"Night Fantasies," explains Carter in the preface to what is arguably one of his most delightfully intractable works, "is a piano piece of continuously changing moods, suggesting the fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night....In this score, I wanted to capture the fanciful, changeable quality of our inner life at a time when it is not dominated by strong, directive intentions or desires."

Night Fantasies (1980) was the result of a quadruple commission extended by some of Carter's most notable advocates and performers. Carter had Paul Jacobs, pianist of the New York Philharmonic, in mind when he composed the piano parts for his Concerto for Orchestra (1968-1969). Ursula Oppens had performed Carter's works in several venues, including performances with the ensemble Speculum Musicae, of which she was a founding member. Gilbert Kalish had participated in the premiere of the composer's Duo for violin and piano. Pianist-scholar Charles Rosen had long been a champion of Carter's music, and had made the Piano Sonata (1946), Carter's only previous composition for solo piano, part of his standard repertory. Night Fantasies thus glows with an unusual reciprocal energy between performer and composer, especially apparent in recordings by the dedicatees. Carter knows his resources well, and utilizes them to their fullest; the performers speak Carter's musical language, and transform his sometimes cryptically difficult musical demands into fluent and fluid gestures. Which is not to say that this is by any means a gentle piece—otherwise the insomniac would be peacefully snoozing. The uninitiated listener will strain to follow musical thoughts in the same way that, between moments of consciousness, one struggles to reclaim reality from the elastic logic of dreams. While for some the thorny figures that dot Carter's sonic landscapes sound random and improvisatory, they are in fact carefully calculated. The composer's notorious rhythmic specifications—Night Fantasies begins, for example, with sustained notes articulated exactly four-fifths of the way into the first beat—suggest that Carter knows the precise flavor of (dis)order he wants at any given moment, never leaving it to chance. In fact, his complex metric ratios create an unseen but pervasive rhythmic skeleton that determines the position of surface features within the piece. For this reason, tempi and meter must be strictly observed and consistently deployed so that the so-called metric modulations (really tempo modulations) Carter frequently employs can be faithfully executed. In this technique, the rate of pulse of a given division is used to set the speed of a subsequent division. For example, quintuplet eighth note rhythms in one measure might emerge as identical-sounding septuplets in the next, remaining "constant" as the metric context changes.

Meticulous, too, are Carter's articulation indications. Throughout Night Fantasies, Carter specifies in detail when and how the damper, sostenuto, and una corda pedals are to be used; he likewise carefully controls note durations and dynamic nuances. Thematic organicism is difficult to find here; the piece is divided with invisible seams into overlapping and intermingling textural zones that continually produce new but vaguely familiar figurations. The harmonic language utilizes intervallic combinations that can be rearranged and inverted to create striking spatial and registral contrasts, the sort of extremes that only appear in the caricaturized thoughts of the half-conscious. Scholar, composer, and former Carter student David Schiff observes that works such as Night Fantasies, though extremely difficult to learn and perform, are not "extroverted show pieces. Rather, they seem intense acts of self-communion."

© Jeremy Grimshaw, All Music Guide