la spirale (The Spiral) (2022)

Duration: 9:00 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.

La spirale (The Spiral)

In this final story, Qfwfq narrates as a mollusk, who is moved to create a shell, somehow expressing its feelings about the outside world that it has no eyes to see. The story is difficult to summarize, expanding at moments to some beautiful, kaleidoscopic imagery, but it centers on this act of creation and the irony that the beautiful shell can literally not be seen by its creator. My musical response alternates between a symmetrical impressionist texture and a spiral passacaglia (passing through different keys, like a spiral canon), which represents making the shell.