Yarava Raised to the Twentieth Power, Divided by Iranian Traditional Music (2021)

Dedicated to dear Mehdi Jalali, the beating heart and tireless locomotive of YARAVA

Traditional Iranian music has always been an undiscovered and fascinating world for me—one that, as a composer, I had never dared to enter or write for its instruments. When Mehdi Jalali invited me to compose a piece for the 20th anniversary of the founding of the YARAVA Music Group, I began to consider drawing inspiration from this rich source, especially since YARAVA itself was originally formed by a group of musicians active in the field of traditional Iranian music.

Of course, without the support and conversations with Joachim Heintz, and the chance to collaborate with professional performers, I would not have been able to overcome my fears and uncertainties. After several months of work, I arrived at several categories of musical material that I decided to interweave and use in an integrated way. This, along with a graphical motif that, for me, evokes the name “YARAVA” and appears twenty times throughout the piece in various forms, might reflect the breadth, complexity, and diversity of YARAVA’s activities over the course of its two prolific decades.

I dedicate this piece to Mehdi Jalali, who is undoubtedly one of the most important supporters of contemporary music in Iran.

Performers:

Niloufar Shahbazi (Kamancheh)

Yasamin Shahhosseini (Oud)

Atiyeh Shahverdi (Daf)

For more information about this piece, you can refer to my interview with ILNA News Agency (in Farsi).

A collection of links related to the “Twenty” project is also available on this page (in Farsi).