Night Creature
Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born in Washington, DC, on April 29, 1899, and died in New York City on May 24, 1974. Ellington composed Night Creature in 1955 on a commission from Don Gillis for a concert of the Symphony of the Air. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra with the Symphony of the Air gave the premiere under Ellington’s direction at New York City’s Carnegie Hall on March 16, 1955. First BSO performances: November 7 and 9, 2024, Thomas Wilkins conducting
Night Creature in the present orchestration is scored for 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), oboe (doubling English horn), 2 clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet), bassoon, 2 alto saxophones (2nd doubling clarinet), 2 tenor saxophones (1st doubling clarinet), baritone saxophone (doubling bass clarinet), 2 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba (1st movement only), timpani, percussion (3 players: suspended cymbals, claves, maracas, bongos), harp, rhythm section of piano, jazz bass, and drum set, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
The large-scale symphonic work Night Creature is a kind of three-movement programmatic jazz symphony composed as a vehicle for Ellington’s orchestra to perform with the Symphony of the Air, a successor orchestra to Arturo Toscanini’s celebrated NBC Symphony Orchestra and made up of many of its players. Unlike Ellington’s tone parallels, Night Creature seems not to depict a specific neighborhood or milieu but rather a range of nightclubbing archetypes. He provided extensive comments on the piece in his memoir, Music Is My Mistress:
The first movement is about a blind bug who comes out every night to find that because he is king of the night creatures, he must dance. The reason he is king, of course, is that being blind, he lives in night all day, and when night really comes, he sees as well as anyone else, but with the difference that he is accustomed to not seeing. So he puts out his antennae and goes into his dance, and if his antennae warn him of danger, he pauses, turns in another direction, and continues bugging the jitterbugs.
The second movement is concerned with that imaginary monster we all fear we shall have to meet some midnight, but when we meet him, I’m sure we shall find that he too does the boogie-woogie.
Night creatures, unlike stars, do not come out at night—they come on, each thinking that before the night is out he or she will be the star. They are the restless cool whose exotic or erotic animations, no matter how cool, beg for recognition, mainly from the queen, that dazzling woman who reigns over all night creatures. She is the theme of the third movement. sitting there on her high place and singing, ‘I want to be acknowledged’ (in D major), or ‘Who but me shall be desired?’ (in A-flat), or ‘Who has the taste for my choreography?’ (in A minor). After having made each of her subjects feel that Her Majesty sings only for him or her, who is individually the coolest or craziest, her high-toned highness rises and snaps her fingers. As they stomp off the handclapping, everybody scrambles to be in place, wailing and winging into the most overindulged form of up-and-outness.
As in Ellington's Three Black Kings, Night Creature taps into borrowed modes from a variety of “elsewheres,” focusing for us the images of its three archetypal characters as described by the composer. Night Creature has its elements of gentle satire, but Ellington’s more persuasive suggestion here is that dance is, at its base, a vehicle for joy, optimism, and connection across and through social boundaries.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.
Past Performances
