THE STORY
The Periodic Table is a 75-minute, 21-movement, solo piano work, musically bringing to life Primo Levi’s book by the same name and guided by Nicolas Patruno’s Understanding Primo Levi.
AnonymousUnknown author. Cropping and color balancing by the uploader., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
A brief word on Nicolas Patruno, or simply Patruno as I called him. He was a professor of Italian and scholar of Primo Levi. He felt the past intimately and recognized how the past could have affected those students who he taught. He was outspoken in the name of justice and what writing and chemistry were to Primo Levi, teaching was to Patruno. He lived his life with a fierce dedication to speaking against injustice paired with a deep core of joy and enjoyment of life.
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Origins of the Project
Nicolas Patruno first introduced me to Primo Levi in 2005 during my freshman year at Bryn Mawr College. We read The Periodic Table - Levi’s opus and autobiography framed through the lens of 21 different elements. Levi was an Italian chemist, author, and Holocaust survivor who bore witness and carried the stories those who did not survive throughout his autobiographical, fictional, and essay writing. 
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Patruno and Levi and irrevocably linked in my life; Patruno was the first teacher at Bryn Mawr I connected with in a crucial point of my life and introduced me to Levi. Levi’s writings showed how meeting the wounds of the world with a scientist’s mind does not necessarily mean to feel things any less.