Peter Knight's 5+2 Brass Ensemble has recently released Invisible Cities and Other Works, on Rufus Records. The CD comprises compositions inspired by Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities, which is a series of short and often surreal pieces about fictitious cities, described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan as a series of conversations. Peter Knight is based in Melbourne, Australia. All About Jazz talked to him recently about the CD.

All About Jazz: What was it about Calvino's Invisible Cities that drew you and was important enough to prompt composition, performance and recording?

Peter Knight: I first read Invisible Cities years ago and it was one of those books that stayed with me. When I decided that I wanted to write a suite for the brass ensemble it popped into my head again. I think it seemed like a great starting point for musical inspiration partly because of its structure: it is basically a collection of short pieces that each describe an imaginary city. I wanted my suite to be a collection of vignettes each with a strikingly different 'feeling' but at the same time that link together on some level, in a similar manner to Calvino's stories. Not sure if the suite achieves that but I have had some postive feedback from Calvino fans.

AAJ: Was there anything else led to this project?

PK: My relationship with Adrian Sherriff [bass trombone] was also important in terms of the formation of the group. I had been hanging out with Adrian a bit and was getting really into his playing. I really wanted to create a project with him and we both thought a brass ensemble would be a great challenge.

At the time I wrote the suite I was completing a Master of Music Performance degree at VCA (the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne) and having composition lessons with Mark Pollard. He certainly influenced my thinking, he is a great guy, really interesting composer with a really different approach to me. We had many fascinating discussions and he turned me onto to some new ways of doing things.

AAJ: You quoted TS Eliot as saying that poetry communicates at a completely different level than you might get by simply understanding the meaning of the words. Italo Calvino's work—including Invisible Cities—has this ability to communicate this way; to bypass thinking and go straight into experiencing. Did this play a part in choosing a work by Calvino to inform your composition?

PK: This was a huge part of it. I really didn't want to write 'programmatic' music, you know, where the music tries to represent something else. Music does remind us of things and deliver us to our own memories of things, but it is an abstract art. The closest I came to trying to represent something in the suite is in "Cities and Desire": in Zobeide (one of Calvino's pieces), the streets of the city wind 'skein-like' around one another. I tried to wind three melodic fragments around one another during the course of the music. However, essentially, I just wanted to respond to the 'feeling realm' offered in the writing and for the most part I just read the stories and tried to hear music. I wasn't particularly responding to narrative forms or anything else...in the end it's just music.

AAJ: Were you guided for each of the pieces by the content of specific pieces of Calvino's work or by some sense you gained from the work as a whole? Or were you guided by your own visions of invisible cities—Peter Knight's invisible cities? For example, the tune "Hypatia" seemed evocative of New York City.

PK: Yes I know what you mean, it is 'big city' music. And I was thinking of big cities when I wrote it. The chaos of the city. The myriad simultaneous, independent, and yet overlapping narratives that are going on at any moment in a city. I really love cities, I love walking in the city at peak hour in the crowd; that strange feeling of at once being engulfed and alone. These experiences and feelings definitely influence my music. I know that, and yet I can't really pinpoint the process by which they do.

AAJ: You've mentioned ee cummings as a poet whose work you love. How important is poetry to you as a musician and composer?

PK: It's really important. To be honest words were my first love. I was one of those kids who read books until 2AM every night and then had trouble waking up to go to school in the morning. I think I came to music later. And I am still really fascinated by words and how they work; how they create meaning. It's amazing to me that, in poetry, sometimes a series of words can make little immediate sense in terms of their explicit meaning, but still communicate a clear sense of something: beauty, sadness, violence...whatever. There is something similar for me about this process and that which arises when we listen to music. I mean, as I have already said, music is an abstract art. It doesn't really resemble anything, and yet it evokes a great deal. When I read cummings' poetry I am reminded of music somehow.

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