September 2003

The text of this setting is Cavalcanti’s sonnet Biltà di donna e di saccente core, which begins with a list of beautiful things. Italo Calvino has called Cavalcanti “the poet of lightness” and he points to one image in the sonnet as an example of this, “…white snow, falling without wind”. The essay in which Calvino discusses these ideas, Lightness*, gives its name to the second part of the title.

All the melodic material of the piece is derived from a sestine by the troubadour Arnaut Daniel, a contemporary of Cavalcanti.

* Calvino, I. Six Memos For The Next Millennium (Vintage 1996)

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