Amin Sharifi’s works have been performed in the United States, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Russia, Canada, Poland, the Czech Republic, and his home Iran. His music was called “creative, individualistic, artistic” by the critique of Juilliard School of Music and “product of an unbridled imagination” by the Memphis Daily News. Sharifi's pieces have been performed by such new-music ensembles/orchestras as JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, Ostravska Banda, Hypercube, A&C String Quartet, Luna Nova, DissonArt, Duo Sequenza, Pierrot-Tehran, Breakout, the Indiana University Symphonic Band, and the Indiana Philharmonic. His music has been heard at ReMusik (2019), Ostrava Days (2019), Synthetis (2019), eviMus (2017), Tehran Contemporary Music Festival (2016, 2018, 2019), Druskomanija Festival (2018), WSU Contemporary Art Music Festival (2019), and RISUONANZE (2017, 2019). Soloists who have performed his music include Christopher Otto, Austin Wulliman, Alex Sopp, Verena Rojc, Oliver Dizdarevic, Aleksandra Demowska-Madejska, Wojtek Psiuk, and Futaba Niekawa.
Iranian contemporary composer, Amin Sharifi (b. 1993), studied Composition at the Art University of Tehran (BM) and Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (MM) under the direction of Sven-David Sandström, Nader Mashayekhi, David Dzubay, and Don Freund. He also has had lessons with such renowned composers as Chaya Czernowin, Toshio Hosokawa, Krzysztof Penderecki, Georg Friedrich Haas, Raphaël Cendo, Oscar Bianchi, Marc Sabat, Katharina Rosenberger, Bernhard Lang, Zygmunt Krauze, Christian Wolff, Vladimir Tarnopolsky, Peter Ablinger, Klaus Lang, Dai Fujikura, Frederic Rzewski, Petr Kotik, Isabel Mundry, Alvin Curran, Tansy Davies, Augusta Read Thomas, George Nussbaumer, Rolf Wallin, Alex Mincek, Kate Soper, Mehdi Hosseini, Ken Ueno, John Gibson, Nina C. Young, and Sean Shepherd.
In summer 2017, his triple concerto TrombionOphone or Riders in the Field of Hope for soprano saxophone, trombone, and accordion was the first-prize winner of the XXIII Edition of International Composition Competition Concorso 2 Agosto and was performed by the Tuscanini Philharmonic Orchestra in Piazza Maggiore in Bologna, Italy.
He also has worked as assistant conductor to Nader Mashayekhi with the Tehran Cultural Philharmonic Orchestra and has conducted the Pierrot-Tehran New Music Ensemble, both in The First Tehran Contemporary Music Festival and several recording seasons. Sharifi has also worked as the Assistant Director of the IU New Music Ensemble at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
“A Portrait of the Composer as a Young Man” (after the title of James Joyce’s first novel), an album of Amin Sharifi’s select chamber music composed from 2013 to 2016, was released by Petrichor Records in the U.S. and Arqnoon Records in Iran. The music was performed and recorded by members of the Pierrot-Tehran New Music Ensemble, Breakout Ensemble, and solo artists in Germany, the U.S., and Iran. This album could be considered the musical equivalent of Künstlerroman, German for “artist’s novel”—a narrative about a young artist’s serious explorations and growth toward artistic maturity.
Recently, “Shifting Colors on the Slant", the collection of Sharifi's solo piano music has been released worldwide. A collection of painted pieces of music, a combination of Middle Eastern musical elements and Persian architectural ideas, impressionistic atmosphere, the effect of shifting colors, as well as improvisatory and aleatoric forms are what to expect to hear in this album. Both of his albums are available physically and digitally worldwide.
About the music
IMAGINATIVE MUSIC
A Colorful Experience
I have always been inspired by the music and ideas of the English composer Brian Ferneyhough. American theorist Joseph Strauss has argued – in his article Anxiety of Influence that since Schoenberg's music, there have been many reasons for a widening of the gap between the non-musician audience and the pioneer composers who are trying to touch the extremes. One of these reasons is the visual aspect of music, whether in the form of instructions for performers or a visual realization of music for the audience to follow and understand. Ferneyhough admits that he has struggled with this visual aspect, seeking to incorporate such instructions or audience realizations without compromising the complexity and precision degree necessary to realize the composer's idea. For my own part, I have been preoccupied with solving the issues arising from Ferneyhough’s notation system and performance practice.
INTERPRETER-CREATOR
I want to further explore the issues within the relationship between the performer, the interpreter, and the creator. The discussion starts with the traceability of new notation systems and the blurry boundary of a playable or unplayable musical element. I am working on a series of pieces to be released as a score-reading/album project in which the performance score is more than a recipe or a list of instructions.
THE VISUAL ASPECT
The score can have an independent function as a piece of visual art, before or even without being performed. It also has a traceable surface, readable with no deep knowledge of music—a surface that was, in much modernist and postmodern music, abruptly removed since the advent of dodecaphonic music as a replacement for the melody in Romantic music.
SEARCH FOR A NEW LANGUAGE
This project took a significant step forward last year with my string quartet Maximum Insufficiently Identical Outlines (2019), where the notation itself functioned as a newly invented language, easily readable and learnable, that, due to its newness and lack of trials and errors, contains limited words. This new language can be tailored differently for each composition, as can be seen in the evolution of this system in my Mise-en-scene (2018), Mise-en-synthesis (2019), and Aposynthesy (2019).
SONIC OUTPUT
I am looking for a new language with which composers can write poems that are not understandable or translatable using conventional systems (languages). Its performance practice would be very much under the composer's control and one could easily increase or decrease the level of sophistication. Ultimately, I seek a notational system that does not rely on sonic output and has underlying meaning even without a musical performance as a purely visual and imaginative musical score.
DECOMPOSITION
Aposynthesy (decomposition) is based on the spectral analysis of the recording of the piece Booy-e-Baran (Smell of the rain) by the Iranian composer Parviz Meshkatian (1955-2009). Booy-e-Baran is a composition in the Persian mode Nava and in the form of Tasnif* (vocal and instrumental dialogue) on Rumi’s poem O Yusef. It has been recorded by the Tehran Symphonic Orchestra in 1985 and has been one of the most inspiring pieces of traditional Persian music in my life.
Aposynthesy is my tribute to this piece and in memoriam Parviz Meshkatian. The composition idea is basically giving individual and equal values to every frequency in the original recording. And assigning a series of frequencies to each instrument quantized to the nearest pitch. Also, keep the timing of frequencies by quantizing milliseconds to the nearest 32nd rhythm while stretching and squeezing the material continuously. Thus, achieving a distorted view of the original piece passing through different layers of filters and processes.
* one of the several forms of Persian music and can be considered as the Persian equivalent of the ballad.
CUBISM IN MUSIC
My new compositional direction began in 2018 with the piece I wrote for the JACK Quartet. Beginning with that piece, [Mise-en-scène], I have designed a new notation system based on the morphology theory of music, wherein all the musical elements are decomposed and the composer has complete control over every individual aspect of music that a performer could think of independently.
I also designed a new rhythm staff utilizing simultaneous irrational tempos (I can relate the concurrency of irrational tempos with the idea of cubism in music) instead of confusing partial tuplets. Both the morphologist approach and the rhythmic design of my new notational system give composers an extreme level of precision and offer new horizons with which to experiment. I believe it could be a new notational language with which composers can access more details and have the facility to use new musical dimensions.
Photo credits
Ryan Harrison
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