11/24/2023 0 Comments Invisible cities italo calvino exerptLike all of Phyllis’s inhabitants, you follow zigzag lines from one street to another, you distinguish the patches of sunlight from the patches of shade, a door here, a stairway there, a bench where you can put down your basket, a hole where your foot stumbles if you are not careful. Soon the city fades before your eyes, the rose windows are expunged, the statues on the corbels, the domes. Here is an excerpt from Calvino’s description of the city: Phyllis i also based on its namesake city. There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth that they respect it so much they avoid all contact that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.” Suspended in the void: Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. “After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveller directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The city is described by Calvino as follows They are made of 8mm thick mild steel, cut, bent, bolted or slotted together.īaucis is based on its namesake. The first two shown here are distillations of two cities, Baucis and Phyllis. This series of sculptures were inspired by Calvino’s text. These are not only cities of stone and steel, but also of ideas. Physical portrayal is blurred with metaphor, emotion, aspirations and failings. The cities are thought experiments in which the laws of physics are unravelled and the limitations of material reality are ignored. These are beguiling places, where things are never as they seem. The accounts are divided into eleven groups: Cities and Memory, Cities and Desire, Cities and Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities and Eyes, Cities and Names, Cities and the Dead, Cities and the Sky, Continuous Cities, and Hidden Cities The tale intersperses the dialogue between Polo and Khan with descriptions of 55 cities. The text suspends disbelief and opens the reader’s imagination to the potentiality of these fantastical places. They are described in a magical, poetic manner, sometimes childlike, sometimes melancholy. The cities are fantastical in both construction and concept. In the course of their discussions, Polo describes a series of metropolises, each of which bears a woman’s name. This page last updated on Tue May 29 2007.Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities is an account of a fictional conversation between the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and the Venetian explorer, Marco Polo. The middle section then focuses on the timbres of the vowels, while the final section brings these together, with the filtered consonants accompanying the song-like vowel sounds. In the opening, for example, the rhythmic texture is the result of filtering only the consonants in the speech. My treatment of the spoken text proceeded in a similar fashion: although the speech is never clearly recognizable, it shapes the rhythms, timbres, and overall gestures of the music. In particular, the images of mirrors and water were uppermost in my mind while composing. In composing Valdrada, I wanted to draw upon the imagery, atmosphere, and poetry of the text without creating an explicit "setting" of it. Finally, Marco tells of the relationship between the city and its mirror: "the two cities live for one another, their eyes locked together but there is no love between them." So great is their obsession with these mirrors of themselves that it becomes not so much their own actions and passions which are of importance to them, but those of their images in the water. Marco tells of how an arriving traveler sees not one but two cities: the "real" one above and its reflection in the water below he then explains the peculiar awareness which the inhabitants of Valdrada have of their reflections in the lake. The piece is based on Marco's description of Valdrada, a city built upon the shore of a lake. Calvino's book is a collection of prose poems, connected by the scenario of Marco Polo telling Kublai Khan stories of the fantastic cities which he has visited. Valdrada, composed at the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music, is based on an excerpt from Le cittá invisibili by Italo Calvino. Valdrada was the first of a series of electronic works that I had planned to compose that were inspired by stories in Italo Calvino's book Invisible cities. Valdrada Home Music About Frances White Contact
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