Forth Day

Lecture – Panel Discussion – Concert

Lecture – Panel Discussion – Concert

23 February 2021

Live Events

Lecture and Discussion 3

Tradition and Modernity – Idea, Creativity and Conditional Beauty in Iran’s Modern Music.
Mehdi Kazerouni
Tuesday, 23 February 2021, 18:00 Tehran Time

How and to what extent the social shifts, aesthetic reorientations, changes in listening habits, the emergence of commercial commodity music of all kinds have mutually influenced each other are among the central topics of systematic investigations of recent Iranian music history.
The intention of these three lectures with subsequent discussion is to take a new step towards a systematic investigation of the continuity, transformation and ruptures on the path of Iranian music from Radif to electronic music.

Pass code: TIEMF2020

Lecture and Discussion 4

Sara Abazari, Mehran Pourmandan, Mehdi Kazerouni, Nader Mashayekhi, Mohsen Mirmehdi
Tuesday, 23 February 2021, 19:30 Tehran Time

Pass code: TIEMF2020

Aida Shirazi and Farbod Shirmohammad

Iranian Female Composers Association: Background, Goals, Achievements
Aida Shirazi and Farbod Shirmohammad
Live on Instagram
Tuesday 23 February 2021. 22:30 Tehran Time

Daily Report

A Short Report on the Past and Upcoming Events

Introduction

As the Iranian Female Composers Association, IFCA, we are committed to promoting and amplifying various aesthetics and practices of sonic creation by our members. This collection of works, curated mutually with Yarava Music Group, reflects the multiplicity and diversity of styles at IFCA. You hear just a few examples from a wide range of creations by tens of Iranian female composers, who are active and prolific worldwide. We hope that this program will spark the interest and curiosity for exploring the music of IFCA members.

Concert Part I (IFCA)

Ghâl 2

Text: “The silence was a bouquet, in my throat.” – Yadollah royaee
Commissioned by Long Beach Opera Based on the “Poem Sea 3”, by Yadollah Royaee

In my interpretation of the poetry: There is moment in the memory. A moment that a dialogues occurs between one and her memory. Their voices intertwine and linger, broken and fragmented, in the  pace of memory. In this process the lullaby as the memory never gets revealed and the word of the one who exists in the now, remains naked of meaning.
The voice breaks in a struggle to express itself, and in an atmosphere of nested sounds, it produces its own rhythm from its own fractures.

Video: Deniz Khateri

Poem sea no.3

The silence was a bouquet,
in my throat.
The song of the beach,
was the breeze of my kiss and your open eyelid.
On the waters
the wind bird
was disturbed in the nest of hundreds of noises.
From the poetry collections “Poem Seas” – Yadollah Royaee

Bahar Royaee

Biography

Born and raised in Iran, Bahar Royaee is a composer of concert and incidental music. A 2020 Fromm Foundation Composers Conference Fellows, Royaee, received 2019 Pnea Projects prize to make an electroacoustic piece for Clair Chase’s Density 2036 part vi. Recognized as runner-up in National Sawdust's 2018-19 Hildegard Competition, in 2017 Bahar was awarded from the Krourian Electroacoustic Competition in Iran, and won the Roger Sessions Memorial Composition Award the top composition prize at Boston Conservatory. The Boston Arts Review praised Bahar’s “haunting sound design” in her work with live theatre. In the realm of concert music, Bahar’s compositions have been performed worldwide, through various festivals including, ICMC(NYC), Cortona (Italy), Banff (Canada), Splice Festival (USA), Off Borders (Greece) by ensembles such as ICE ensemble, National Sawdust Ensemble, Splice Ensemble, Mazumal and etc. In the realm of theater and film music she has been working with Kitchen theater company, Boston Experimental Theater Company and Hub Theater Company, CERRU and Artivista Production company, SOCIARTS film production LLC and etc. Bahar received her M.M.
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Clouded Dusk

Premiere was October 2020 – LBO Ungala – Songbook 2020
libretto by Niloufar Talebi for the piece Clouded Dusk by Anahita Abbasi

In this piece I wanted to depict the essence of touch and contact and the meaning of distance. All the struggles and obstacles that one faces, the inner thoughts and worries, all the emotions that one goes through, when one leaves their family and country with a bagful of hopes and dreams.
This is a pain that all immigrants have faced, sort of a collective pain, when we are not able to be in physical contact with our loved ones and our homes.

During COVID, everyone somehow experienced the depth of this need. The irony is that we are in contact with everyone via zoom, but still we all desperately sense the need of being in contact with other human beings.

The piece shows a glimpse of our daily lives, the days passes by, wether sunny, foggy or cloudy … but like the deep ocean species, we are all strong and resilient and can survive even when the sun is not reaching us. I do believe that we need to have hope and always move forward! knowing together, we can reach anything and believing hat there are better days ahead of us …

HERE WE ARE

You and I
erupted into being
our hearts began to beat
as time throbbed in the garden.

We burn on opposite sides of the world
for sand drags us down
but the impulse quickening us is untouched by harm
the greenest dance in the world.

Here we are
you and I
seeds who rose from shallow beds
lilies in the sky
our existence ephemeral
as the flare of a comet.

Do not imagine for one moment
that you are alone
for we lovers
are bound by the same call
to greet the sun.

Here we are
you and I
sowers of endless seeds
in valleys and plains
that bloom eternal for children to come.

Niloufar Talebi

Anahita Abbasi

Biography

Anahita Abbasi is an Iranian born, San Diego based composer and curator. Her music has been described as “a dizzyingly sophisticated reverie - colorful and energetic” (The guardian). “This theatrical listening experience” “embodies tremendous timbral exploration and multilayered performance gestures'' (de Volkskrant & Classical Voice America). She received commissions and worked closely with distinguished musicians, such as M. Esfahani, S. Schick, R. Heller, International Contemporary Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Modern, and has been programmed at numerous venues and festivals around the world, such as Mostly Mozart Festival, Kennedy Center, Lincoln center, Southbank Centre, Darmstadt Ferienkurse, Tectonics, Niefnorf, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Klangspuren, IRCAM, Klang Festival, BIFEM, and many others. Ms. Abbasi received several awards, including a work-scholarship from the Experimentalstudio des SWR, Freiburg (2014), a Morton Gold ASCAP young composers award (2015), a nomination for “women composers of our time” (2017) and the composition prize of the Acht Brücken Festival (2019). She is a founding member of Schallfeld Ensemble (Austria), as well as IFCA, Iranian Female Composers Association (US.) Ms. Abbasi has studied in KUG university in Austria and worked closely with B. Furrer, P. Billone, G. Aperghis and F. Bedrossian. Currently, she is completing her PhD in composition with Rand Steiger at the University of California San Diego.
https://soundcloud.com/anahita-abbasi
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Rubaʿi (2020)

is a type of short poem consisting of four lines, popular especially in classical Persian poetry. In this composition, I have used four different types of voices, reciting Rubaiyat by Persian poet Omar Khayyam, and transformed the original material into a certain musical odyssey of sounds.
Although the meaning of the texts is very close to my heart, I do not approach the material of Khayyam’s poetry strictly semantically; I want to treat it purely sonically and create a specific color narrative, a sort of experimental phrasing by manipulating the arrangement of the particles of the musical material, in a sense dreamed-up, imaginary and rewritten poetry verses. The very form of the piece also refers to the quatrain, with the usually contrasting third hemistich of rubaiyat, which in this composition is a kind of dreamlike suspension of the musical action.

Martyna Kosecka

Biography

Martyna Kosecka, born 1989, Gdynia, Poland. Composer, conductor, performer, experimentalist and researcher in new music. She obtained an MA degree in the composition class of professor Krzysztof Meyer, BA degree in orchestral conducting in class of maestro Rafał Jacek Delekta in Music Academy in Kraków and MA in orchestral conducting in class of maestro Szymon Bywalec in Music Academy in Katowice. Currently she works as a freelance composer, conductor and essayist on new music, with special interest into the sound technology and music innovations. She holds a position of artistic co-director at Tehran Contemporary Music Festival. She resides in Oslo, Norway. Martyna Kosecka is a winner of 5-Minute Opera Competition, organized by 28.Music Biennale Zagreb in Croatia in 2015. The Festival commissioned her to write a full-length opera “Klotho. The threat of the Tales”, which opened the 29th MBZ in 2017. Kosecka is also a winner of Swiss EKLEKTO Ensemble call for proposals in 2015 and creates an instrumental theatre Umbra for three percussionists and electronics. She also is a second prize holder at IV National Krzysztof Penderecki Composition Competition held in Poland in 2017 for composition Orsi for string orchestra. She also is one of the laureates taking part in CECIA Project (Collaborative Electroacoustic Composition with Intelligent Agents), organized by ZKM|Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2019. From 2018 her compositions are published by Donemus Holland. In 2013, together with Iranian composer Idin Samimi Mofakham, she co-founded Spectro Centre for New Music, specializing in giving workshops in area of modern music and organizing concerts. Their intensive tries and vivid activity helped to run the annual festival of contemporary music – International Contemporary Music Festival in Tehran, which is the largest festival with focus on contemporary music in the Middle-East area.

https://soundcloud.com/martyna-kosecka
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Remember Me (2020)

Commissioned and premiered virtually by Ensemble Decipher at 2020 Network Music Festival

Nourbakhsh’s piece remember me draws on excerpts of Nayyirah Waheed’s poetry: Aftrica’s lament, and is sung by Decipher members while being harmonized through a vocoder. This piece will express a narrative journey that begins with vocoded sounds and returns them to the original voice, in order to remember the past and our ancestors. In the era of COVID-19, our day-to-day experiences have shifted from embodied to mediated interactions. It is in this way that the meta-figures of the vocoder and the natural voice also serve as a metaphor for our contemporary experience and thus demonstrate the value in not only remembering today, but also our past.


Niloufar Nourbakhsh

Biography

Described as “stark” by WNPR and “darkly lyrical” by the New York Times, a winner of the Second International Hildegard competition and a 2019 recipient of Opera America’s Discovery Grant, Niloufar Nourbakhsh’s music has been performed at numerous festivals and venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Kennedy Center. A founding member and co-director of Iranian Female Composers Association, Nourbakhsh is a strong advocate of music education and equal opportunities. She is currently a Teaching Artist at Brooklyn Music School, an adjunct faculty at Molloy College, and a co-director of Peabody Conservatory Laptop Ensemble, while finishing her doctorate at Stony Brook University.
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Orbis (2020)

is a fixed media work based on a quatrain by Omar Khayyam.
According to Khayyam, good and evil are inherent to human nature. So, we are the agents of perfection and failure in this world. In my work, I tried to create an ab-stract space that embraces the text. The words don’t dominate that space, though; they are fragmented and fused with the synthesized and recorded sounds.

 

Video: Kiou Kalami

Aida Shirazi

Biography

Born and raised in Tehran, Iran, Aida Shirazi is a composer of acoustic and electroa-coustic music. Shirazi’s music is described as”unfolding with deliberation” by The New York Times, “well-made” and “affecting” by The New Yorker, and “unusually cre-ative” by San Francisco Classical Voice. In her works for solo instruments, voice, ensemble, orchestra, and electronics she main-ly focuses on timbre for organizing structures that are often inspired by Persian or Eng-lish languages and literature, as well as Iranian classical music. Shirazi’s music has been featured at festivals and concert series including Manifeste, Mostly Mozart, MATA, New Music Gathering, Direct Current, Taproot, and Tehran Contemporary Music Festival in venues such as Maison de la Radio France, Lincoln Center, and Kennedy Center. Her works are performed by Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Miranda Cuckson, International Contemporary Ensemble, Quince En-semble, Ensemble Dal Niente, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Empyrean Ensemble, and Bilkent Symphony Orchestra among others.

https://soundcloud.com/aida-shirazi
More Info

Concert Part II

L’homme machine

Georg Katzer (1935-2019), German composer, wrote the piece «l’homme machine» for Matthias Bauer, German double bassist, and electronics in 1997, after seeing his unique performances using his vocal abilities while playing the instrument. The text is based on parts of «l’homme machine» by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, a French physician and philosopher of the eighteenth century. Georg Katzer has expanded this text and added some parts to it. 
Matthias Bauer has performed the piece many times. In the first performances, the composer himself improvised the electronic part of the piece. In 2017, with the help of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts, Georg Katzer documented the electronic part of in collaboration with Gregoria Carmen.

Georg Katzer

Biography

Katzer was born 1935 in Silesia (today Poland). He studied composition and piano with Rudolf Wagner-Regeny und Ruth Zechlin in Berlin (East) and at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. Later, he studied with Hanns Eisler, as a student of his master class at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. In 1978, Katzer became an elected member of the Akademie der Künste himself, where he founded the Studio for Experimental (Electroacoustic) Music, which he served as artistic director until 2005. In 1980, he was appointed as professor for composition and held a master class at the Akademie. Katzer received numerous awards in the GDR, in France, Switzerland and the Federal Republic of Germany, among others the Federal Cross of Merit in 2003. He was member of the Institut international de musique électroacoustique de Bourges, France, and honorary guest at the Villa Massimo in Rom, Italy. In 1980, he was Visiting Professor at Michigan State University, USA.
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Fremdeigentum (2020)

1 nach_richten (00:00)
2 be_greifen (04:45)
3 b_b (07:50)

Third party property. Foreign materials, in any way media-related realities, have been collected, selected, cut, assembled, composed. Property would emerge as appropriation, as constellation, as creation of a space. These sound images are a reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s “Livre d’image” (“Image Book”).

Joachim Heintz

Biography

Joachim Heintz, composer and writer, studied first literature, then composition with korean composer Younghi Pagh-Paan. Important was also his membership in a performance group, the Theater of Assemblage Bremen, and his engagement in the Free Software Mouvement. Lately he focusses on contacts between music and spoken word, for instance in improvisations with his live-electronic program ALMA.
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Pulsation (2018)

Pulsation for Oud and four speakers, is merely a continuous tremolo that has been considered from different angles. 

This is a stereo version of this piece.

Afshin Motlaghfard

Biography

Afshin Motlaghfard (Shiraz - 1991) began his music studies with Violin and under the instruction of Kaveh Keshavarz, then he attended in theory and composition classes of Ali Radman. In 2014 graduated from Azad university with a bachelor’s degree in composition and after that pursued his studies in Composition with Mehdi Kazerouni. He is currently studying composition under the supervision of Ashkan Behzadi.

Schweigeminute (2010)

For my father Mohammad Tahriri

The whole piece is made of samples of human voices. The two main materials of this piece are recordings of a Koran singer and a dirge (called “sherve”), which is sang at obsequies in south Iran. The theme of this piece is about receiving a bad message, such as the death of a loved person. The feeling of this moment is blurred. No clear thinking is possible. This feeling rests for a long time and does not disappear. In correlation to this there is no climax in this piece. Blurred and indistinct states can be heard. Sometimes the original voices can be understand, sometimes the original material is blurred through different synthesis (i.e. granular synthesis, phase vocoding and convolution) and sometimes abstract sounds (which are made of the samples) come to the fore. I composed this piece for my father Mohammad Tahriri.

Madjid Tahriri

Biography

Madjid Tahriri (1981 - Tehran) is an iranian composer, pianist and musicologist. He holds a Bachelor’s degree of Arts (piano, musicology) from the Azad University, Tehran, a diploma in instrumental and electronic composition and a Phd in musicology from the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, Germany. His music is performed at international Festivals in Europe, Asia and America and he obtained different international prices in the category composition and electronic music. Besides his artistic work Madjid Tahriri was teaching at the Folkwang University of the Arts since 2010. Currently he is teaching at the Tehran University of Art.

Silence(d) (2019-20)

“Silence(d)” is a piece for female voice and electronics. The idea and inspiration about the piece came from a project with a task to write a 30 second piece for voice concerning silence and immediately a question came to mind: How does the silence of the silenced voice sound? And especially the female voice. This silence is not relaxing, but very loud. The voice is trying to say something, but is constantly being interrupted by the electronics.

Marijana Janevska

Biography

Marijana Janevska was born in 1990 in Skopje, Macedonia. She graduated violin performance in the class of Mihailo Kufojanakis and composition in the class of Darija Andovska at the Faculty of music in Skopje. She is an author of solo, chamber, orchestral, choral and electronic music. Her pieces have been performed on concerts and festivals in Macedonia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania and Iran. Marijana is also a performer of contemporary music and part of the ensemble “Zeitstoff”, based in Hannover, Germany. She is currently enrolled in the solo classe program at the Hochschule für Musik Theater und Medien Hannover under the mentorship of Joachim Heintz, Ming Tsao and Gordon Williamson.

TONGUES OF FIRE

Tongues of Fire explores our human aspirations and absurdities, through the musical transformation of the human voice.

The slightly angry, disgruntled, comic muttering with which the piece begins is the source of all the sounds subsequently heard in the piece, sounds suggesting drums, water, metallic resonances, fireworks, or entirely imaginary materials or events, all generated through processes of sound-transformation on the computer.

There are 3 main sections to the piece. The first lasts for about 10 minutes, and ends as a gradually granulating voice slowly changes into the ticking of a clock. After a brief pause the opening vocalisations are heard once again, and lead to a rhythmic variation of the same material. The sound world then continues to develop, through humorous, mechanistic and soaring sound landscapes, until the vocal granules become strongly pitched and lead through an extended rhythmic area (with recollections of earlier events in the piece) into the ‘fireworks’ transformations. As these dissolve the concluding section of reminiscences (the coda) begins.

Tongues of Fire uses the whole range of sound-processing and sound-texturing tools available on the computer, including several new and non-standard techniques (such as spectral tracing, waveset distortion and sound-shredding), many of which were developed specially during the composition of this piece.

The music was realised almost entirely on a low cost home computer, using software developed by the composer and other participants in the Composers’ Desktop Project (the CDP – a UK based composers’ cooperative) with the support of public domain software (Barry Vercoe’s Csound and Mark Dolson’s Phase Vocoder).

The final mixdown was planned at the GMEB studio in Bourges, but realised on the CDP system. The final planning was made possible by a commission from the GMEB studio and the assistance of the British Council. The premiere took place at the 1994 Synthese Festival in Bourges.

Trevor Wishart

Biography

Trevor Wishart, (b 1946), composer/performer from the North of England specialising in sound metamorphosis, and constructing the software to make it possible (Sound Loom / CDP). He has lived and worked as composer-in-residence in Australia, Canada, Germany, Holland, Sweden, and the USA. He creates music with his own voice, for professional groups, or in imaginary worlds conjured up in the studio. His aesthetic and technical ideas are described in the books On Sonic Art, Audible Design and Sound Composition (2012), and he is a principal author of the Composers Desktop Project sound-processing software. His most well-known works include The VOX Cycle, Red Bird, Tongues Of Fire, Two Women, Imago and Globalalia, and pieces have been commissioned by the Paris Biennale, Massachussets Council for the Arts and Humanities, the DAAD in Berlin, the French Ministry of Culture and the BBC Proms. In 2008 he was awarded the Giga-Herz Grand prize for his life’s work. Between 2006 and 2010 he was composer-in-residence in the North East of England (based at Durham University) creating the sound-surround Digital Opera Encounters in the Republic of Heaven, and during 2011, as Artist in Residence at the University of Oxford, began work on the project The Secret resonance of Things, transforming astronomical and mathematical data into musical material.

Elegy for Valerian (2020)

Commissioned by Yarava Music Group – World Premiere

Alireza Amirhajebi

Alireza Amirhajebi

Sound Cloud