The Terrors of the Night

for five voices (SSATB)

2015

5’

commissioned and premiered by Ping Vocal Ensemble

This madrigal sets the text of Thomas Nashe’s 1594 pamphlet The Terrors of the Night, in which he examines the causes of dreams and nightmares:

As touching the terrors of the night, they are as many as our sins. The night is the devil’s Black Book, wherein he recordeth all our transgressions.

Well have the poets termed the night the nurse of cares, the mother of despair, the daughter of hell.
Some divines have had this conceit, that God would have made all day and no night, if it had not been to put us in mind there is a hell as well as a heaven.

The day is our good angel, the dove, that returneth to our eyes with an olive branch of peace in his mouth, presenting quiet and security to our distracted souls and consciences; the night is that ill angel the raven, which never cometh back to bring any good tidings of tranquility: a continual messenger he is of dole and misfortune.

This cursed raven, the night, pecks out men’s eyes in the valley of death.

(By night-time sin, and cloak thy fraud with clouds)

The Robin Goodfellows, elves, fairies, hobgoblins of our latter age, which idolatrous former days and the fantastical world of Greece y-clepped fawns, satyrs, dryads, and hamadryads, did most of their merry pranks in the night. Then ground they malt, and had hempen shirts for their labours, danced round in green meadows, pinched maids in their sleep that swept not their houses clean, and led poor travellers out of their way notoriously.

A general principle is, he that doth ill hateth the light.

Those that catch birds imitate their voices; so will he imitate the voices of God’s vengeance, to bring us like birds into the net of eternal damnation.