Nightsounds: Triptych for Full Orchestra (Orchestral Score & Parts)

Orchestration: 3(3=pic).3(3=ca).3(3=bcl).3(3=contra) | 4.3.3.1 | timp.3perc | hp.pno | str

Commissioned & Premiered by University of Wisconsin–Madison Symphony Orchestra, Dr Oriol Sans, Music Director

PROGRAM NOTES by Andrew Maxfield

Humans have grappled with the experience of nightfall, darkness, and sleep for as long as there have been humans to grapple with anything at all. 

Of course, people of any age who lack the protection of secure walls or the comfort of a bed, might approach twilight with wariness—with fear of things that go boom in the night or sly predators slinking through dark forests. However, granted a certain level of physical security, many people look forward to sundown with some anticipation—an evening meal, softer light from a lamp or candle (the next best thing to infinite doomscrolling with a tiny blue screen), a night out (to hear an orchestra, of course), a night in, or any number of other rewards for making it through another day of work.

Further still, many creatives—probably those occasionally accused of being nocturnal by their parents, partners, or peers—have encountered the dark with creativity. In some cases, the darkness inspired creative works directly—ranging from Bartók’s recurring “night music” to Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” to endless other examples. In other cases, the dark hours were the hours when the muse called and the artist responded, whether it was Mozart and Picasso working instead of sleeping or novelist Haruki Murakami rising at 4:00 AM to write before sunrise.

In my house, we experience all of the above: at the mere mention of “bedtime,” I’m beset by sudden wariness while my kids anticipate a full creative rebellion. And, as a result, I roll out of bed at 5:00 AM to write before the chaos begins anew!

My orchestral triptych Nightsounds explores several of these aspects of nighttime, and was inspired by an enigmatic phrase that was included in the publication of Claude Debussy’s first book of piano preludes, as a subscript to the fourth prelude: Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir (“the sounds and smells waft in the nighttime air”).

The first movement—Dusk—reflects the residual buzz and energy of the day as it spills into, and the dissolves into, the first grayer moments of dusk. The music is made of three primary ingredients: a bluesy canonic melody; contrasting rhythms in constant juxtaposition; and timbres (in musical jargon, “timbre” signifies the color, intensity, or quality of a sound) that alternate to denote bigger structures and then fade over time.

The second movement—Dark—began with my older son, one of the bedtime dissidents. Exasperated, he once asked me why we’re supposed to spend a third of our lives asleep. Not only is that not fun, he argued, it’s also weird! (I’m sure I argued the same case to my parents.) What’s even weirder is what happens while we’re snoozing: typically four “phases” of sleep where our physiology alternates between deep relaxation and near-waking levels of brain activity paired with muscle atonia (REM). This movement depicts those phases sonically: a constant, very quiet layer of music is overcome at intervals with wild, frenetic motion. Tonally, the movement drifts through a gradual transition from the harmonic world of Dusk toward the harmonic world of Dawn, with one new chromatic alteration in each sleep phase.

The final movement—Dawn—is the inevitable reanimation of things and people after dark gives way to daybreak. In my (early) morning routine, that pivot happens the moment that I hear my kids clambering out of their bedrooms, chatting about breakfast, protesting school, practicing their instruments (or loudly not practicing), and sometimes staging a nice, preemptive coup against that day’s eventual bedtime. In other words: business as usual. Musically, you’ll hear the energy of the new day burst fairly suddenly out of the sluggishness of sleep, the way my kids transition from comatose to cacophonous instantaneously or how the sun suddenly reaches over the top of the mountains just east of my house. As in the first movement, this movement is animated by a melody that appears in various guises and eventually in canon with itself. The movement is propelled by rhythmic contrasts and a pervasive grooviness and in colors that tend to brighten over time. The piece reaches “cyclic closure” as the end of Dawn returns us to bits of Dusk, mirroring the natural cycles in the form of the music.

—Andrew Maxfield © 2025