The second installment of "Relevant Tones Live," a podcast series copresented by the Esopus Foundation and Chicago-based nonprofit Access Contemporary Music (ACM), centered around Italo Calvino's 1965 short story collection Cosmicomics, which tells the story of the dawn of the universe through the eyes of an immortal narrator known as "Qwfwq."

ACM's founder, composer Seth Boustead, released a new album of music inspired by eight of these stories, and for this event, he and I discussed the process of adapting these works into musical form. The stories’ literary and scientific legacies were explored in depth with writer and cartoonist John Dermot Woods (Mortals) and Yale University astronomer Chiara Mingarelli.

As always, the conversation took place in tandem with live music—in this case, five pieces from Boustead’s album performed by Unheard-of//Ensemble.