One. Spectrum, Timbre, and I
As far as I recall, I always could and still can sit and listen with mesmerism to the sound of a kettle boiling water on the fire, to an electric cooling fan, to a stove, a heater, or simply a fireplace, and after a flash of the moment, hear spontaneously generated music material which easily relates to one of the traditional Iranian modes. It was always an intriguing phenomenon to me, but for others, these are simple noises. However, I have always heard music in them.
I still remember the hard and long ear training and solfeggio lessons when I was very young. The fake PVC-like, crispy sensation of a major or minor scale on the piano in the classroom, and the requirement to sing in equal temperament, the way the piano keys are tuned into, was utterly irritating for me. I remember the only thing I wanted was to take out my ears and literally give them to my teacher and ask her to try to hear as I do and understand that how I hear things, that my perception of sounds and intervals is different. In fact, everyone's musical perception is different. However, back in the classroom, the teacher would only like us to sing what she would like to hear herself, perfect and clean (of course for her) equally tempered intervals.
I can sit and listen to one single tone for hours. After a while, I can hear the fluctuations of its inner components and enjoy the living organism in it. I follow the internal relation of the spectrum and the slight variations due to these tiny movements in sound I perceive that could change its timbre with time. I try to focus on different tone components, falling deeper and deeper in this pleasant sensation of discovering the tone. This process can distract me from doing my daily routine as a composer, even cause me to stop composing and listen to one sound, get distracted, and lose track of time.
After a while, I understood that my brain automatically skips some lower overtones and concentrates on the 11th to 14th harmonic series. Of course, my brain should be lucky that the vibrating object has a harmonic overtone structure or should have such arithmetical relation, which is established between the 11th to 14th harmonic series. Otherwise, experiencing inharmonicity of sounds, I would have never been able to hear what I hear through the relations with sonic objects.
Very short etude based on the pitch organization of Kisser's solo
Synthesized in Openmusic, December 2020
Three. Childhood
I grew up surrounded by traditional Iranian music. The Iranian modal microtonality was imprinted in my ear during my childhood, even before I knew it. I can thus easily conclude that thanks to my origin, I perceive sonic events differently from the vast majority of western-trained musicians. My parents sang me lullabies in traditional modal systems, specifically in Gusheh "Dashti" in Dastgāh-e "Shur"….
[ to be continued ]
Pitch class histogram of the first melodic phrase of an Azān
performed by Rahim Moazzen-Zadeh Ardabili (1925 – 25 May 2005)
A musical production of the sound of a heater from my childhood
Synthesized in Openmusic, December 2020
Two. Weird Kid
I have grown a very unusual taste in music since I was a teenager. In my collection of cassettes, one could find the albums from the founders of Norwegian black metal, Mayhem, to the traditional Iranian vocal repertoire of Mahmoud Karimi (master of Āvāz, the vocal repertoire of Iranian traditional music). I could jump from one cassette to the other in the middle of songs, simply because something would remind me of the other one. Thanks to the digital revolution, these shuffles are easier today.
I would listen to the 25-second fantastic guitar solo by Andreas Kisser in one of my favorite songs, "Territory" by Sepultura from the chaos A.D. album (1993) repeatedly for several times and feel hypnotized by that. Unstable minor seconds, dirty glissandi and the gradual bending, and most importantly, this significant solo's modal structure are among the most memorable things in music I have ever heard in years. The dropped tuning of the Guitar, not well-tuned power chords (due to the wide vibratos), along with the distortion, octave changer, and whammy pedals (pitch shifter), creates fascinating timbres in this solo.
In the climax of his performance, Kisser uses several string bends between F and G. He moves the F up and down around G in microintervals, creates extraordinary and beautiful beatings between them, and finally rests on a microtone between F and F#. The whole event happens only for two bars. With the songs fast tempo, it is merely happening within some seconds, but this triggers me to go and listen to Giacinto Scelsi's Quattro Pezzi Su Una Nota Sola ("Four Pieces On a Single Note", 1959), where for each piece, the composer creates an oscillating sound universe around a single tone, respectively on F, B, Ab, and A. Nevertheless, both in Kisser's or Scelsi's music, I can hear another level of sensitivity, the one that my inner ear wants to hear, the one that reminds me of my childhood, the one that I could hear in the sound mass of a kettle boiling water on the fire. I think it reminds me of the Čahārgāh mode of Iranian traditional music, of a particular jingle in the same mode that my father was listening to on the radio every morning. ...
This sensation led me to investigate deeper in vibrations and acoustics, and through the span of several years, I have reached ending up in the world of microtonality and precisely the field of just intonation, where the relation of overtones can describe lots of details and becomes so crucial to the understanding of sonic phenomena. Another significant result of the introduction of the above musical parallel is the wonder that I have discovered many years later - the phenomenon of combination tones, so vivid in my music written around 2015.
A Persian lullaby, performed by Hengameh Mofid
recorded with WhatsApp application during an international phone call, December 2020
Four. Cacophony of Muezzins
Whenever I live outside of my hometown Tehran, the enormous, gray, noisy and polluted multicultural capital of Iran, with almost ten million inhabitants (more than fifteen million in the whole of the greater area of Tehran province), I start to miss its overall aura. I miss its authentic noises and hums, the long walks through the loud and chaotic streets of the city to avoid the traffic jam, the liveliness of the old town's pathways, and the maze of crowded Tehran grand bazaar, but what I miss the most is the so-called by me "cacophony of Muezzins".
A muezzin is a person who sings an Azān, a call for Muslims for prayer, performed from the minaret of a mosque. This event happens three times a day in the Shia tradition, at dawn, noon, and sunset. In Arabic, the root of the word Azān is adhina, which means "to listen, hear, and be informed about". The sound and the melody of Azān in the evenings is very soothing, maybe because it brings back my childhood memories, or maybe because it recalls the familiar to my ear sonic patterns.
Azān can be sung in different modal systems, with different ornamentation types, but the text structure always remains the same. There is a considerable difference between the melodic and modal structure of Azān in different ...
The most famous Iranian Azān is performed in the Bayat-e Turk, Guš-e Ruholarwah, which is a part of Dastgāh-e Šur by performed by
Rahim Moazzen-Zadeh Ardabili (1925 – 25 May 2005).
[ to be continued ]