Quickness
from Memos
(2024)
piano solo
duration: 4’30"
SMMP No. 128b
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.
In his “Quickness” essay, Calvino suggests that quickness includes speed as one of its components but is not synonymous with it. Raw speed makes a significant appearance, particularly with respect to locomotion and its thrills and perils; however, he is more interested in speed of thought. Given his preoccupation in the essay for swift and efficient storytelling, Calvino’s understanding of quickness is similar to a chess player’s capacity to plot victory with the fewest possible moves. His affection for folktales is rooted in their economy of expression: “the most outlandish adventures are recounted with an eye fixed on the bare essentials.” In Borges, he sees a writer who is consistently inventive, deploying a “variety of rhythms (and) syntactic movements” “without the least congestion, in the most crystalline, sober, and airy style.” In this sense, the dimensionality that Calvino ascribes to quickness far exceeds the brute directness of speed.
In discussing these matters with Mari Kawamura, for whom Quickness was written, we referred initially to examples in the piano literature that had a similar ethos to the writings Calvino cites, particularly études by Ligeti, Reynolds, and Chopin. I then found myself down a peculiar Italianate rabbit hole, contemplating keyboard music by Scarlatti, Donatoni, and Castiglioni. Eventually, I adapted rhythmic cell materials from Ligeti’s Étude 1 “Désordre” as the source for my work’s metrical design. Meanwhile, I took a bass line from Schoenberg’s Op. 23, no.2 (referenced in Donatoni’s etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck) and embedded it into the piece as a critical architectural undergirding.
Despite a preoccupation with the genre in my review of referential literature, Quickness is not an étude. However, I gave myself the peculiar challenge of composing a piece that features only single note attacks – a situation that inevitably introduces a challenge to the performer as well, particularly when combined with discrete layers of held notes. This condition emerges from my understanding of Calvino’s preference for individual lines, for economy of expression, and for clarity. Simultaneity is implied when we are forced to contend with a “rush of ideas.” Density, then, is achieved horizontally via iterative behaviors, and, eventually, by the use of pedal effects that allow a residue of sonic information to cloud over the proceedings.
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