Giochi senza fine (Games without End) (2023)

Duration: 3:00 minutes

Instrumentation: solo piano

Premiere: November 7, 2023 by Sung-Soo Cho at Akin Auditorium, Midwestern University, Wichita Falls, TX

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.

Giochi senza fine (Games without End)

In this story, Qfwfq plays a cosmic game of marbles using newly-formed hydrogen atoms, against his nemesis, named Pfwfp. They each take the advantage over the course of the story (mostly by cheating) before they switch games and chase each other in what turns out to be an infinite loop. My musical version of this story is a game of black keys versus white keys. The main theme at the beginning is evenly matched, with the right hand playing black keys and the left hand playing white keys, but when that initial music comes back, it changes according the the game: first white keys have the advantage, then black keys have the advantage. There are other "games" of white and black keys in between. The ending is a strict canon, with the left hand chasing the right hand, white keys after black.