Lo zio acquatico (The aquatic Uncle) (2022)

Duration: 3:00 minutes

Instrumentation: solo piano

Premiere: February 21, 2023 by Andrew Cooperstock at Grusin Hall, University of Colorado-Boulder

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.  

Lo zio acquatico (The Aquatic Uncle) 

This story begins with the fact that land creatures have a common aquatic ancestor. Our ever-changing Qfwfq is now an early land creature, of the first generations to make the move out of the water. But his rude and close-minded Uncle N’ba N’ga stubbornly holds to his “fishy” ways, still living in a muddy lagoon. Qfwfq has a love interest, Lll, who seems fully at home on dry land, and she meets Uncle N’ba N’ga as a sort of joke or curiosity. It becomes clear that she is actually fascinated with this aquatic uncle and eventually falls in love with him, learning to live underwater by the end. I turned this story into a musical character portrait. The uncle is portrayed as a sort of grotesque version of Debussy’s Poissons d'or, with fluid lines in the lower register. Lll is portrayed with a contrasting ("dryer") music in the middle section. The dry music becomes "wetter" (more pedal and sustain) and the two themes are eventually joined in counterpoint in the end.