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.