Andrea Guzzoletti -- Invisible Cities, the music project that has been gradually evolving for the past three years finally moved into its finished state and was released to the public on line on itunes and Amazon earlier on this year and is available in local shops from this morning onwards for people living in this area and not wishing to buy on line. It can now be found at Edicola dal Mario in Barga Vecchia, Edicola in Barga Giardino, Bottega della musica at Fornaci, Tony Records in Castelnuovo and Telerecord in Lucca.
The record is dedicated to the memory of the great musician Hector Zazou who tragically passed away in September 2008, and contains a previously unreleased live track which gives us further valuable insight by way of a performance by Andrea Guzzoletti on stage together with his friend Hector Zazou.
andrea guzzoletti outside his studio in Barga pointing to his new QR code ceramic tile linking him to the new iBarga information system
Andrea Guzzoletti’s tour of “Invisible Cities” borrows its title and its thematic structure from the brilliant prose-poem of the late Italo Calvino, Italy’s most imaginative 20th century writer. Le Citta Invisibli, published in 1972, was ostensibly an account of Marco Polo’s “conversations” with Kublai Khan – descriptions of the Mongol Empire’s far-flung capitals by a wandering merchant who knew the Great Khan’s immense realm better than the emperor himself. The two men shared no common language, and in Calvino’s rendition their exchanges revolve around largely non-verbal reactions to emblematic objects that Polo has acquired on the long road from Venice to China. It is left to the reader to interpret the responses that each object invokes in the emperor and his Venetian guide.
Beyond the acknowledged debt to Calvino stretch a long line of more purely musical resonances, dating back most notably to another celebrated Venetian, the Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi. Like Vivaldi in his lyrical potrait of the “Four Seasons,” the nine tracks of Guzzoletti’s “Invisible Cities” employ instruments and musical phrases to capture the soundscapes that define our experience of the physical world, often more distinctly and powerfully than the landmarks that serve as their backdrop.
Early in the genesis of this work, I spent a memorable day listening to parts of half a dozen tracks with Keane – a writer and a painter – both of us held in thrall by a musical composition that took its inspiration from literature and wielded its notes as though they were subtle brush strokes. We played a little game as we listened, speculating on real cities that seemed to emerge from Guzzoletti’s passages. Hong Kong and Tokyo came up, as I recall, along with New York and Paris. We thought we heard Sao Paolo and Bahia, and the vast megalopolises of Africa: Nairobi, Cairo and Lagos.
I can’t say why, exactly. There weren’t specific musical references – none of the precise allusions to Broadway taxis or smoky Montparnasse bistros that act as signposts in George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and “American in Paris,” two other grand monuments in the line that leads to Andrea Guzzoletti. It was, rather, an inexplicable sensation of those places that his composition (and he and his extraordinary fellow musicians) provoked. A plunge into the very meaning of “city,” its mythic force and creative vitality, whether invisible and nameless or visible and named.
You can’t ask for more from an act of the imagination, whether its medium is music, words or paint.
Article by Frank Viviano
In July for the art event THE CUBE in Piazza Angelio it was possible to hear some of the music written for Invisible Cities but now for the first time it is possible to hear the complete cycle of music composed by Andrea.
Complete article on Invisible Cities can be seen here