"Inner Cities are where you go to get debriefed, to watch Cage and Braxton play chess in Washington Square Park; to listen to Cy Twombly just back from the Gobi desert; to meet Diana in her temple on Lake Nemi; to hear Art Tatum play the whole world from memory; to cook funghi porcini for Luigi Nono in Berlin-Friedenau; to listen for Messaien in Birdland; to hear Evan Parker play the Festa dell'Unita and George Lewis play the Tower of Pisa; to observe Sartre and Beauvoir drinking Campari from a window on Piazza Navona; to accidentally step on Dietrich Fischer Dieskau's foot backstage at the Akademie der Kunste; to record an interview with King Hussein of Jordan; to shake Stravinsky's hand in the American Sector-Berlin and Varese's in New Haven.........<br><br>I offer these disconnected autobiographical fragments, attempting to connect the dots and tell you something about the pieces on this set of CDs, maybe my best music.<br><br>Inner Cities began in 1991 as a single innocent piano piece and has now evolved into a musical cycle of 12 pieces, sometimes performed (following Daan Vanderwalle's brilliant intuition) in its 6-hour entirety. Each piece starts with a single idea, chord, or cellular pattern, which serves as its own source of narrative and history."<br><br><i>Alvin Curran<i>