Kala (2026) for flute, piano, percussion.

In Sanskrit, Kala is time. Time is change. Change is destruction.

​Ramin Amir Arjomand, flute, piano, voice

Last night I saw, again, Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy,” which left me so much more to think about this time—as cinema, as poetry, as attachment, freedom, dependence and independence, as mirrors upon mirrors, as life, as happiness, as sadness. The film, set in Italy, is no less majestically Iranian than any of his others. This poem of Mehdi Akhavan Sales, “The Leafless Garden,” is mentioned briefly in passing. So, herewith, a Fall poem in Spring.

Here is the English translation:

The cloud with its cold damp skin
Has embraced the sky tightly;

The leafless orchard
Is alone day and night
With pure and sad silence.

Its lyre is the rain; its song, the wind,
Its garment a cloak of nudity,
And if another garment it must wear,
Let its warp and woof be woven in golden ray.

It can grow or not grow, whatever and wherever it wants or does not want;
There is neither gardener nor passerby.
The depressed orchard
Expects no spring.

If its eye sheds no warm luster
And on its face no leaf of smile grows,
Who says the leafless orchard is not beautiful?
It relates the tale of fruits, once reaching to heavens, now lying in the cold coffin of earth.

The leafless orchard,
Laughs in tearful blood,
Eternal, mounted on its wild yellow stallion,
It roams autumn, the king of seasons.

Fourteen infinite canons over the first eight notes of the Goldberg Variations bass, jotted on a scrap of paper tucked away at the back of his own copy of the said work, are as close as Bach gets to handing us the keys to his canonical art. He spells out nothing explicitly, but a close study of these canons reveals a pedagogical gift of the highest order, and that he is secretly conveying how to design a canon in contrary motion effortlessly. (In all the mind-numbing contrapuntal tours de force his music offers us it is obvious he is hardly breaking sweat working out his conceptions.) He first brings to our attention, in a simple crab canon, that the first eight notes of the Goldberg bass are contrapuntally compatible with their own retrograde. He then uses this to teach us, step by step, the mechanics of a canon in contrary motion—with an independent third voice, no less—culminating in a six-voice triple canon—the same one he is seen holding in the 1748 portrait of him by E.G. Haussmann.

There are two canons in contrary motion in the Goldberg Variations. This, one of the greatest andantes ever written, is the second.

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