"Tears," is a passacaglia of sorts. The main theme is a ground bass motive made up of a 4-note phrase, the last note being actually a chord. This creates a kind of a rotating theme which takes three measures (or five repetitions of the phrase) to complete. The theme is a spectral theme, and can be unmasked at leisure by an attentive listener. What was the point of such a conceit? Tears are not visible at a distance. I remember seeing a painting once (unfortunately, I no longer remember its title or painter) which showed a woman and a child. There was something very particular about the expression on the woman's face. When I approached the painting and began to examine the face in detail a few inches away from the canvas, I noticed that the woman was crying. But being translucent, the tears were not visible at a normal distance. The nature of tears (of water) is that they blend into whatever they travel on. A close aural reading of the piece will reveal the theme. Over this ground motive is a more standard melodic line. At that time, I was very much interested in the Ukrainian dumas, a bardic tradition, and was inspired by them to write a kind of slightly atonal duma melody. Since most dumas tend to be laments, it seemed appropriate.
Nocturnal No. 2 was sketched out at the same time as Nocturnal No. 1, with which it shares certain things in common, among them a predominantly (but not exclusively) dissonant harmony, a multilayered texture and hesitant steps toward what I will later refer to as non-imitative counterpoint. Rather than follow a set of sophisticated versions of imitative counterpoint along the lines of a tradition fugue or invention, the listener is confronted with hearing an interaction of separate and distinct voices contributing something of their own in terms of linearity, volume, color and pulse to the musical conversation. At that time (1960), I was very much interested in the French 14th century motets. In revising the piece in 1998, I updated the notation and added a small and swift envoy at the very end. Otherwise, the work remains essentially as it was written in 1960.