Cities and the Dead, computer-generated soundfile (1997)

I borrow a chapter title from Calvino's Invisible Cities to bring to mind a cemetery, one whose rolling, overgrown landscape I have missed since moving away from western New York. The varied plant life and scattered grave markers of Rochester's Mt. Hope Cemetery often suggested to me an ideal for my compositions: an intrusion of culture upon nature that does not entirely tame it, but rather accommodates its chaotic beauty. The paths of Mt. Hope Cemetery are mostly named after Rochester streets, a fact that never failed to bring to my mind one of Calvino's necropolises: "The streets of the Laudamia of the dead are just wide enough to allow a gravedigger's cart to pass, and many windowless buildings look out on them; but the pattern of the streets and the arrangement of the dwellings repeat those of the living Laudomia, and in both, families are more and more crowded together, in compartments crammed one above the other."

Listen to an MP3 excerpt from Cities and the Dead.

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