night musicn.

1832 J. K. Paulding Westward Ho! II. ii. 19 The stillness of the night, interrupted only by the drowsy hum of insects, the croaking of frogs, and the occasional night music of the owl and whip-poor-will.

1837 Southern Literary Messenger 3 196/1 Who so happy in the air, With the sad night-music there.

1867 Old Guard Oct. 788/2 On the graves, in the deepest shade and shadow, the crickets and katydids were chirping their night-music.

1889 Harper's Mag. May 906/1 It was a pleasant thing to take a rustic chair, and..sit and listen to the night music then rising in the woods.

1910 W. de la Mare Three Mulla-mulgars ix. 128 It pleased Battle mightily, this night-music—music of all the kinds they knew, white man's, Jaqqua-music, Nugga-music, and Mulla-mulgars'.

1952 M. J. Ward (title) A little night music.

1995 People (Electronic ed.) 12 Nov. This County Louth undertaker liked nothing better than to wind down with a little night music.

1931 Musical Times Aug. 698/2 One of the pieces [from ‘Out-of-Doors’], called ‘Music of the Night’, towers high above all his other work of this period.]

1950 Music & Lett. 31 37 The melody is accompanied..by the fourth D–G, with grace notes C♯–F♯ held against it, senza colore, in anticipation of the ‘Night Music’ movements in the ‘Out of Doors’ Suite, the fourth Quartet, &c.

1957 M. Carner in A. Robertson Chamber Music xi. 225 Bartòk's impressionism, as exemplified in the ‘night music’ of the slow movements of [string quartets] Nos. 4 and 5, can be traced back to Debussy.

1990 New Yorker 5 Feb. 115/1 It is a quirky, understated, imaginative fourteen-minute stretch of night music.

1996 Scotl. on Sunday (Electronic ed.) 3 Nov. It is in the final movement [of Maxwell Davies' Concerto for Orchestra]..that the legacy of Bartok is clinched. A brief moment of night music, a stilled, hushed interruption in which [etc.].