A little night music
Let’s listen to the music of the night: it’s no surprise that soundscapes of nocturnal imagination have released such and rich strange dreamscapes from composers. At night, whether we’re dreaming or partying, we give ourselves over to the unfiltered power of our subconscious.
Which is the place that so many composers access in their music. Take the nocturne as an idea and a genre. What the Irish composer John Field began, Chopin and Liszt took to new heights in their fantastical imaginings for solo piano in the 19th century. The nocturne was a place in which the usual rules of musical form and convention could be suspended, so that Chopin’s dreams could be spun in sounds of gossamer evanescence and sometimes disturbing weightlessness.
Debussy’s orchestral Nocturnes take the principle even further at the end of the 19th century. In the first, he conjures orchestral dreams of clouds that shift in and out of the edges of our perception, and makes a diaphanous festival of light and movement in the second movement. The third movement is strangest of all, an evocation of the Sirens of the ancient world, as a wordless female chorus gilds the dreamworld of the orchestra.
But musical dreams can also be disturbing: Tartini’s Devil’s Trill Sonata was born after a dream in which he made a pact with the devil for the soul of his violin; Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is a hallucinogenic nightmare, an opium fever dream of self-annihilation. The lovers of Wagner’s
Richter’s Sleep stimulates and accompanies our passage through the night
Tristan und Isolde consecrate their love in the blissful oblivion of the night, only to return to the world of fate and tragedy when they are discovered by their pursuers in the dawn of ‘spiteful day’.
The sounds of nature at night are already strange enough without the heightened imagination of composers’ dreams. Bartók’s night music is made from the calls of frogs and insects in his Out of Doors Suite for solo piano, and the slow movement of his Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta is a pageant of the surreally clicking, chirruping, swooping things of the dark.
There are whole repertoires devoted to our slumber: lullabies that charm us to the land of the nocturnal beyond, from Brahms’s Wiegenlied to Dick van Dyke’s slumber song to ‘Hushabye Mountain’ in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Most ambitious of all is the eight-hour lullaby of Max Richter’s Sleep, music designed both to stimulate and accompany our passage through the night, made of strange patterns and lulling repetitions.
But there’s a sense that all music is a nocturne. The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho sums this up. For her, the entire activity of composition is about giving shape to her ‘dream spaces’. And when we listen to any of their music, we’re sharing composers’ dreams.
Music is always a passport to another consciousness, a waking dream that we can all share.