“Message” for piano, tombak, cymbal, and voice

Composed and performed by Ramin Arjomand
Video: Ramin Arjomand
Text: Allen Ginsberg

“Cry of the Patient Nightingale” (2026), for piano, flute, tombak, cymbal, and voice.

Text: Hafez
​
Composed and performed by Ramin Amir Arjomand

Composed and performed by Ramin Amir Arjomand

​Text: Walt Whitman

The student evaluations for a course I taught at Columbia University last fall—called Melody—communicate a sentiment and narrative that confirms my own feeling that it was some of the truest teaching I’d done to date. To quote directly:

“I think it is one of the best classes I've ever taken, both in quality of teaching and content, and enjoyment.”

“His students walk away thinking they were lucky enough to sign up for a random class that ended up being a gold mine of understanding that no one except those in that specific class will ever get to.”

“It felt like he showed up, like all of us students, with an open hand and a question. As a class, a ship of curious minds, we traversed the uncharted, and arguably unchartable, expanses and depths of ‘melody,’ starting and leaving every class with questions, not answers, and being comfortable in the uncomfortability of that unknownness. Professor Arjomand is one of those people that, it’s clear, has a sort of eternal fountain of unique ideas and questions, one of those people you want to pull out your notebook and write down every sentence he says, not to quote it, idolize it, but because the choice of words opens up new pathways for inquiry inside you, and you need to preserve that word choice to be able to be inspired again."

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

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.