Notte for chamber orchestra

Sample 1: Notte for chamber orchestra live performance.mp3

Sample 1: Notte for chamber orchestra live performance

Sample 2: Notte for chamber orchestra live performance.mp3

Sample 2: Notte for chamber orchestra live performance

Sample 3: Notte for chamber orchestra live performance.mp3

Sample 3: Notte for chamber orchestra live performance

Sample 4: Notte for chamber orchestra live performance.mp3

Sample 4: Notte for chamber orchestra live performance

Date: 

1968

Duration: 

12 minutes

Instrumentation: 

  • Orchestral/Large Orchestra

Forces: 

1.2.0.1 - 2.0.0.0 - Str

Notte, the Italian word for night, is a sound poem for chamber orchestra. It was originally written for a concert of new British music commissioned by the Malta Festival of Contemporary Music in 1969 and later in 1972 revised for publication and a further series of performances in France, Switzerland and Italy on a tour by the New Cantata Orchestra of London. 

Notte is written in a flexible style that many composers made use of at that time, a style that was rather like giving the players free recitative-like parts which they all played together, with the conductor providing signs to start and end each section of playing.

Notte is a sound poem. Its subject is night, the still darkness over an open countryside with only the moon to shed light on the landscape. There are small sounds of little creatures about their nocturnal business, owls waiting for unsuspecting mice, and inexplicable rustlings beneath the tall silhouettes of trees that may be little people whom we would be foolish not to believe in if we are not sure. The trees sometimes look like giant people, the noises in the undergrowth might be huge footsteps. As the clouds hide the moon, the wanderer may lose the small pathway and be alarmed by soft uneven ground beneath the foot, the flashes of light from the eyes of small animals and the sighing wind among high branches.

This piece is not only about the sounds of night, but also about the things we might imagine when caught by darkness in wild places.

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