Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a series of descriptions, really conversations, told by his fictitious Marco Polo to an invented Kublai Khan. As Marco travels round the world on the Emperor’s business, his job is not to bring back treasure or trade, but to barter in stories – the accumulated wealth of his imagination. Invisible Cities is a social enterprise that trains people who have experienced homelessness to become walking tour guides of their own city. We offer alternative tours to locals and tourists. Invisible Cities, more than any other novel, feels fresh and new each time. Every chapter talks about a city with a different name and the cities that resonate with you the most will change depending on what you're going through in life at that moment, or what you've experienced since the last time you read it. Invisible Cities is a novel by the Italian author Italo Calvino that tells the story of a bored emperor, Kublai Khan, who asks the newly arrived Marco Polo to travel his kingdom and bring back. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the.
Christopher Cerrone’s widely acclaimed opera, INVISIBLE CITIES, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Music, is now available as a studio recording produced, engineered, mastered, and mixed by Nick Tipp. The recording is released by The Industry, LA’s home for new and experimental opera, on its new independent record label, The Industry Records.
Adapted from Italo Calvino’s 1972 fantastical novel, Cerrone’s delicate, quiet score explores sonic qualities of decay and lushness with a haunting simplicity through the use of found objects as instruments and pre-recorded voices interweaving with live voices.
The opera imagines a meeting of the emperor Kublai Khan at the end of his life with the explorer Marco Polo. And the story depicts a host of fantastical cities that the explorer Marco Polo narrates to Kublai Khan: unreal cities of desire, of memory, of the imagination and mind.
MUSIC & LIBRETTO BY
Hailed as “a rising star” (The New Yorker), Christopher Cerrone writes music of profound intimacy and rigor. Cerrone has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chamber Music America, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Opera America, the Jerome Foundation, ASCAP, and New Music USA. He was recently named to NPR’s 2011 crowd-sourced selection of young composers, “100 Composers Under 40.” In his hands, Italo Calvino’s novel becomes a deeply spiritual musical experience.
ChristopherCerrone.com
PRODUCED, ENGINEERED, MIXED & MASTERED BY
Nick Tipp is a recording engineer, mixer, and audio producer in Los Angeles. He specializes in acoustic studio recording, live recording and broadcast mixing of concerts, both acoustic and amplified.
With over 15 years of experience recording bands, ensembles and artists in an incredibly varied array of spaces. Nick seeks to create acoustic recordings that go far beyond the reality of the confines of the studio or concert hall and into the architecture of both his own mind and the imagined spaces the composer saw. NickTipp.com
CONDUCTED BY
Marc Lowenstein is the Music Director of The Industry. He has conducted the premieres of several new operas including The Mortal Thoughts of Lady Macbeth, Dice Thrown, The Scarlet Letter, The Peach Blossom Fan, and WET, and the American premieres of Schaeffer’s Loving and Aperghis’ Sextuor. He has conducted with the New York City Opera’s VOX new music festival, the Monday Evening Concert Series, Jacaranda, the Ear Unit, the Vinny Golia Ensemble, the Kadima Conservatory, the CalArts New Century Players, and Ensemble Green. He was the founder and music director of the Berkeley Contemporary Opera, a company that produced four seasons of contemporary operas.
He has been a professional whistler, plays klezmer clarinet, and he teaches theory, conducting, composition and history at CalArts.
BASED ON THE NOVEL BY ITALO CALVINO
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER YUVAL SHARON
WEBSITE & INTERACTIVE VIDEO BY DANIEL ANDERSON
GRAPHIC DESIGN & PACKAGING BY TRACI LARSON
LOGO DESIGN BY DANEL LUCAS
This recording of Invisible Cities was made possible with grants fromTHE COPLAND RECORDING FUND and NEW MUSIC USA. Additional support was generously provided by ELIZABETH & JUSTUS SCHLICHTING.
Microphones for recording provided by SENNHEISER.
The challenge is working with excerpts from a text that lends itself particularly well to this task, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In short, Invisible Cities is the fantastic description of 55 mythical cities, each with a character and personality of its own.
The task is to choose 5 cities from the selection provided and create a book that pushes the boundaries of the traditional book format.
The goal of the project is to present the text in a way that makes for an unusual, surprising, and rewarding experience for the reader. Think about how it can innovate on the physical structure and format of the book to add an interesting dimension to the text.
Cities & Eyes
Valdrada
The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the water. Thus the traveler, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake, and the other reflected, upside down. Nothing exists or happens in the one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, because the city was so constructed that its every point would be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the flutings and juttings of the facades that rise above the lake, but also the rooms' interiors with ceilings and floors, the perspective of the halls, the mirrors of the wardrobes.
Trading Cities
Eutropia
Eutropia is not one, but all these cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others are empty; and this process is carried out in rotation. Now I shall tell you how. On the day when Eutropia’s inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip.
Thin Cities
Isaura
Isaura is a city built upon deep vertical wells. And so far as the wells reach, the city exists. Beyond the reach of its underwater lake, the city ceases to be, it’s visible border mirroring the unseen borders of the lake below. Polo describes two religions growing up as a result of this geography. One group of people worships the god of the deep reservoir, the unseen lake and source of life to the area. The other worships all the methods produced to ensure that water moves upwards to the city.
Cities & The Sky
Andria
Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet's orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids. The city's calendar is so regulated that jobs and offices and ceremonies are arranged in a map corresponding to the firmament on that date: and thus the days on earth and the nights in the sky reflect each other.
Cities & Desire
Fedora
Invisible Cities Writer Calvino Crossword Clue
In the center of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, it had not for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today.