Christopher Cerrone's Seductive Headphone Opera 'Invisible Cities'

Invisible Cities is a chillingly beautiful opera by Christopher Cerrone based on Italo Calvino’s classic novel that depicts a meeting between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which the explorer recounts fantastical stories about the cities he’s seen on his travels. As John Adams has recommended, “Listen to Chris Cerrone’s Invisible Cities on headphones, preferably in the dark.” This is music that inhabits its own mystical world and quietly demands its own space.

Shortlisted for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, Cerrone’s first opera created a lot of buzz last year with its wildly successful staging in LA’s Union Station, in which the cast of costumed singers and dancers performed and moved among the crowds of commuters while audience members—wearing wireless headphones that piped in the sound of the musicians and singers—followed the performers around the space. (Visit the production’s website to view video footage from the event.)

The music feels timeless with its long-breathed lines, gonglike resonances and drawn-out dissonances. Though the instrumentation is stripped down to 11 orchestra musicians and eight singers, the harmonies are rich, intricate and tightly executed by the vocalists, making the music sound more like chamber choir music than an opera at points.

Invisible Cities is not a narrative-driven opera, and there’s not much forward motion in the music, either; instead, each scene explores and builds within a theme of desire, memory, or death. The music reflects and communicates the character of each city: Isidora, the city of desire, features a seductive, vocalizing soprano line; Adelma, whose inhabitants’ faces appear as those of people the traveler knew who died, brings back this same soprano line in an unsettling, ghostlike representation of the past. Polo’s descriptions are interrupted by the chaotic “Language” scene, in which the language disconnect between Polo and Khan is represented by crude squawks, violent string plucks and voices overlapping in different languages.

If you only listen to one track, it should be the final Epilogue, arguably the most beautiful music in the opera, whose slow-moving intensity builds to a powerful and emotional close.

Released as the inaugural album from The Industry Records, the digital album and wooden box set are works of art themselves, including a collection of designed postcards from the different “invisible cities” with artwork by Traci Larson, texts about Marco Polo’s journey in the opera, and images from the LA production. 

'Christopher Cerrone: Invisible Cities'
The Industry Records | Released Nov. 4
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