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The Light Years

In Italo Calvino’s short story The Light Years, the narrator is a primordial immortal who spans time and space.  Even so, he has a few concerns.  One of which is surveillance.  One day he notices that an unknown entity has hung a sign on a galaxy a hundred million light years away that says simply “I saw you.”

By multiplying the distance times the speed of light, the narrator is able to look up the exact day in question in his diary and finds that in fact there was something he did that day that he’s not at all proud of. In fact it’s something he wants to hide. Soon, just a few tens of millions of years later, he begins to see other signs also saying “I saw you.”

The story is from 1965 and it’s part of a collection called Cosmicomics in which Calvino took a scientific fact, often very new findings from quantum mechanics, and created an inventive story around it.  In this case the fact concerns the expansion of the universe.

As the galaxies get farther and farther apart, the narrator is increasingly unable to clarify his good intentions with response signs until communication ceases altogether and he’s left knowing that for some people in the universe he’ll only be that one bad thing he wishes he hadn’t done.

Other stories concern the speed of light, the formation of the universe, the appearance of colors and probably the best-known of the stories, a love triangle from the time when the moon and Earth were so close together you could easily step from one to the other.

In between other projects for the last couple of years I’ve been writing a large-scale chamber piece inspired by many of these stories.  It’s about halfway done now and I’m hoping to boogie and get the last few pieces done in time to record it this fall for a release in early 2023.  In the meantime though I’ve been lucky enough that every movement I’ve finished so far has been performed somewhere.

Next up is, you guessed it, The Light Years, which will be premiered this Sunday at the Queens New Music Festival by the RAM Players.  Calvino’s story is light and funny and meant as a joke but I can’t help but wonder what he would have thought of social media.

My piece is a reaction to the many emotions living our lives in public can elicit: anxiety, joy, melancholy and obsession which is represented by a hard driving toy piano part.

Well, it’s a real piano instructed to be played like a toy piano which is not the same thing but, as Calvino, (and Carl Sagan for that matter,) would be quick to point out, they do both come from star stuff. So, there’s that.

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