Program Note Memos is a book of short piano pieces, each titled after an essay in Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. In each of his essays in the collection Calvino identifies a critical value in literature and explores it by citing a dizzying array of writings from the Classics to the modern, from Latin to Arabic to modern European languages. It has often seemed to me that these values: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, were well suited to music as well as literature.
Lightness, the first piece in the Memos series, was written for Andrea Violet Lodge. In interpreting Calvino’s essay, I was determined to adapt his method of referencing earlier literature, and it was Andrea’s suggestion I consider Ravel’s Miroirs (1904-1905). This was remarkably apt, given Calvino’s interest in mirrors, both in his “Lightness” essay (where he refers to Perseus using the reflection in his shield to combat Medusa) and in his book Invisible Cities, where he writes “elsewhere is a negative mirror.” The essay also addresses lightness quite literally, insofar as Calvino frequently refers to flight. Ravel also reveals an interest in flight. The first movement of Miroirs, Noctuelles, elicits the image of moths fluttering in the night. The second movement is entitled Oiseaux Tristes. I selected passages from these movements and produced a collage featuring their original and mirrored forms, color-coding them so the individual layers could be distinguished. This, along with Calvino’s essay, became the source material for the piece.
Nevertheless, there are few literal quotations from the Ravel in Lightness. Rather, materials are filtered through various compositional strategies, some of which reveal more of the original, some of which transform it quite radically. Guiding principles for this were drawn from two ideas to which Calvino devotes his attention. In his description of Perseus and the mirrored shield, Calvino writes that he “fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision.” Here, Calvino indicates he’s perhaps not particularly interested in the mechanics of mirrored images, but rather in the ability of the reflected image to reveal a new perspective. He then discusses the first century BCE atomist Lucretius, who becomes a central figure in the essay. Lucretius theorized that all matter is made up of smaller particles long before there were observational tools to prove it, relying on a rich use of metaphorical constructions instead. Calvino invites us to imagine spaces in between seemingly solid objects.
What is lightness, though? As a principle of writing, Calvino states that it is the removal of weight, not of meaning or significance. But removing weight requires it to be there in the first place. “We would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it,” he writes.
