The music of Invisible Cities is the result of my first collision with Calvino’s extraordinary novel. For years I had been unable to bridge categories of music, thinking that a work could be either lyrical or conceptually rigorous, but not both. Calvino’s novel, however, is a tightly structured mathematical work, yet also opens with the gorgeous line: “In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.”