Nostra Lilli: the middle section of A Lattice of Unplanned Measurements, movement 2. Drawing by Lili Maya.
For anyone arriving here first: my family's history is complicated, and it took me years to untangle. Lilliana Rovelli turned out to be the key to nearly all of it. How I found her — and, through her, a past I hadn't known was mine — after she had spent much of her life looking for us, is the subject of a series of essays that begins with A Girl from Costa.
What you’ll hear
The first thing you may notice is that it sounds slightly out of tune.
It isn’t, quite. It is tuned to a different rule. The piano most of us grew up with divides the octave into twelve equal steps — a compromise so familiar that it is what we mean by “in tune.” The ten pitches here come instead from a scale the composer and theorist Ervin Wilson called a dekany: a set built by combining a handful of simple whole-number ratios, the relationships that vibrating strings and columns of air produce on their own. Heard against the habits of conventional Western tuning, those intervals feel less bound — less pulled toward a home. To me they sound less like something agreed on and more like something in the act of finding.
Wilson’s scale gives the pitches, exactly, and nothing more. It says nothing about which notes come when, or for how long, or how they are put together. Like any tuning, it is a set of starting conditions. The composition is mine.
I chose the dekany because of where it stands in relation to the piano. Some of its intervals come close to the familiar twelve — close enough to recognize — and then slip free of them. Near enough to the familiar to be uncanny. The twelve-note scale carries centuries of habit with it: what a phrase should do next, where it should come home, how it ought to feel. Those habits are a gift, but they also interpret an experience before you have had it. In a sense they claim it. Inside Wilson’s scale, those habits stopped working — for me, as the one composing, as much as for anyone listening. I couldn’t fall back on what one typically does. The scale, the instrument I built, and the keyboard under my hands together opened a field of possibilities, and within it I made something that held together. What appeared in it reminded me of Lilliana. I’ll say a little about how that happened, further down — as an account of what happened to me, not as a guide. I would not want to tell you what to hear. Telling you would hand you an interpretation, and an interpretation can take the place of what you actually hear. If this history taught me anything, it is that the explanations the world hands us tend to cover over the direct encounter — and the direct encounter is often where the truth is. What you hear in it is yours.
There is one more thing in Wilson’s design that belongs here. Conventional Western tuning is built for gravity. Its harmony pulls toward a home note, and the pull is so strong and so widely shared that it arrives already interpreted — a force of alignment with what everyone else already hears, from somewhere outside the moment of listening. Wilson’s scales loosen that pull. There is still attraction between tones, but no single center. Each of the ten tones in this one is made by multiplying together three of the same five generating factors, so that tones sharing a factor are related — and any one of them can serve as the place you start from; none outranks the rest. What forms instead of a home is something closer to a constellation — except that no chart fixes its shapes in advance. Each listener draws them, and the shapes each listener draws are real.
Wilson drew these sets as lattices: networks of relationship running in several directions at once, in which the same interval always runs the same way.
The larger work this music belongs to is called A Lattice of Unplanned Measurements. I can’t think of a better description of the history I have been writing down, in one form or another, for ten years. A census page. A genetic report in percentages. The age at which a mother and two of her sons died. Eighteen months between a stranger’s lunch in Baltimore and a room in Pontecurone. Seventy-five years between a woman shouting in a street and her daughter at a funeral. None of it was planned, and all of it turned out to be connected — not in a line, and not around any one center, but in every direction at once.
Uncanny is the word I keep coming back to. It is also the word I would use for everything that happened with Lilliana.
Where it came from
A Lattice of Unplanned Measurements was my return to composition after a long time away. The last pieces I wrote before turning to electronic music, and then to other media altogether, date from when Alice was still alive. One of them, for flute and piano, asked the flute for quarter-tones — notes that fall between the keys. Decades later I came back by the same door: a sound I built from little more than sine waves, played on a keyboard, in a tuning that falls between the keys. It is a very exposed way to work. There is nowhere to hide in a sine wave.
The second movement is in three sections, and I didn’t set out to write any of it for Lilliana. Then, listening back to the middle section, I found myself at sea: looking out over the water by moonlight, moving gently through it, alone with my thoughts — a feeling anyone who has spent nights on the ocean will know. And I realized I was thinking of Lilliana. La Vagabonda, her friend Anna called her: the wanderer, who spent fifteen years crossing between Genoa and the Far East and timed her sailings by the full moon. Her wandering ran west, too. More than once she crossed to New York to look for us — searching for a name that no longer existed, and turning over, I imagine, what she would say when she found us: the truth, as her father had asked, told kindly. That was when I knew the music was hers. Only afterward did I notice the date. I had finished it on the anniversary of her death — which falls within a day or so of my father’s birthday, just as his funeral, five years before her death, fell within a day or so of her birthday. The two of them never met. Two ships continually passing in the night.
The sea runs all through this history — the crossings that scattered the family in the first place, the ships Lilliana worked for fifteen years, the water where my father said he was most at peace. I offer the image as what happened to me, not as what the music is. Your own crossing may look nothing like it.
What the middle section had caught, I think, was something I saw in her often when we talked: a curiosity about distant places and distant people that the two of us shared, and the astonishment of finding each other so late — astonishment with the full weight of the years in it, and of a family history that had been brought to bear on everything and was now, in a room in Pontecurone, finally coming into the open. That mixed feeling — hers, as I imagine it, and my own, all through my passage among these encounters — is what I hear in the music. We were both, in our way, travelers. We both knew how hard it is to bring what you find back into ordinary life, and we both kept trying anyway.
So the middle section is hers. The score marks it for Lilliana Rovelli. I call it Nostra Lilli — “our Lilli,” as she was known to the people who loved her. (She is no relation to Lili, my partner, whose drawing you see in the video, though the coincidence has never stopped pleasing me.)
It is not a portrait. She could not be fitted into two minutes, or into nine essays. It is a sketch of one quality of her mind.
I sent the piece to the family in Italy, and to her doctor, with a note in English and Italian. The only answer came from Carla — whose French, years earlier, had opened the door in Costa Vescovato. She loved it.
The image
The drawing is by Lili Maya, who was there for nearly every step of this history. It is made of paper and bark — fragments of her own drawings and sketches, pieces of translucent tracing paper, and a few slips of tree bark almost as thin as the paper — in light gray, brown and taupe, torn and cut and laid onto a surface, then marked with black ink. Seen whole, it looks almost like a skin of some kind, layered and organic. The marks run from medium to small, and here and there a cluster of dots sits as tight as a constellation — the kind no chart has drawn. It could be something you’d come across on the wall of a cave: old, deliberate, and not quite readable. The video holds it still for the length of the music.
Torn may sound violent. It isn’t. The fragments stay fragments, rough edges and all, and the composition holds them together anyway. Clearly made, clearly chosen. Free, certainly. Not random. Like the tuning, it gives the eye nothing it already knows how to read — no picture of anything to recognize — and so whatever you meet in it stays your own.
It took me a while to see why the cutting and tearing in it moved me. In this family, paper was cut and torn to make things disappear. Adelaide and then Alice took scissors to photographs; letters went down an incinerator chute; records were lost or let go. Lili cut and tore her paper to choose what to keep. Every fragment was chosen on purpose — many of them taken from her own earlier drawings — and set beside the others, so that together they could be seen. It is the same gesture, run the other way — not removing, but gathering; not cutting something out of the drawing, but cutting it in.
And the bark. I don’t know what tree it came from. But I can’t look at it without thinking of the mulberry tree in Costa Vescovato whose roots my great-aunt Lina tripped on in 1918 — the accident that ended her life, and that this family covered for a century with a story about the influenza. There is an older connection, too: in China, Korea and Japan, paper has been made for centuries from the inner bark of the paper mulberry, a cousin of the tree in Costa. Trees keep turning up in this history. The family name, as Lilliana told me, began in Spain as Robles — oaks. And the station in Milan where I very nearly gave up and went home, Rogoredo, is named for an oak grove paved over long ago. In Lili’s drawing, for me, a tree is there again — transformed, thin as paper, a marked surface, a texture. I feel it resonate. Gathered in with everything else, it lets me see this story, its past and its present, and myself inside it. I know that is my reading, not the drawing’s. The bark was one of the conditions of Lili’s composition; what it means depends on who is standing in front of it, and someone else — my family among them — might see nothing of the kind. I accept that. It is what the music asks of a listener, too.
Listening
All through this history, the hardest part was never finding the facts. It was keeping the expected story — my family’s, and my own — from telling me what I had found. Had I done what one typically does — had I gone along with the conventions that came with my family and my world — most of it would still be where it was left. The music declines what one typically does as well: it is one possibility among many inside Wilson’s conditions, and it does not borrow the familiar pull. So does the torn paper. In their small way, they are the same refusal.
At the top of this post is the middle section on its own, about two minutes. Below is the whole of the second movement, about seven, with Nostra Lilli at its center.
There is nothing in it to decode.
Almost Visible is a notebook of encounters with art, sound, space, and attention. If this one opened something, consider sharing and subscribing.