Author | Kazuo Ishiguro |
---|---|
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Genre | Short story collection |
Publisher | Faber and Faber |
Publication date | 7 May 2009 |
Media type | Print (hardback) |
Pages | 221 pp |
ISBN | 978-0-571-24498-0 |
OCLC | 310156229 |
Preceded by | Never Let Me Go |
Followed by | The Buried Giant |
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is a 2009 collection of short fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro. After six novels, it is Ishiguro's first collection of short stories, though described by the publisher as a "story cycle". As the subtitle suggests, each of the five stories focuses on music and musicians, and the close of day. The hardback was published by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom on 7 May 2009 and in the United States by Knopf in September 2009.
As the subtitle suggests, each story focuses on music and musicians, and the close of day. All of the stories have unfulfilled potential as a linking theme, tinged with elements of regret. The second and fourth stories have comic undertones. The first and final stories feature cafe musicians, and the first and fourth stories feature the same character. All five stories have unreliable male narrators and are written in the first person. [1]
Robert Macfarlane writes in The Sunday Times that "Closing the book, it’s hard to recall much more than an atmosphere or an air; a few bars of music, half-heard, technically accomplished, quickly forgotten." [3] Christian House of The Independent writes that "Ultimately this is a lovely, clever book about the passage of time and the soaring notes that make its journey worthwhile". [4]
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro is a British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, and moved to Britain in 1960 with his parents when he was five.
A nocturne is a musical composition that is inspired by, or evocative of, the night.
The Remains of the Day is a 1989 novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British author Kazuo Ishiguro. The protagonist, Stevens, is a butler with a long record of service at Darlington Hall, a stately home near Oxford, England. In 1956, he takes a road trip to visit a former colleague, and reminisces about events at Darlington Hall in the 1920s and 1930s.
Julian Lloyd Webber is a British solo cellist, conductor and broadcaster, a former principal of Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and the founder of the In Harmony music education programme.
The Malvern Hills are in the English counties of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and a small area of northern Gloucestershire, dominating the surrounding countryside and the towns and villages of the district of Malvern. The highest summit affords a panorama of the Severn Valley, the hills of Herefordshire and the Welsh mountains, parts of thirteen counties, the Bristol Channel, and the cathedrals of Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford.
David Popper was a Bohemian cellist and composer.
Never Let Me Go is a 2005 dystopian science fiction novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize, for the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke Award and for the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award. Time magazine named it the best novel of 2005 and included the novel in its "100 Best English-language novels published since 1923—the beginning of TIME". It also received an ALA Alex Award in 2006. A film adaptation directed by Mark Romanek was released in 2010; a Japanese television drama aired in 2016.
A Pale View of Hills (1982) is the first novel by Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. It won the 1982 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. He received a £1000 advance from publishers Faber and Faber for the novel after a meeting with Robert McCrum, the fiction editor.
Kazumasa Oda is a Japanese singer-songwriter, and composer. He was the leader of folk rock band Off Course from 1969 to 1989, and has done solo work since 1985.
Nocturnes, L. 91, CD. 98 is an impressionist orchestral composition in three movements by the French composer Claude Debussy, who wrote it between 1892 and 1899. It is based on poems from Poèmes anciens et romanesques.
Stacey Kent is a Grammy-nominated American jazz singer. Kent was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2009. She is married to saxophonist, composer Jim Tomlinson, who produces Kent's albums and writes songs for her with his lyricist partner, novelist Kazuo Ishiguro.
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) is a novel by British author Kazuo Ishiguro. It is set in post-World War II Japan and is narrated by Masuji Ono, an ageing painter, who looks back on his life and how he has lived it. He notices how his once great reputation has faltered since the war and how attitudes towards him and his paintings have changed. The chief conflict deals with Ono's need to accept responsibility for his past actions, rendered politically suspect in the context of post-War Japan. The novel ends with the narrator expressing good will for the young white-collar workers on the streets at lunchbreak. The novel also deals with the role of people in a rapidly changing political environment and with the assumption and denial of guilt.
Huw Warren is a Welsh jazz pianist and composer whose work crosses several genres.
Cascando is a radio play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in French in December 1961, subtitled Invention radiophonique pour musique et voix, with music by the Franco-Romanian composer Marcel Mihalovici. It was first broadcast on France Culture on 13 October 1963 with Roger Blin (L'Ouvreur) and Jean Martin. The first English production was on 6 October 1964 on BBC Radio 3 with Denys Hawthorne (Opener) and Patrick Magee (Voice).
Paul Anthony Griffiths is a British music critic, novelist and librettist. He is particularly noted for his writings on modern classical music and for having written the libretti for two 20th century operas, Tan Dun's Marco Polo and Elliott Carter's What Next?.
Kellie Loder is an independent singer-songwriter from Newfoundland who plays drums, guitar and piano. She has released three albums: The Way in 2009, Imperfections & Directions in 2010 and Benefit of the Doubt in 2018. With a voice that St. John's-based newspaper The Telegram has described as "powerful yet serene and soulful", she has received critical recognition from Canada, including a nomination at the Juno Awards.
Lani Groves is a South African musician and actor. She began playing the cello and singing at the age of five years. Groves performs regularly at musical events across the Gauteng region in South Africa.
Arthur William Phoenix Young Jeffes is an English composer, musician, and arctic explorer. He is the frontman of the musical group Penguin Cafe, a group he formed in 2007 to play the music of his father's band, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. He is one half of the band Sundog.
The Buried Giant is a fantasy novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published in March 2015.
Jim Tomlinson is a British tenor saxophonist, clarinetist, flautist, producer, arranger and composer, born 9 September 1966, in Sutton Coldfield, Warwickshire, England. He is married to singer Stacey Kent.
All five stories have unreliable male narrators, who are musicians of some kind, and are written in the first person.
She cannot actually play the instrument at all. So convinced was she of her own musical genius, no teacher ever seemed equal to it, and so rather than tarnish her gift with imperfection, she chose never to realise it at all.
Closing the book, it’s hard to recall much more than an atmosphere or an air; a few bars of music, half-heard, technically accomplished, quickly forgotten.
Ultimately this is a lovely, clever book about the passage of time and the soaring notes that make its journey worthwhile.