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Alireza Mashayekhi: Chahargah I (1979)

From the album Persian Electronic Music Yesterday and Today, 1966-2006 (2007)

In one of the very first Acousmata posts, back in February 2009, I featured Ata Ebtekar’s “Miniature Tone”—a joyful and clangorous bit of electronic music. Recently I returned to the album where I found that track, which is one of the more creative offerings of Sub Rosa’s Guy-Marc Hinant (and that’s saying something). Featured alongside Ebtekar on this record is the older Iranian composer Alireza Mashayekhi, a fascinating figure who is lamentably unknown in the resiliently Euro- and Americo-centric world of new music. 

Born in Tehran in 1940, Mashayekhi is a perhaps the most prominent Iranian composer in the world. He studied in Tehran, Vienna, and Utrecht before returning to his home city to teach at the University of Tehran in 1970. Since 1995, Mashayekhi has led the Iranian Orchestra for New Music. His prolific musical production includes many works for traditional media such as symphony orchestra, as well as numerous electronic compositions. 

“One of the main features of Persian music, or rather Persian and Islamic art, is unity in multiplicity or coherent collection of seemingly contradictory items. This sacred art contains the means to enable man to see the forms of nature and multiplicity as so many reflections of the Unity which is both the origin and end of the order of multiplicity. It is the bridge from the periphery to the Center, from the relative to the Absolute, from the finite to the Infinite and from multiplicity to Unity. This doctrine of unity is central to the traditional and sacred art, which is also observed in the tradition of Persian music. […] Another aesthetic features of Persian music…is meditated repetition resembling the zekr or repetitive concentrated prayers.” (Hooman Asadi)

Like many composers who came of age in the second half of the 20th century, Mashayekhi upholds an emphatically pluralist aesthetic attitude. Many of his compositions resound with the scales and melodic shapes of Persian traditional music, while other works are composed in the so-called “international style” of mid-century modernism. Yet other pieces are shaped by metaphysical or formal concepts of Persian music, without necessarily bearing a readily audible trace of that influence.

Chahargah I demonstrates the sophistication of Mashayekhi’s fusion of classical and modern elements. The title invokes one of the seven primary scales or dastgah of Persian traditional music, and the distinctive intervallic character of this scale is clearly projected in the music, but the lush dissonances and shimmering electronic timbres that emerge a few minutes into the piece take us in a very different and unexpected direction. 

August 02, 2011, 7:48pm