Forth Day
Lecture – Panel Discussion – Concert
Lecture – Panel Discussion – Concert
23 February 2021
With Mohsen Mirmehdi, Nader Mashayekhi, Sara Abazari and Mehran Pourmandan
Mehdi Kazerouni, Mohsen Mirmehdi, Nader Mashayekhi, Sara Abazari and Mehran Pourmandan
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
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
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
https://soundcloud.com/anahita-abbasi
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
https://soundcloud.com/martyna-kosecka
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
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
https://soundcloud.com/aida-shirazi
Concert Part II
L’homme machine
Georg Katzer
Biography
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
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
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
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
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
Elegy for Valerian (2020)
Commissioned by Yarava Music Group – World Premiere