What has become of the nocturne, and by extension of the nocturnal, since (or: with) its vague conception?
The nocturne mimes the nocturnal. Nocturnal sounds perhaps – but most of all, that veiled, cloudy mood, in which it is always undecided whether something is happening or not. I think the question of the nocturne is the question of this mood. This question has entered music with John Field, who named it, and the recurrence of the title has fostered a more or less defined area for the music to take place in, to be night music.
If Field discovered and named these grounds, it was Chopin who cultivated them. Since his work, the area of the nocturne is defined – however vaguely – by certain technical aspects that I understand to be part of the nocturnal question in music and have tried to retain in my own nocturnes: Preference of the horizontal over the vertical – melodies, threads of small sounds make up the sound of the nocturne. Generous use of the sustain pedal, to ease the knitting together of these sounds into a nightly quilt. Free, floating time – as there is no light to guide us.
I would venture to say that the nocturne is not a genre, and it is certainly not a form. I think it is one of a few ground moods of music, the others being perhaps the light, elegant and the grand, religious, encompassing. Perhaps these correspond to night, afternoon and daybreak. These moods place the listener in a specific position in the world, in a specific relation to the world. They reveal a ground condition of life – of how we relate to the Absolute. For example, of how our souls are affected by our faint and doubtful perception of the world. This experience, as revealed in music, is the subject and matter of the nocturne.
The nocturnes which lie ahead of us will be the figures of a cut, yet another division of what it is and will be to be a nocturne: this inanité sonore, soft, hesitant, embracing, at times disturbing. This uncharted space: no light, no substance, every movement renaming the situation, commonly fed by – as Mallarmé has it – "doubt, night's ancient hoard".
