques to evoke the delicate, flowing structures seen in nebulae. The eerie, fractured structures of supernova remnants may evoke transparent and fleeting musical timbres, while the energetic planetary nebulae calls for more expressive movements. The music will further explore slow sonic transformations, mirroring the vast timescales of cosmic events, while also contrasting these with sudden, dramatic shifts inspired by cataclysmic stellar explosions.

My approach to composition is often influenced by my solo double bass work, and I see the string quartet as both an extension of and a counterpoint to my own instrument’s timbres. I plan to experiment with placement, and perhaps even movement, of the musicians both on stage and in the concert room as such to create a dynamic and immersive sound world. George Crumb’s Black Angels for string quartet is an important inspiration—not only in its use of unconventional playing techniques but also in its intricate and visually expressive notation. I intend to incorporate elements of graphic notation in sections of the piece, to indicate both shapes and textures of improvised sequences. The dialogue between improvisation and composition will be an important part of the piece, giving room lots of room for personal interpretation by the musicians while at the same time maintaining my intentions as a composer.

I enjoy working closely with the musicians I write for, and I will have a first meeting with the Cikada quartet in May. Later, we plan a process-oriented concert at my workplace Sørum farm in late August or September, where we will explore different ideas from the piece in front of an audience. The piece will premiere in October, time and place TBA soon!

NGC 6992 - Veil Nebula (supernova remnant in Cygnus)
(By Carsten Frenzl)

A Requiem Without Words

The title Requiem for a Star naturally led me to consider the traditional requiem mass form, though I am still deciding how—or if—it will influence the structure of the piece. A traditional requiem is built around sacred texts, choir and orchestra, whereas my work is purely instrumental and written for a small ensemble. However, I am drawn to the idea of incorporating text passages that resonate with the theme of stellar birth and death. But rather than religious texts, I am considering excerpts from Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 science fiction novel Last and First Men.

Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men is a visionary novel spanning billions of years, chronicling the rise and fall of eighteen human species - of which we are the 1st. It explores themes of cosmic insignificance, collective destiny, and the fleeting nature of intelligence in the universe. These themes deeply resonate with the idea behind Requiem for a Star. I have read the book - and in particular the last part about the 18th human species - several times. I find some of the closing passages from the last chapter to be particularly moving, and am considering ways to incorporate them into the performance. This would add another dimension to the music, reinforcing the cosmic perspective. I will close this essay with one of the final passages from the book. I hope you have enjoyed this glimpse into my creative process, and I look forward to sharing more in the future!

“The stars have their beginnings and their ends; and for a few moments somewhere in between their beginnings and their ends, a few, very few, may support mind.”

– Olaf Stapledon

Below is a short video from my studio at Sørum gård featuring a glimpse into my current process, doing research and recording simple sketches with my double bass.