Commissioned by ROCHE for the 2004 Lucerne Festival as a companion piece to The Shadow of Night, this latest addition to the Hawkes Pocket Score Series takes its title from the text of the John Dowland lute song, Flow my tears. Both The Shadow of Night and Night's Black Bird explore the world of melancholy as understood and celebrated by Elizabethan poets and composers. They take inspiration from two dark sources - the expressions of melancholy in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I (1514) and Dowland's song In darkness let me dwell.