Ramin Amir Arjomand, piano, voice
​Text: Forough Farrokhzad

This clip from the opening minutes of my solo performance last weekend at The DiMenna Center gives a glimpse of the music’s harmonic architecture, beginning spontaneously to solidify in this passage, and which was centered around C#, part of an octatonic network of which it was the 7th degree, and which was superimposed upon the primordial white-key diatonic network, a parallel realm that emerged in opposition to it from time to time as a luminous force and that supplied the psychological impetus for the entire 72-minute improvisation. Tonality is about conflict. Here that conflict is embodied in the anatomy of the piano, in the counterpoint of chromatic and diatonic realms whose interaction, like the coming together of magnets at their ends of like charge, became a metaphor for and expression of what I have been experiencing presently.

The nonsemantic vocal material in the three pieces on this album—an excerpt from the second of which I share here and which, incidentally, is a strict double canon—is born of a mental process not dissimilar to that of asemic writing. The primitive, primal, childlike, playful and rhetorically sophisticated intermingle here in refined, highly structured polyphonic interaction.

Access the entire album here.

This work from last Saturday afternoon conveys, apart from a mysterious perfume—an immediate response to having read Apollinaire’s “Un fantôme de nuées” seconds before—that the specificity of a musical composition consists not in its notation but in the artist’s true clarity of intention and intensity of concentration on the feeling at hand. Of the five non-identical takes that render the same compositional idea exactly each time, this is one. With a creative approach of this certitude and directness—referred to sometimes as “jazz”—the idea of a notated score, and almost all music-making attached to it, appears a pained mockery of what music can convey when created as it is meant to be: spontaneously.

Listen to all five takes on YouTube.

Bach loves augmented triads. In his free counterpoint and in his chorales he will make sure the voices have no choice but to collide on this chord, to often hair-raising effect. In his later counterpoint he begins literally to build it into his strict canonical designs, as an integral feature. This fascinating, radical canon is one such example. His appetite for dissonance is extraordinary. Note also the enchanted Neapolitan sixth chord at the end, another favorite of his and which he invokes with pathos like no other composer.

This inscrutable masterpiece has been on my mind and in my bones for some years and, from the unusual hold it has on me, I would think a lifetime or more. Many people who know me know that when they are over my house I have forced them to listen to me play it. I think I may finally have a reasonable take on it, for now—linked above. I should share that something really clicked for me this past Monday, the day after I went to see Panahi’s magisterial Dayereh at Metrograph. The message of both works seems so strongly to align that the discovery—and its relationship to my own life—was transformative.

A dirge for solo piano, made on June 21, 2025.

It is hard to find motivation to describe this work just finished, Erasure, an excerpt of which I share here—the last minute or so of “The Promise of Rhyme,” the last of its three compositions. I am sitting presently with two thoughts, though. First, one does not speak truth to power. Second, I quote my brother Andrei Tarkovsky, who felt as acutely as I the monstrousness of war and, separately, who shared the belief that, in art, a manner of presentation in which “the artist obliges the audience to build the separate parts into a whole, and to think on, further than has been stated, is the only one that puts the audience on a par with the artist in their perception… And indeed from the point of view of mutual respect only that kind of reciprocity is worthy of artistic practice.”

Visit my Bandcamp page to hear the entire album.

Next fall, Columbia’s undergraduate musicianship program will move to a topics-based approach that will focus on in-depth exploration and development of rhythm, melody, and harmony as separate, though interdependent, courses. This semester in my Ear Training III class I piloted the approach, devoting one third of the semester to an all-encompassing inquiry into each of the three topics.

I assess learning outcomes by what students come to say and do spontaneously, of their own accord, rather than through prompted examination. My approach is experiential; often, in the course of a given day’s work, usually in the second session of the week, I observe students independently arrive at and lucidly formulate conclusions that, to me, are so deeply foundational to music making that I come away with pure delight at how superbly the work is unfolding. As often, the following week, I observe that students have no conscious recollection of the milestones they achieved the previous week and which to me were so significantly memorable. It is that this kind of learning—or organic growth—involves a different kind of integration than what examinations can obtain. In late April I asked them to reflect inwardly on the work we had done thus far and to put the pieces together in their own way. One response was noteworthy and proved that the learning has been potent and surpasses what traditional methodologies hope for. I quote verbatim:

“This semester in Ear Training III has been a deepening of musical awareness—not only of what we hear, but of what we feel, intuit, and know in our bodies.

We began with rhythm—not as a grid, but as breath and space. The rhythm of silence taught me to listen between the sounds, to feel presence in absence, to sense time not as a ticking metronome but as an expanding field. The body became our metronome. The breath, our downbeat.

Melody emerged not as a series of pitches, but as emotion given shape. In our weekly work, we were pushed to stop thinking and instead feel—to trust the gut over the brain. Melodic dictation became less about notes and more about flow.

Harmony entered gently. We explored not just chords, but relationships between overtones—the tension between tones and the pull of resolutions. We embodied these experiences by singing them, by feeling them resonate, clicking into place, gradually crescendoing—just by feel.

The idea of “believe the gut” was our undercurrent through all three parts: rhythm, melody, and harmony. As a class, we listened more deeply to each other. I began to sense when someone was trying to adjust, to resonate. These were musical truths discovered through doing, not saying.

I leave this semester with a sense that music is not separate from me. It is of me. What we trained was not just the ear—but the full self: the feeling, the trusting, the risking self. That’s the real harmony.”

Ghazal: درآ که در دل خسته توان درآید باز, for wood flute, piano, percussion, voice. Text: Hafez.

Moon in Gemini (2025), for four pianos, tells of what I saw and felt looking at the night sky on March 8 of this year, around midnight, and which meant so much to me—there is a piercing intelligence to the stars’ alignment, I aver—as a complex interplay of emotions, the multiplicity of which you can imagine some aspects, I am sure, but others, reaching through all my life experience, and specifically into that blessed moment looking up, you will have to listen fully to the music to hear all woven together in sound.

Visit my Bandcamp page to listen to and purchase the entire 11-minute composition.

Hut Song (2024) is an unusual, abstract, wholly intuitive response to hearing Baka vocal polyphony of Cameroon.

We have visited this and other polyphonic music from around the world in my Counterpoint in the Digital Age course at NYU Steinhardt this semester. It is a course I have been thinking about for 15 years and finally have had the chance to teach. I am blessed with a unique group of brave, bright, keen, bold students whose response to my challenging ideas has been wildly imaginative, serious, and mature. Our class discussions thus far have been unforgettable, so much so that from time to time I am moved to contribute to the collective creative work of the class; this piece is one such case. Somehow I know my students would understand this music, and I hope others will as well.

Visit my Bandcamp page to purchase the full 5-minute composition.

Two thoughts accompany this release of Invented Truth (2024):

“I don’t want to have the terrible limitation of those who live merely from what can make sense. Not I: I want an invented truth.”
- Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

It is impossible fully to calculate the depth of this work’s quietly assuring, recalibrating, beatific effect on my creativity.

I am not a lover of recordings. While they are meaningful as a kind of “photograph” of a real music event, for me the experience of live sound is irreplaceable. But music created within and specifically for a recorded medium using fixed media could be possible. It occurs to me that if one were able truly to express oneself in this way, as a pure, self-sufficient experience, that one’s prior sense of musical form and space, as developed to give shape to live sound, would not be wholly applicable. This would have to do, among other things, with the fact that tone is not represented and experienced in the same way in recording as it is in real life. Music composed in and for a recorded medium will suggest new experiences and new forms of organization. It implies, in my case, a kinship with cinema.

Visit my Bandcamp page to purchase the full 15’ piece.

Last weekend’s thrilling performance at The DiMenna Center marks for me 15 years of solo improvisation performances in New York and abroad. These two clips taken from 20 and 60 minutes into the 80-minute improvisation indicate the work is strong as ever and continues to flourish. The format of these performances evolved rather rapidly, with a 60-minute set at the old ISSUE Project Room in 2011 marking a pivotal turning point, to the form they presently take and which, to my knowledge, no other pianist is practicing with the same consistency, commitment, and unity of artistic vision.

In Fall 1999, I had an epiphanic experience listening to the “Pleni sunt” of Ockeghem’s Prolation Mass (a canon at the seventh), after which I began to dismantle everything I had assumed about writing counterpoint. After years of trying to unpack a cryptic statement Schoenberg makes in his writings about the polyphony of the Franco-Flemish School, it all came together in one perceptual moment. I also became certain, as I had begun to in my own contrapuntal writing, that there was an additional quantity in great polyphonic vocal music that classical theory could not account for. I knew now how I could obtain this quantity by ear. I was a graduate student at Columbia and had just become director of the Collegium Musicum. Among the many compositional experiments I was doing at the time, Five, a set of 4-part polyphonic speech motets on texts by e.e. cummings, captures a manner of assembling lines contrapuntally unique to the Franco-Flemish School and later only to J.S. Bach. This is the first of the motets I composed in the set.

Please visit my Bandcamp page for the entire set.

In Fall 1999, I was a graduate student and took a course in recorded sound techniques with Terry Pender at the Computer Music Center at Columbia University in Prentis Hall. Almost immediately I understood the digital audio workstation as a polyphonic compositional interface. I also saw it as a world in which the stiffness and sluggishness of musical notation, which I had encountered hearing my compositions performed by all the finest musicians, could be forever bypassed. Recorded sound was, to me, improvised compositional material, and the DAW a means by which to assemble it contrapuntally. In effect, it was a synthesis of my two strongest creative sensibilities: counterpoint and improvisation. If this wasn’t enough, in electroacoustic music, the composition and the rendition are one and the same: thus my mentalities as a composer and a performer also came together as one. Fall is one fruit of that formative time.
​
Please visit my Bandcamp page for the full piece.