This piece takes both its graphic and musical inspiration from Ptolemy's The Almagest, Nicolaus Copernicus' On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and Book Five of Johannes Kepler's The Harmonies of the World. Much of the graphic content of this broadside is a reworking of these three writers' celestial diagrams. Kepler really did believe in a "harmony of the spheres," Copernicus only partially worked out a correct celestial mechanics, and Ptolemy put the earth at the center of the universe. Each of these intellectual constructs was part of a dream world, a vision of a reality which had only a relative truth.

Scored for guitar, bass clarinet, marimba, and harp, this piece takes its musical structure from the celestial siting rings found at the pre-Columbian archaeological dig at Cahokia Mounds in south-western Illinois, at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. This site contains the largest pre-Columbian structure north of Mexico City and, also, the remains of a Native American city which population of over 50,000 constituted one of the largest pre-European settlements in North America. This musical piece is a meditation of the uses of time as recorded at this site by the transit of the stars and planets overhead. (Recommend purchase of two copies for performance.)

Joe was born in Elmira, NY on November 29, 1952. He attended St. Joseph's Collegiate High School in Buffalo, N.Y., received a B.A. in Music at the University of Buffalo, and received his Masters Degree in Musicology at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. He and his wife Wendy were married on July 2, 1988 in San Francisco, CA.

As a composer and performer, Joe was primarily concerned with drawing the listener's attention to long time structures, forms occurring in the natural world, and the archaeological record. He wrote music for the concert hall, theater, film, and gallery spaces, using various instruments including keyboard, electronic drones and harmonics, piano and harpsichord, harmonic singing, the didjeridoo, and an instrument he invented, The Spirit Stick, as well as many others. He was also a member of the Didjeridoo Ensemble, and the Strawberry Creek String Band, where he played guitar and didjeridoo.

His most recent theater/film music was written in collaboration with John DiStefano for Kwan and Iger's Pins and Noodles, premiered at Center for the Arts Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, CA, in November of 1993 which was transformed into a film and premiered on PBS's series POV in May of 1997. In November of 1994, DreamFrame for guitar was premiered at Roulette, NYC.

Joe was currently developing and performing variations of As Oceans Curve as well as his most recent work, An Arc of Gathering: The Mississippi River at Minneapolis, St. Louis and New Orleans. The first of these and Joe's last performance was performed in March of 1997 in Minneapolis at the Red Eye Theatre. These are nine hour performance/installation pieces. These series of site specific sound installations are a meditation on different aspects of the physical and psychic nature of the world's oceans and the Mississippi River, as well as the physical space in which the pieces are performed. Joe performed with his wife, poet and musician Wendy Jeanne Burch in their collaborative piece, Traffic Prayers, which is a meditation upon the bardos, written about in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, at Stoa Gallery in Petaluma, at Pauline Oliveros NonStop Flight (now available on CD) as well as various performances throughout California.

During January of 1992 he created and produced YesterDay Foretold/Ayer PreSagio, a multi-media theater piece with visual artist Charles Rose at the Mission Theater/Teatro Mision, in San Francisco whose temporal form is based on the meso-american 52 year calendar and whose content is the retelling of the eight dark omens experienced by the inhabitants of Mexico city 10 years before the invasion of Cortez in 1519.

In October of 1992, Joe conceived and organized a six-city live, interactive teleconferenced concert of experimental music, poetry and performance art between The Experimental Intermedia Foundation, New York, NY; Phil Davis' Shadow Productions Houston, TX; Pauline Oliveros Foundation - The Parlour, Kingston, NY; The Homestead parlor home of Joe Catalano and Wendy Burch, Oakland CA; The Electronic Cafe, International, Los Angeles; and The Interarts Consortium, UCSD La Jolla; featuring the work of 50 artists including, among others, Robert Ashley, Linda Montano, Charles Amirkhanian and Pauline Oliveros. The event is documented in the article Electronic Midwifery: A Videophone Celebration of Pauline Oliveros's Four Decades of Composing and Community by Joe Catalano in Leonardo Music Journal, Vol.3, pp.29-34, 1993.

Joe's other major works include Five Terrestrial Projections for Guitar and Other Instruments , a set of five major chamber pieces for guitar premiered at New Langton Arts, San Francisco, CA and It's In The Cards, an evening length Multi-Media, multi-artist musical performance work based solely on mail art presented at The Lab in San Francisco, CA.

Joe was actively involved in many events presenting other artists. In 1992 he conceived and curated the annual High Tides: San Francisco New Music Festival of Bay Area Composers, presented by the Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, featuring new works by Bay Area composers and sound artists. For many years he and his wife Wendy have been presenting The Homestead Series, which they organized and held in their home, presenting musicians, poets, and other artists. His wife plans to continue this popular series.

Joe was also employed at the UC Berkeley Music Library.

He was survived by his wife, Wendy Jeanne Burch, his Mother and Father Luise and Leonard Catalano, two brothers Michael and James and sister Marie. His ashes are buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Piedmont, CA. Joe requested that the words to one of his compositions be placed on his marker: Listen Deeply, Beauty Surrounds You.

Sounding the Deep Ocean Layer; Toward the Nevada Desert, and The Great Barrier Reef - a set of three scores from an ongoing series of pieces for group performance. Each piece is a meditation on different aspects of the physical and psychic nature of the world's oceans.

Set for guitar and flute, the score is formatted into two squares. The combination of the two parts is left to the performers' discretion though the instructions demand that they perform all the written material provided. It is very likely that no two performances will ever be the same because the possible combinations of the two sets of material (of nine units each) equal 362,880 different possibilities. The most striking aspect of this work is the inclusion of silence within a minimalist framework.

A different kind of string trio, scored for guitar, cello and piano, this piece is based on the Fibbonicci number series found in the growth patterns of many trees, plants and animals. It is the working out, in sound, of these life patterns. Its effect has been described as possessing "a passionate quality which borders on the deeply tragic."

This composition for guitar, harpsichord, and optional recorder, is based on the musical material derived from a magic square of nine notes. The first section relies heavily on improvisation, while the second section is the rigorous working out of rhythms, from nine beats down to a single beat.

This piece was especially composed for the Tenth Anniversary celebration of Deep Listening Institute on May 27, 1995, with a map of Kingston, New York in the center with mandalas on each side