i dinosauri (The Dinosaurs) (2022)

Duration: 7:00 minutes

Instrumentation: solo piano

Premiere: September 8, 2023 by Daria Rabotkina at Watson Hall, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Winston-Salem, NC

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.

I Dinosauri (The Dinosaurs)

This story is told from the point of view of Qfwfq, this time as the only remaining dinosaur after the mass extinction. Qfwfq attempts to make a life with the "New Ones”, the creatures who emerge to dominate after the dinosaurs. Qfwfq tries to hide the fact that he is a dinosaur, first out of fear, later out of shame. In making a musical depiction of this story, I took a more abstract approach, expressing the feeling of nostalgia and loss for a bygone era. (There is a wonderful Old English word for this feeling: dustsceawung.) The mood of this piece was prompted by a moving scene when Qfwfq finds a dinosaur skeleton and contemplates the lost time when they were in their prime. This feeling is conveyed by a stately and expansive pavane.