nocturne

Nocturne is French, from Latin nocturnus (of the night), from nox (night). In medieval Christianity, a nocturne was a section of the night office — the prayers sung between midnight and dawn. The word was liturgical before it was musical. Monks chanted nocturnes in the hours when the rest of the world slept. The word belonged to candlelight, to silence, to the hours when the boundary between wakefulness and sleep softened.

John Field, an Irish pianist and composer living in St. Petersburg, coined the musical nocturne around 1812. His eighteen nocturnes for piano were gentle, lyrical, and dreamy — the right hand singing a melody over a left-hand accompaniment of arpeggiated chords. Field was painting the night in sound: not dramatic darkness but intimate quiet, the hours between evening and sleep. The form he invented was simple, and he did not develop it far. He did not need to. Someone else would.

Frédéric Chopin heard Field's nocturnes and transformed them. His twenty-one nocturnes (1827-1846) took Field's template — singing melody over arpeggiated bass — and added emotional depth, harmonic complexity, and structural ambition. The Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9 No. 2 (1832) became one of the most performed piano pieces in history. Chopin made the nocturne the piano's most intimate genre. Field's invention was eclipsed by Chopin's reinvention.

James McNeill Whistler extended the word to painting. His 1870s Nocturne series — including Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, which John Ruskin called 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face' — used the musical term for paintings of nighttime scenes. The word moved from prayer to piano to canvas. In each case, it named art that belonged to the dark hours, to the time when the normal rules of brightness and clarity are suspended.