This chamber music cycle is written on initiative from the Cikada ensemble, who have comisioned some of the pieces. Other pieces have been commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain, Fondation Royaumont (Grand Atelier) and Trondheim International Chamber Music Festival.  The pieces have been performed seperately between 2005 and 2008, and the premiere of the whole cycle as a continous performance took place in 2009.

 

Part I of the cycle is titled Possible Cities and part II Essential Landscapes. The titles, and much of the inspiration for the music, is from Italo Calvinos book Invisible Cities. His novel 'Invisible Cities' is (among other things) a poetic meditation on construction and decay, on human inginuity and the inevitable forces of nature. The cycle moves from the image of the city in part I, with its tightly structured activities, towards the more organic developments and the openness of landscape in part II. Thus a central image is the friction between nature and culture, between the constructed object and the found object, between monument and ruin.

 

And Marco answered: ”While, at a sign from you, sire, the unique and final city raises its stainless walls, I am collecting the ashes of other possible cities that vanish to make room for it, cities that can never be rebuilt or remembered. (Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities p. 60)

 

Contemplating these essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustain cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then how they sadden and fall into ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords [...]  (Ibid, p. 122)

 

It is not the voice that commands the story: It is the ear. (Ibid, p. 135)

 

At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again. (Ibid, p. 136)