Atmosphere-Nocturne

I remember sketching the first page of this piece sometime around 1993. It actually was late at night, and I wanted to capture the feeling of quiet darkness. I recall that I really liked the way the melody not-quite-chromatically wandered down to the dominant 7th at bar 16, which just kind of floated there without properly resolving. But after the first 24 bars I couldn't see where it was going next, and so it went into the pile of incomplete sketches. I unearthed it in 2016 and thought about it some more, and eventually realized that it didn't really need to go somewhere other than where it already was. There was already enough material there to develop in texture and harmonic depth. So that's what I did, with the result that it turned into a nice compact piece that, at least in my opinion, is a lot deeper than it looks on paper.

While I was working on this piece, my wife (who loves the night and thinks it's sad that people consider it scary) commented that she thought it sounded "atmospheric". It was already a night piece, or nocturne, so... there you go. Title done.

Pianists may notice in the forte bit a slight harmonic kinship with La Cathédrale Engloutie, which I had been learning around the same time. There's a way of suggesting something very very large on the piano. Debussy did it; if I followed his example and achieved it in a slightly different way, I'll count it as a success.