Night Music: Voices in the Leaves, 2000

Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky
Uzbekistan

Instrumentation:
violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, clarinet, percussion (2), piano, harp

Night Music: Voices in the Leaves, composed by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, bridges East and West on multiple levels. "Night music" is a reference to earlier works by Elliott Carter and Béla Bartók, both of whom were important musical influences, and "voices in the leaves" comes from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, as well as from a line in the famous medieval Central Asian poem Language of the Birds by Alisher Nawâ'i. In Night Music, Yanov-Yanovsky intentionally refrains from using Eastern instruments. Instead, he uses Western instruments to evoke their timbres and textures; for example, he uses the harp to evoke the sound of the chang (the vertical angular harp of Central Asian and Middle Eastern countries). At the climax of the work, a recording of taped voices singing a Uzbek lullaby floats over a lush complement of Western strings.