The Geography of Cities on Water (2009) for orchestra (3.2.3.2 / 4.2.2.1 / timp. / 3 perc. / harp / strings) [10:00] Shortly before my twenty-first birthday I stopped falling in love with people and started falling for cities instead. It wasn’t a calculated conversion; one day I just stopped checking out smiles and thighs and found myself drawn to tramways and cobblestones, streetlamps and archways. I’d just begun to lose patience with a string of bespectacled brunettes—and there was Valletta: sheer sandstone ramparts rising clear out of the sea… Venice, the city for forgetting, first glimpsed at dawn as the overnight train slid down that sliver of rail into Santa Lucia… then Paris: the sheer improbability of a cathedral, on an island, in a river, at the heart of a city… I used to imagine that one’s sense of self-worth could be measured by how close one lived to the Seine, til I spent two years a stone’s throw from the Ile-St.-Louis, where night after night of three-euro wine on the quais, the magic gradually wore thin… At first you think every encounter is distinct, pure, genuine. Later you begin to realize you have a type: wandering, poorly-marked streets, preferably leading downhill to a water view. Tilting and crumbling façades, remnants of a decaying grandeur. Tangiers, Dubrovnik, Bonifacio, Istanbul… Could you ever be faithful? There’s always some other worn-out seaside beauty (Marseilles? Valparaiso? Zanzibar? Cape Town?) a quick flight away… The Geography of Cities on Water is a collection of overlapping snapshots, memories with blurred edges which sometimes spill over into one another—the way you can stare at the Sultanahmet skyline and think about San Francisco: Pulling into the Grand Harbour after an hour of nothing but open water… Riding tramways over concentric canals in Amsterdam… Hearing the Gonzaga fanfare to open the Regatta on the grand canal, four days after Hurricane Katrina… A long chord of ships’ horns floating from the Bosphorus to my balcony…