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. This piece is one fruit of that formative time.
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Please visit my Bandcamp page for the full piece.

Looking forward to meditating upon and assimilating this scintillating musical-syntactic pianistic proposition.

For those unfamiliar with Alireza Mashayekhi’s music, author and curator Lauren Rosati has written lucidly regarding his work, the following in relation to her concert event “Sounds from the Avant-Garde,” presented in 2018 at ISSUE Project Room:

“While Alireza Mashayekhi’s music has been performed for more than 50 years in his native Iran and abroad, the pioneering avant-garde composer remains under-recognized in the United States.

“Mashayekhi’s music spans a range of styles and genres, from classical compositions inspired by Persian rhythms and Iranian folk music that incorporate meditated repetition and polyphony, to atonal compositions, to works for tape and live electronics that combine traditional Iranian and Western instruments, to computer music written in the programming language XPL. Mashayekhi calls his hybrid compositional practice “Meta-X,” referring to the sonic multiplicities present in his work (tonal/atonal, improvised/pre-defined, Persian/non-Persian) that unify within a single musical piece.

“Though Mashayekhi is reticent to cite direct influences on his work, his music recalls the electroacoustic compositions of John Cage and Edgard Varèse, the composite harmonies and tone clusters of Henry Cowell, and the large-scale electronic works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, among many other composers, merging sound and noise, drone and dissonance, with Persian flourishes. Alongside these composers who transformed the landscape of mid-century music in Europe and the U.S., Mashayekhi’s radical practice introduced modern classical music, as well as electronic music, to Iran in the mid-1960s, revolutionizing the possibilities for musical composition in that country.”

Please visit my YouTube channel to listen to my live performances of his Kristall I and Kristall II for piano solo, given as part of the above-mentioned concert presentation.

Today I am proud to be releasing a quintet of piano pieces, related only by their proximity of composition, and which constitute some of the slowest, most private music I have composed. At present I happen to be painfully ambivalent about the idea of promoting work, both as social media platforms are governed by what seem wholly unwholesome forces, and, especially, as in the present environment where each of us is witnessing if not experiencing, both near and far, suffering of the most horrid kind and which one cannot help but to regard with some pessimism, the future of humankind seems rather bleak.

What motivates me to write this is a strong, strong positive feeling about the music; what it communicates, in sound, comes from a place of clarity. I find it meaningful to have developed a language that I feel accurately communicates something about my existence. We are all imperfect. The music is hardly marketable—in any community—and the circumstances required to take it in highly improbable in today’s world, where “creatives” even are often despairingly full of discursive constructs and the cynicism this brings. Who is the music for? The devoted artist, the young mind, the layperson with nothing to lose.

The themes of death, rebirth, infinity, truth, and identity that the music addresses are not born of any intellectual plan or desire to obtain a grant or commission, but rather of a sustained creative discipline that begins early in the morning, upon waking, before coffee, before brushing my teeth even, and where I can allow what needs to emerge to do so before I have had a chance to conceptualize it. In fact I have been working in this way for many years. Thus I assign these themes to the music as my own post-impressions of what it seems to communicate to me, to the extent that I have allowed myself to be in touch with such feelings and experiences in my own psychic life.

Songs of death, rebirth, infinity, truth, and identity, meditations on loss, life, time, love, and integration; soft, slow, sparse, lyrical atonal music, not intended for the short attention span of social media culture—you will need 20-25 minutes of calm, quiet time, private space, and noise-cancelling headphones to listen to each track. Please visit my Bandcamp page for links to the music.

Comments from this semester’s course evaluations:

“He encourages a kind of thinking that allows you to be comfortable in the undeniable uncertainty of music theory. I appreciate it beyond words. I have no notes or "improvements" for Arjomand's teaching style. In fact, he could do a better job making the course less amazing, as my other courses might look better in comparison!”

“Professor Arjomand was able to get every single student excited about our class work, regardless of major or past musical experience. Class time was both challenging and enjoyable. I really appreciated Professor Arjomand's intentionality and commitment.”

“Arjomand's approach to Ear Training—reliant on developing our tendency to notice musical particulars relative to what is beside those particulars as opposed to memorizing particular sounds out of thin air—is fantastic. This perspective, which he quotes as the "decoupling of what you read from what you hear" is paramount to a new age of music theory teaching that I believe will accelerate any student's musicianship beyond the level-by-level building of musical knowledge. I have become a significantly better textbook musician without a textbook at all; I have simply learned how to appreciate and enjoy music better. I have learned how to identify sounds and articulate their impact in a larger body of musical ideas. This is not what I was expecting from Ear Training II and precisely what I needed from Ear Training II.”
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“Arjomand encourages you to experience the relationship between musical ideas in the assignments beyond finding a 'correct answer'. He actually encourages this by foregoing grading according to accuracy. He grades for effort and submission—but do not be fooled! Little effort will be noticed. It will not be penalized, but you will most definitely feel inspired to interrogate your own unassisted mental interpretation of music. You will be encouraged to test yourself on how well you can interpret the assignment, as well as "why" you made a particular mistake. Arjomand loves mistakes. By the end of the course, you will too.”
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“I loved this class because of the way each day was structured in a way that allowed us to learn the techniques and observations on our own.”

This fall in my Theory & Practice I: Global Approaches to Music class at NYU Steinhardt School I am yet again privileged to have under my supervision a spectacular group of students whose range of interests, creative intuitions, and intellectual voraciousness is almost overwhelming.

Our discussion of asymmetrical metric cycles, African rhythm, and the underlying principle of the magnifying effect of rhythmic counterpoint took on vast, humanistic proportions as we pondered the universal nature of rhythm, separated rhythmic experience from time, and realized that the purpose of creating counterpoint is, paradoxically, to reinforce the individuality of its component lines—that they become even more themselves when placed against each other, their differences highlighted, their dynamic coexistence making a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

This led to an assignment in which I had students create something, in any genre, in which they paid specific attention to and radically, intuitively experimented with rhythm. I then had each of them select any two of each other’s creations and, without altering them, superimpose them contrapuntally in a disposition that actually brought out each one’s individuality. The secret was difference—and rhythm. As I found my self living with and witnessing their unprecedented work, I felt compelled to participate alongside them in the experience we were having. This video combines, contrapuntally, a piano composition of my own made independently on October 22 with a rhythmically rich reading of an original text by my student Sydney Scrimpshire. Listen to how the piano enhances the power of her reading.

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​“O you people! We have been taught the speech of birds and have been given of all things: this, behold, is indeed a manifest favor!” Quran 27:16

In July I spent two weeks on an olive farm in Italy. The cycle of each day was an endlessly rich, varied, and beautiful experience for me. I rose at sunrise to hear the morning chorus of birds; I eventually identified over 20 different birds, and there were more. Their quiet, early, ethereal vapor of sound gradually dissolved, as a mist, and gave way to a more ordinary morning music, largely dominated by the Eurasian Blackcap. The sun quickly grew strong, and I began every day by reading, among other books I had packed, Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, a 12th-century monument of Persian mystical poetry—a slow read, as the language is difficult and gives quite a bit to ponder. One morning I was sitting in an unusual place, and a strange bird, about crow-sized, flew up and sat briefly in the olive tree just next to me. I watched it closely, admired it, and made a note of its features—a strange, curved beak, and a striking cap—so that I might later research what it was. It was both beautiful and frightening. It flew away with perfect certitude. I looked it up immediately: a Hoopoe…the main character in Attar’s poem. Never in my dreams did I think I’d ever see an actual hoopoe, let alone there, then. The experience was overwhelming and took me several hours to process.
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I didn’t see it again. Over the next several days I composed this piece. Like most of my concert and electroacoustic music, it is polyphonic; its stylized five-voice format refers directly to the Italian madrigal, though the non-semantic vocal material invokes an almost abstract cinematic experience. I’ve had a strong conviction for over 20 years that music can be made with this type of raw material, which charts the entire range of what is possible with the human voice, and points to experiences and expressions both primal and ordinary. This particular work is special perhaps in that it reflects the degree to which the experience I had just had shook the core of my being, and in a most delightful, affirmative, and transformative way. I highly recommend listening to it with headphones to experience the full breadth and vitality of its unusual sounds and their detailed polyphonic interaction.

​Rome, July 19, 2023—The graceful poem pictured here (note incidentally its iambic underpinning), likely quoting a song by Eddie Vedder, could not have been a more perfect encounter on a blazing morning in Rome on my way to the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi for a breathtaking—and apperceptive—day of work in preparation for my concert presentation “Re-Improvising Scelsi, Part 2” (I presented Part 1 at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America in 2019), the centerpiece of which is his Piano Suite No. 8, “Bot-Ba.” Uncannily the poem is not dissimilar from Scelsi’s own, often aphoristic, poetry.

But more deeply resonant is how aptly it contextualizes my intimate, privileged encounter with the solitary, radical force of nature that Scelsi is. My convictions concerning a performance practice of his œuvre were only corroborated in hearing archival audio of his piano and ondiola improvisations. Most of what I took in is non-verbal. But in advance of what I will communicate directly in performance, I will share some observations here—none of which care for any pretense of academic expertise.

Firstly, the kinship of his work process with my own is extremely apparent to me. The problems he endured regarding engagement with musical notation to convey—and legitimize—his creative existence, and the ambivalence he certainly had therewith, are even more so.

There is a riveting urgency and a fire in Scelsi’s execution, a delicateness yet savageness, a gentle refinement yet roughness, all rendered with unflinching, crystalline technique that is born from a total, almost erotic engagement with sound. There is no distinction whatsoever between improvisation and composition.

Notable in the recordings is his utterly conscious sensitivity to the interactivity of overtones, absolutely magical and intoxicating. Their audible life is often more the object of his preoccupation than the fundamental notes he is obsessively sounding. Obviously none of this secret interplay is reflected anywhere in the notations otherwise so meticulously carried out by his amanuenses. Yet it reveals everything concerning the temporal unfolding and evolution of what I would call his ‘sound concern.’

Also notable, initially, is an always identifiable, primordial pulse—his performances surge with dance—though this eventually proves to have less to do with such; there is no grammar, no obligatory syntax, no context even to his sound concern; it is a reality that simply, phallically asserts its existence in the moment, having no beginning and no end. All notions of movement, repetition, and agitation are but perceptual functions of the developing self-declared “am” of the sound, fanning the fire of its resonance, augmenting its dimension. I thought: what greater exhilaration and freedom is there than in such a spontaneous, godly creative experience?

I began to register moments that could be heard, classically speaking, as formal contrasts quite otherwise. Rather the unrelenting, sensual engagement with the living resonance of what came before—his singular, unwavering sound concern, maintained with searing aural precision—is what gives rise to each new sound formation that emerges, each but literally a way to love the same resonance from a new vantage point.

It became more obvious to me than ever that his written scores, though so diligently executed, ultimately do something of an injustice and obscure access to the primal essence of his creative enterprise. Therefore any representations of his music that are obtained from an academically faithful rendering of these notations—however dutifully done—are irrelevant. As Hafez beautifully declares, “Burn the book if you’re one of us.”

During these several unforgettable hours of immersive listening I surrendered my heart wholly to Scelsi’s world, an experience entirely unique and enthralling: as with any iconoclast whose commitment and vision are so total and so thoroughly carried out, for a moment theirs supersedes all other approaches…
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In such a state of wonder I emerged again into the unsettling, ferocious heat of our burning planet.

The Abandoned City was made on August 26, 2022 alongside Missive to the Sea and Odes on a Dying Rainbow, made the following day. The excerpt I share here is 14 minutes into the composition, when briefly a white-key resonance emerges—a singular moment of clarity and climax in the sound narrative—and dissolves back into a fully chromatic one. Further apposite here are my notes to Odes on a Dying Rainbow, which I quote:

Notable throughout is the unwavering focus on and immersion in sound. The music’s slow, deliberate, and enunciated logic is ever pregnant with possibility and intent. Full of motion and plasticity, it invites the ear to give over fully to the unfolding sound life. The music makes no references to formal schemes of the past; its structure is the very exact record of the genuine, immediate interaction with sound.

Notable is an absence of friction in the music: friction of the compositional process, friction of musical notation, and friction of reading, interpretation, and execution. It exhibits at once the qualities of a fully worked-out composition and of a deeply considered yet spontaneous interpretation. There is a gratifying certitude to the sound ideas that echoes notated composition and its premeditated, dramatic purposefulness, but which bypasses the inefficiency of the intellect, of notation, and of the subsequent process of execution; the agencies of composer and performer are done away with. Conception and sound are one.

​Watch the full video here.

Missive to the Sea, of which I share the first three minutes here, was made on August 26, 2022. Apposite are my notes to Odes on a Dying Rainbow, which I quote:

Notable throughout is the unwavering focus on and immersion in sound. The music’s slow, deliberate, and enunciated logic is ever pregnant with possibility and intent. Full of motion and plasticity, it invites the ear to give over fully to the unfolding sound life. The music makes no references to formal schemes of the past; its structure is the very exact record of the genuine, immediate interaction with sound.

Notable is an absence of friction in the music: friction of the compositional process, friction of musical notation, and friction of reading, interpretation, and execution. It exhibits at once the qualities of a fully worked-out composition and of a deeply considered yet spontaneous interpretation. There is a gratifying certitude to the sound ideas that echoes notated composition and its premeditated, dramatic purposefulness, but which bypasses the inefficiency of the intellect, of notation, and of the subsequent process of execution; the agencies of composer and performer are done away with. Conception and sound are one.

Watch the full video here.

Odes on a Dying Rainbow, an excerpt of which I share here, is one example of the way distinctions between improvisation and composition dissolve in my work in a way unlike that of any other composer.

The work was created on August 27, 2022. It consists of three prolonged gazes (18-19 minutes each) on the same thought-image. Notable throughout is the unwavering focus on and immersion in sound. The music’s slow, deliberate, and enunciated logic is ever pregnant with possibility and intent. Full of motion and plasticity, it invites the ear to give over fully to the unfolding sound life. The music makes no references to formal schemes of the past; its structure is the very exact record of the genuine, immediate interaction with sound.

Notable is an absence of friction in the music: friction of the compositional process, friction of musical notation, and friction of reading, interpretation, and execution. It exhibits at once the qualities of a fully worked-out composition and of a deeply considered yet spontaneous interpretation. There is a gratifying certitude to the sound ideas that echoes notated composition and its premeditated, dramatic purposefulness, but which bypasses the inefficiency of the intellect, of notation, and of the subsequent process of execution; the agencies of composer and performer are done away with. Conception and sound are one.

The almost identical duration of the three odes points to an intuitive exactitude that Arnold Schoenberg called a “sense of form” and which he regarded as the most important aspect of a composer’s creative awareness.

In the coming weeks I will be releasing two more works that were made in the same vein the day prior.

Watch the full Odes on a Dying Rainbow video here.

This invention (like all the others) is a radical composition; it is unique in the set of 15 for a number of reasons, one of which is how clearly it demonstrates how Bach’s formal thinking appropriates that of the Franco-Flemish School, in whose polyphony the component lines exhibit such persistent independent-mindedness as to repel one another like magnets brought together at their ends of like charge.​

I have never loved the term “imitative polyphony.” A polyphonic idea is a contrapuntal combination of discrete sound components whose sense lies in the totality of their combined sound. The art of invertible counterpoint consists of varying the disposition of these components in relation to one another; it is a way of exploring the implicit potential of a basic idea so as to produce a variety of sound expressions that also fulfill different compositional/syntactic functions. Here form literally equals the unravelling of the idea’s inherent potential. 

When two varying dispositions of the same basic idea are placed in succession, it is possible to hear the recurring component material—which will appear in a different voice or register than before—as a repetition or “imitation” of what has just been stated elsewhere. But this misses the point. The attention, so far as the composer is concerned, is rather on the total sound emanation created by the new disposition, which cannot be traced to any of its components individually. It is somehow greater than the sum of its parts. 

Polyphony, and counterpoint, paradoxically, are more vertical than horizontal. The individual lines exhibit independence, but the perception of independence comes about only in relation to their context.