Nocturama

PROGRAM NOTE

"All I remember of the denizens of the Nocturama is that several of them had strikingly large eyes, and the fixed, inquiring gaze found in certain painters and philosophers who seek to penetrate the darkness which surrounds us purely by means of looking and thinking. I believe that my mind also dwelt on the question of whether the electric light was turned on for the creatures in the Nocturama when real night fell and the zoo was closed to the public, so that as day dawned over their topsy-turvy miniature universe they could fall asleep with some degree of reassurance." — Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald

Writing purely instrumental music has long been a deeply uncomfortable experience for me. As a songwriter, and even as a composer of formal concert works with text, I am anchored by language. Language indicates to me, in some inexpressible way, what is to be done with melody, with rhythm, with architecture. Unmoored from words, I find that every musical decision becomes seemingly insurmountable. Over the last couple of years, I've gotten around this problem time and again by using bits and pieces from my own songs as musical brick and mortar for new instrumental works. But when I sat down to write the piece that would become Nocturama, I felt the need to leave behind the self-referential process I'd employed in those earlier works.

When I write instrumental music, I do not assign any extramusical meaning to the sounds I hear. They are just sounds. But as I searched for a title for the piece I'd written, I heard in the music a struggle to reconcile my connection to the old world, to Germanic musical culture, with my life as a folk songwriter in present-day America. That sense of the old world led my mind wandering toward the books of the late W.G. Sebald, and in particular to his description of the Antwerp Nocturama, a zoo of nocturnal animals, in his masterpiece, Austerlitz. And when I thought of the Nocturama, I begin to assign, albeit retroactively, a kind of romantic programme to the piece. Thus: Nocturama is a thinly-veiled set of variations based on a twelve-tone row (although the procedures employed throughout are in no way serial). It seems to me that after the theme, which introduces us to the dim and mysterious world of the Nocturama, each variation conjures a different creature of the night, at last concluding in bright daylight with the ecstatic cries of all its inhabitants.

— Gabriel Kahane, 2017

PURCHASE