Memory is a basic building block of music. You are connected to what you have heard before. But in computer music, we’re always looking for some new sound, which even blurs the distinction between music and sound. When you hear computer music, you don’t really need to hear Bach in it. This modern mentality started with Schoenberg who formally introduced the idea that the notes you play do not have to relate to what came immediately before. You erase your instantaneous memory; erase the notes you just played. In the broader movement, it’s understood that this quest for newness is something that is separate from what it comes from.

In no other tradition in the world does the musician or composer cut away from what has existed before. We listen to traditional music for nostalgic value and it becomes very difficult to find something new in it. If you bring something totally fresh into a form of music, listeners may feel it is no longer this particular music. My goal has been to create something that is really new when you listen to it. But at the same time you don’t readily think this is computer electronic music connected to the West.

Within Persian music, since specific tunings are not rigidly defined, all that is left to define is a certain structure attributed to a mode in your memory. If I play something that invokes your memory of the certain space of a mode, I’m alright. This is the amount of freedom one has in Persian musical tradition. However, if I go too far in disturbing you as a listener, you might say this doesn’t sound right.

on the traditional radif form

The radif is a collection of 300 to 400 melodies known from old times. Nobody knows who wrote them, but  all traditional musicians know them. About a hundred years ago one musician tried to classify and put them all in hierarchical model. He said, ‘These go here together, and these are related’ and so forth. The dastgah is the highest level of category. Each dastgah has a number of modes within it. Each mode has a number of melodies within it. There are 50 or 60 different modes in Persian music. Whereas in Western music there are the major and minor scales and the church modes and that is about it. 

In the radif tradition, each dastgah has a specific form; certain guidelines. There are certain movements you are supposed to follow, specific forms of cadence for ending a long melody, specific ways to resolve a melody, specific ornaments associated with each dastgah. ‘If you come down this way, you have to use this ornament.’ These aspects are all defined. And as long as you don’t bother your listener, you can do what you want. Every definition can disappear as soon as you touch it. The old masters want it to be ephemeral, so it becomes negotiable. Nobody owns it per se.

I remember one old master once told me, when he was teaching me a goushe (melodic form within a dastgah), “I taught it. You learned it. Now you make your own version.” He was saying that now I own it too. By learning the melodic form, I became a part of the tradition and could gently adapt it.

on the separation of mind and body, sound and music, computers and sensuality

In Western thought, a note is something that has a certain frequency. You can play anything on that frequency and it is that note. Thus a note has a essential quality. That is the same way we essentially define the self in the West as well.  The definition of an individual in the West connects to a lot of Darwinian thought. I think about this connection and the difference between sound and music. The concept of music requires us to have a certain faculty that understands music: intelligence. But there is really no way to find where this intelligence comes from. You have to accept the separation of mind and body. Music is experienced by the mind. And that is where the intelligence lies. In Persian poetry there is no such distinction. The mind and body are the same. Most of the celebrated poetry of Iran actually carries a very deep philosophy within it. In the West, there is separation between poetry and philosophy. Something that talks about truth and facts, something that we can follow from one point to another, is called philosophy. Poetry is this ephemeral thing, and is not valued as much in the West. Poetry is this being that is expressed, that may talk about eternal truths, but is not considered fact. In Persian culture, they are one and same. Philosophy is carried through poetry, not prose. Big philosophers in Iran are actually poets. Omar Khayam is my primary reference. He was translated by Scott Fitzgerald. Rumi has become popular more recently, but in the 1800s during Fitzgerald’s time, Khayam became very popular because of his point of view and how he defines what life is. His idea is we are the same as the earth. There is no mind body separation, no species separation. We are all the same thing. He followed a certain form of philosophy that, now in the West, is starting to become important, more accepted. The mind/body duality is breaking in the West. In Eastern thought, many never accepted this duality.

In building Lila, I do not separate sound and music. Even though I do want to create a connection with my listener, which I feel is extremely important. But I do not want to do that based on the concept of intelligence alone. There is so much baggage. I would rather just connect with listeners, making the intellectual and sensual one in the same. That’s been a real struggle to me because computer music is mostly intellectual. And usually when it becomes sensual it becomes weak. It is only very recent that we’ve been able to create computer music that also caters to the senses. Before computers were not powerful enough. You weren’t able to create this sensual element in real time.

on developing new Persian audiences

Traditional music in Iran no longer attracts young crowds. For a period after the Revolution, it did, but mostly because pop music was banned. But when there is a choice, traditional music doesn’t attract young people. My feeling is that is because it always becomes nostalgic. It has an introverted feeling. That is true of the traditional music of most countries. I want to create something that the younger generation is attracted to. People are looking for something new. Yet in some sense our music may be more traditional than most of the things we assume are traditional, because we are not superimposing the Western classical concept of an ensemble which is now popular in Persian music. They don’t really play in the traditional duo any more. And because it is not done with that older style of energy, the young crowd does not follow it. I hope that the use of computer and OUR new approach will give them something extra to appreciate. Hearing something new, but still in a traditional form.

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