nocturne (no. 3 of four piano pieces)

This is the third piece in Reddy’s four piano pieces with which he was occupied between c1978 and August 1984, and was written in 1982. As can be seen from the score sample this is quite a provisional handwritten manuscript, not yet been written out as a fair copy in his usually immaculate handwriting. It is nevertheless complete as a piece. Reddy performed it once or twice, playing it almost by heart and therefore not writing out repeated bars. Reddy originally wrote ‘Nocturne/Song’ at the top of the score, but in later life Reddy collected together the various fragments or versions of this piece in a paper file entitled ‘Photocopies & autograph score of Nocturne’, and thus the title was fixed, perhaps because he realised ‘song’ would cause confusion with the 2nd of the four piano pieces. The file contains a complete autograph score (1) in blue pen and an incomplete photocopy of this autograph minus page 1 (2), which combines pages 2 and 3 of autograph 1. This is how the work is presented here, using autograph (1) with the two half-pages combined into one, making 4 pages in all. The performance by Reddy shown below was recorded at the University of Zululand in 1982.