Quanto scommettiamo (How Much Shall We Bet?) (2022)
Movement 8 of Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics)
Duration: 3:00 minutes
Instrumentation: solo piano
Premiere: October 20, 2023 by Joy Thurmon at the FSMTA State Conference, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, FL
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.
Quanto scommettiamo (How Much Shall We Bet?)
This story takes the premise that future events are determined from the early moments of the universe. Qfwfq and a certain Dean (k)yK bet on future events, trying to make their predictions as accurate as possible, and, as the story goes on, as far in the future as possible. By the end of the story, they are in contemporary times still tallying the results of their detailed wagers as they come in at a dizzying pace; the ending is a fascinating depiction of information overload, and the situation makes Qfwfq yearn for a simpler time. In translating this to music, I created a mechanical, process-oriented sort of etude. The process comes from the key-scheme of the entire 12-piece set, so in a real way, this piece summarizes the previous seven pieces, and predicts where the future will go in the remaining four.