Un segno nello spazio (A Sign in Space) (2022)

Duration: 4:00 minutes

Instrumentation: solo piano

Premiere:

Notes:

      Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics) is set of musical responses Italo Calvino’s collection of stories by the same name. Each story takes as its starting point a scientific fact (some of them disproven by now) and proceeds to spin out a whimsical tale with bizarre characters, all narrated by a timeless, multiform character with the improbable name of Qfwfq. Though each story begins from a strange place, and though they are often very funny, these stories speak clearly to universal themes of loss, loneliness, and yearning. To me, the very absurdity of each story’s premise makes these underlying truths more vivid.

While there are many specific connections to each story, the approach in these pieces ranges widely, from character pieces, to impressionistic and atmospheric works, to much more abstract interpretations of the ideas in the stories. These pieces may be performed individually, or as a complete set, or in subsets of the performer’s choosing.

  Un segno nello spazio (A Sign in Space)

In this story, Qfwfq has the idea to mark the endless empty stretches of space with a sign, which he would be able to see again when he returned to that spot, as his galaxy completed a rotation over the course of hundreds of millions of years. In the long period of waiting to return, Qfwfq obsesses over his sign and when he finally returns to the spot, he sees that another character, who he never meets, seems to be following him and erasing and copying his sign. The whole story spins out of control, with Qfwfq creating false and distorted signs scattered throughout the universe to confuse his nemesis, and by the end, space is full of signs upon signs and Qfwfq can no longer distinguish the fakes from the original. My piece begins with a simple ostinato that represents both Qfwfq’s sign itself and his obsessive thoughts about it. Various distortions and variations on the ostinato lead to a final moment when various musical ciphers are all superimposed, “a general thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated, occupying the whole volume of space,” as Calvino puts it.