Nocturne, Nocturnes
Nocturne is a work of art dealing with an evening or night, a musical composition that inspires or evokes the night usually intended for an evening performance. The artwork could be tranquil or expressive or evoke any other mood.
The opposite of nocturne is aubade: a song or poem or music greeting the dawn.
Nocturnes, a quintet of stories, is the title of one of the non-fiction books of Kazuo Ishiguro. Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is ‘a sublime story cycle, he explores ideas of love, music, and the passing of time. From the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the ‘hush-hush floor’ of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to café musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning.’
