Where Thou Smile, There is Home is a duo composed for violin and viola. It was commissioned by violist Muriel Razavi and violinist Ava Bahari.
Stay tuned for premiere information at the Houbara Festival in Cologne in April 2024.
Sepideh is a multimedia composition for solo piano, video, and audio playback inspired by the Women, Life, Freedom Movement in Iran. The title itself carries a dual meaning, symbolizing both the dawn and an Iranian woman's name. It's worth noting that Sepideh is also the name of a young Iranian activist currently incarcerated.
The creative process behind this work holds a special place in my heart. It marks the first project that brought together the communities I deeply cherish: mothers and children, and the musician community. Throughout its development, I felt an outpouring of love, compassion, and support in every aspect of this project, from crafting ribbons to filming the video components and composing the music. Furthermore, I had the privilege of collaborating remotely with Sandra Sangiao, a versatile Spanish vocalist, who lent her voice to the audio playback, and Yun Lee Young, a pianist based in Toronto, who skillfully recorded the sound effects on the piano. A special thanks to Joshua Weinfeld of Continuous Motion Production for recording and editing the visuals.
Sepideh portrays the collective transformation of humanity, as we seek to address the oppression and persecution of minorities on a global scale. My hope for this multimedia composition is to provide the audience with a transformative experience. As the virtual world of sounds and images unfolds during the performance, I wish it leaves a lasting impression on their perspectives.
How Could I Know is a duo for clarinet and piano commissioned by Toronto-based clarinetist, Peter Stoll. It is inspired by Rumi's Ghazal, Swallowing the Sun.
How Could I Know explores my feelings and lived experiences vis à vis the Women, Life, Freedom movement. The composition begins with a melody based on the overtone series of clarinet, in an “incorrect” order and register. As the theme develops, this material transforms by way of spectral, atonal, and total serialist compositional techniques. The final thematic statement presents the same opening material, now in a corrected order and register. Through this transformation, from chaos to ordered arrival, I aim to depict the small, internal changes necessary to realize transformation.
HOW COULD I know this melancholy
Would make me so crazy,
make of my heart a hell
of my two eye raging rivers?
How could I know a torrent would
snatch me out of nowhere away,
Toss me like a ship upon a sea of blood,
that waves would crack the ship’s ribs board by board,
tear with endless pitch and yaw each plank
that a leviathan would rear its head,
gulp down the ocean’s water,
that such an endless ocean could dry up like a desert,
that the sea-quenching serpent could then split that desert
could jerk me of a sudden, like a Korah, with the blend of wrath
deep into a pit?
When these transmutations came about
no trace remained of that desert or the sea
How should I know how it all happened
since how drowned within Howlessness?
What a multiplicity of how could I knows?
But I don’t know-
for to counter that sea
rushing in my mouth
I swallowed a froth of opium
Ghaal 1855
Translated by late Dr. Franklin D. Lewis
Goodnight Moon is a composition for voice, cello, piano and audio playback commissioned by a Montreal based trio, Noise Partout. Stay tuned for premier information!
Minakari (2022) is a solo piano composition commissioned by pianist Melody S Quah.
I find Minakari an elegant, delicate, and sophisticated form of art and I am mesmerized by the beauty that these detailed oriented colorful geometric patterns create.
The first time I talked to Melody, she had a similar impression on me: a pianist with an elegant, delicate, and sophisticated personality. Her piano performance was not different. Therefore, I decided to use characteristics of Minakari as my source of inspiration for this composition.
Minakari is the art of miniature painting and coloring on ceramics and metal. The word Minakari has two parts: Mina and Kari. “Mina” is associated with the word Minoo (a feminine name) meaning heaven. It is also defined as the blue sky in Farsi. The design usually has bright colors primarily blue and detailed geometric patterns with small variations.
His Gabbah Is Turquoise (2022), is a composition for double bass and piano comissioned by Ali Kian Yazdanfar for Sayeh Roshan Project.
His Gabbah Is Turquoise (2022) is a commission by Ali Kian Yazdanfar for the Sayeh Roshan Project. Its musical elements are inspired by patterns, textures and colors found in Gabbah. Gabbah in Farsi means raw, natural, and uncut and is a type of Persian rug with bright colors and rough and primitive textures. Its patterns are formed by asymmetric and symmetric knots and can be as diverse as the mind and imagination of its craftsman. The color turquoise represents wisdom, tranquility, protection, good fortune, and hope.
When I asked Ali what elements of Iranian music or culture most interested him, he referred to his memories with his father talking about different aspects of Persain culture. I have been wanting to compose a piece dedicated to my father as well. His Gabbah Is Turquoise is a homage to the fathers.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.
Silent is a multi-media composition for clarinet, cello, piano, soprano, tenor, audio playback, dance, and visuals commissioned by Charsu Quartet. It is inspired by The Wind-up Doll, a poem by an influential Iranian poet, Forough Farokhzad (1934-1967). Influenced by the poem’s perspective on the ways a male-dominated social system in Iran has destroyed women’s lives, I aimed to depict the feelings of an emotionally, physically oppressed woman struggling towards change.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Stay tuned for premier information!
(Binaural Version) USE YOUR HEADPHONE
The Sounds of Cities Album, Yu Tsz Long
Then It Was This One is composed for clarinet, piano, and cello. It is inspired by Uzeyir Hajibeyli's operetta, If Not That One, Then This One. The composition received Certificate of Achievement & Publishing in the USA from the Hajibeyli International Composition Competition.
A proud, recently retired woman and her adult daughter square-off in a grand but faded Montréal apartment. It’s a familiar and tiresome routine for the two of them, but today their complex give-and-take will open a door to an entirely unexpected, terrifying, and potentially wondrous future neither are fully ready to enter. Vanishing Point is a 30-minute opera for soprano, mezzo-soprano, and Pierrot Ensemble instrumentation that I created in collaboration with librettist Nika Khanjani. We have taken elements from our shared history as Iranian immigrants to craft a challenging piece of complex and nuanced emotional shifts, a whiplash of tenderness and bitterness, and a sober question of whether we can reframe a crisis into an opportunity to show up fully present for someone we love even as we watch them slip away. Densely crafted around themes of loss, migration, and unresolved trauma, it asks audiences to bring their attention, patience, and empathy to an emotional canvas that is perhaps uncommon in traditional opera.
We have designed this opera as a vehicle exclusively for BIPOC performers. On the premier performance, Dr. J. Marchand Knight and Fredericka Petit-Homme will embody two women who, like many Iranian immigrants to North America, resist aligning themselves with any simple and reductive category—especially when facing the universal challenges and heartbreak of the loss of identity through dementia.
The world premiere of opera will take place at Salle Bourgie, Montreal, Quebec on October 10, 2021 at 7:30 pm (EDT). Link: https://thepointofsale.com/tickets/trytique
Dancing My Heart Out is a solo cello composition commissioned by amazingly talented cellist, Dobrochna Zubek. The idea was to create a composition that was a reflection on the lockdown period in 2020. The musical idea develops through the juxtaposition of playing on the instruments and using the instrument's body as a percussion instrument. The two ideas are woven into each other in a way that one comes out of or dissolves to another.
