This
piece is based on one of the cities described in Italo Calvino's book, Invisible Cities.
Olinda is
an expanding city, and such such as in the description, I try
to build
a melody based on the expansion of timbric molecules and fragments of the melody
itself.
You can listen at: Olinda
Hidden Cities 1
In Olinda, if
you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find somewhere a
point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it slightly
enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennas, the skylights, the
gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the
squares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later
you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a
soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier
city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses its
way toward the outside.
Olinda is
certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks
which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains, in the
center, the old narrow girdle of the walls from which the withered spires rise,
the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around
them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old
quarters with them, enlarged but maintaining their proportions an a broader
horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters,
which also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still
more recent ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the
city, a totally new Olinda
which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of lymph of
the first Olinda and
of all the Olindas that
have blossomed one from the other; and within this innermost circle there are
always blossoming--though it is hard to discern them--the next Olinda and
those that will grow after it.
Italo
Calvino, Invisible Cities
