Born 1987 and raised in Tehran, Aida Shirazi is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. In her works she mainly focuses on timbre for organizing structures inspired by languages and literature. A conversation about the relationship to poetry, about drawers – and about death.

The other day I saw on Instagram that you are at IRCAM right now, the electronic music research institute in Paris. What are you doing there?

I develop a piece there, where I'm collaborating with two poets and writers. One of them is my very close friend: Haleh Ghassemi. She's a poet and translator and wrote a poem in Persian for this project. And then I also met a French poet who also translates, her name is Irène Gayraud. I asked Irène if she would be willing and interested in making a French adaptation or translation of the Persian text and she said yes. So right now, I'm working with a bilingual text, in Persian and also in French.

This preoccupation with language, especially in poems, is an elementary part of your work. What fascinates you so much about it?

The first time that I started really asking this question was several years ago when I started writing music and thinking about becoming a composer. I started noticing that, in different kinds of text, whether it's poetry or prose and just in general language, they intrigue my imagination. They inspire me in very different ways. I think the main reason was that I actually grew up around a lot of poetry. As you know, I'm originally from Iran. I speak Persian, it's my mother language. And we have a really huge legacy of Persian poetry and also a lot of works in prose. While growing up, it was something that was part of the household just as much as music was.

And it really doesn't have to do with the level of education. Iranians can be highly educated or not. They can just have high school diploma or maybe even be illiterate. But everyone knows at least several lines of poetry. Especially the classic poetry like Hafez, Saadi, Firdausī and Rumi. And even a lot of the expressions that we use in daily life, they have a really strong poetic aspect. Also in my family: My grandfather was very much interested in Persian classical poetry, also my father and my grandmother. We had a lot of books at home. My brother and I had the opportunity to really go and shuffle amongst the books. My father and sometimes my grandfather would sit with us and just read poetry. 

You started playing the santur at an early age, right?

Yes, but not first. When I was eight years old, I learned the piano and played Western classical music. But from very early on, two or three years later, I also got to know Iranian classical music. I started playing the santur and the repertoire of the Iranian classical music, which is called Radif. There are these short pieces, they're in free metre and they accompany singing. The words for those song parts are again a few lines from Persian classical poetry. So it was that as well. 

It is exciting that these pieces have an undetermined metre. For me, it makes such a difference in which rhythm you perform poetry. Sometimes when I listen to people recite poetry, it completely changes the focus of the poem, its atmosphere, and its emphasis for me.

Yeah, absolutely. It comes down to this really subjective and personal take on the poem. It can be the language, it can be the imagery. Words definitely evoke some sort of a sense for us. They can be colours, they can be textures or something else. But the combination of what they mean and what they evoke and how they sound, I'm really fascinated by that. Just in a very direct manner, I try to find any kind of sonority timbre, texture, anything that would be some sort of musical equivalent of that. 

In your new piece of distempered corpses and distilled winds, which will be premiered this year as part of Outernational at the Chios Music Festival and at radialsystem, you also deal with poetry, more specifically with Walt Whitman's This Compost. Can you give an example of how you translate language directly into timbre or texture?

In the opening, it says »Something startles me where I thought I was safest«. I start with these quiet air sounds in the ensemble and in the piano, I have some sort of really simple preparation for the piano, which mutes the upper octave. And I have these air sounds and these tremolos of air sounds in the strings. And when it comes to the word »startle«: For me the sense of being startled is, some sort of being stopped or all of a sudden you stop for a second and then you react to something. The sense of being startled translates musically for me into taking the letter »r« and rolling it - »rrrrrr«. I have the ensemble actually speak and whisper, so the musicians recite the poem at times. 

Walt Whitmann wrote the poem in 1856, five years before the Civil War, when he himself was positively startled. As a science fan he had just read a new book by Justus Liebig on organic chemistry and was thrilled. He wrote his Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of the Wheat (later This Compost), based on the facts he had read. It is about the realisation that continuous change, growth, formation and decay are elemental to our world and nature. What fascinated you about the poem? 

In the project »EXT INC / REMEMBER ME«, on a curatorial level, there is this idea of disintegration, of fading, of dying out. I was reading a lot and searching for a suiting text to work with. Then I came across this poem by Walt Whitman! It deals with those topics, and it also deals with death, and I have a weird relationship with death in general.

What do you mean?

I don't believe in an afterlife or rebirth, but I think that with death everything that is alive disappears. I find it fascinating how your perspective changes completely when you experience death. It becomes a turning point in your life and you start to look at life in a completely different way. I imagine that in most people's lives, they experience it more than once. We lose people over the years for different reasons. The shift of perspective, the way we re-evaluate even death itself every time it happens and every time we are somehow exposed to it – that’s interesting to me.

I come from a part of the world that is very unstable for a very long time. Parts of it have turned into ruins. Millions of people are displaced because of that. These crises bring deaths with themselves in so many different ways. Sorry, it's getting kind of dark. If the government of your country is a totalitarian government, is a dictatorship, then it's very likely just erasing people and silencing them and killing them, whether it's through execution or just if there's a protest, they just open fire and kill people. Earlier I spoke about a pleasant aspect of Iranian culture, about poetry and the fact that it is present in the lives of millions of people. I think that death is probably equally present. I was born during the Iran-Iraq war. It was towards the end of it and I don't have any memory from it. But yeah, it is there. And I have the feeling that unfortunately  more and more people all over the world get to experience such kind of instability and a closer or more immediate distance to death.

You also mentioned a poetic aspect of death. What do you mean with that? 

Transience can also have something beautiful in it. I can also relate this to a poet, Omar Khayyam. He was not only a poet, but also a scientist, mathematician, philosopher - a very interesting person. And at his time a lot of his contemporaries, they could be very religious, be either Sufis or have a very strong connection with mysticism in different ways. But he was just the opposite: He was this hedonist philosopher who just only talks about enjoying and savouring life as it is. He has quite a few Ruba’is which are poems that have four lines. And in a lot of them, it's either the mention of wine and getting inebriated or enjoying life or the transience of life and the unfairness of the whole world. 

As there are several pieces of you that are directly influenced by Persian literature – are there also some who are directly influenced by Persian/Iranian music, if you can even put your finger on it? 

I have pieces that are directly influenced by Persian or Iranian music. But actually, I don't care. During the first years I had started writing music this was something I was particularly interesting in. But at some point, I started re-examining the position. Asking myself, where would that put me in terms of how my music is being received. Is it something limiting? Is it going to exoticize me or my music? Is it going to put me in a box that I don’t necessarily desire? And I had a lot of conversations about this with my non-Western teachers, colleagues, and friends.

How do these conversations and your experiences affect your work?

There is this phase, which I am still in. It starts with getting to know more people who play your music and are genuinely interested in it. They are musicians who might find something that is Iranian or sounds Iranian. Even though I might not have consciously chosen to use an element from Iranian music, this feedback from musicians can be interesting for me, because sometimes I don't pay attention to it in the way I work. I deal with my moves, my intuition, my memory - and with material to which I have an immediate, very intuitive connection. So it's actually quite natural and also normal that you can hear Iranian elements. But then when it's the only thing people perceive, it really bothers me. But of course you can't really stop people from thinking what they think or feeling what they feel. And I can live with that now. ¶

Born 1987 and raised in Tehran, Aida Shirazi is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. In her works she mainly focuses on timbre for organizing structures inspired by languages and literature. A conversation about the relationship to poetry, about drawers – and about death.

The other day I saw on Instagram that you are at IRCAM right now, the electronic music research institute in Paris. What are you doing there?

I develop a piece there, where I'm collaborating with two poets and writers. One of them is my very close friend: Haleh Ghassemi. She's a poet and translator and wrote a poem in Persian for this project. And then I also met a French poet who also translates, her name is Irène Gayraud. I asked Irène if she would be willing and interested in making a French adaptation or translation of the Persian text and she said yes. So right now, I'm working with a bilingual text, in Persian and also in French.

This preoccupation with language, especially in poems, is an elementary part of your work. What fascinates you so much about it?

The first time that I started really asking this question was several years ago when I started writing music and thinking about becoming a composer. I started noticing that, in different kinds of text, whether it's poetry or prose and just in general language, they intrigue my imagination. They inspire me in very different ways. I think the main reason was that I actually grew up around a lot of poetry. As you know, I'm originally from Iran. I speak Persian, it's my mother language. And we have a really huge legacy of Persian poetry and also a lot of works in prose. While growing up, it was something that was part of the household just as much as music was.

And it really doesn't have to do with the level of education. Iranians can be highly educated or not. They can just have high school diploma or maybe even be illiterate. But everyone knows at least several lines of poetry. Especially the classic poetry like Hafez, Saadi, Firdausī and Rumi. And even a lot of the expressions that we use in daily life, they have a really strong poetic aspect. Also in my family: My grandfather was very much interested in Persian classical poetry, also my father and my grandmother. We had a lot of books at home. My brother and I had the opportunity to really go and shuffle amongst the books. My father and sometimes my grandfather would sit with us and just read poetry. 

You started playing the santur at an early age, right?

Yes, but not first. When I was eight years old, I learned the piano and played Western classical music. But from very early on, two or three years later, I also got to know Iranian classical music. I started playing the santur and the repertoire of the Iranian classical music, which is called Radif. There are these short pieces, they're in free metre and they accompany singing. The words for those song parts are again a few lines from Persian classical poetry. So it was that as well. 

It is exciting that these pieces have an undetermined metre. For me, it makes such a difference in which rhythm you perform poetry. Sometimes when I listen to people recite poetry, it completely changes the focus of the poem, its atmosphere, and its emphasis for me.

Yeah, absolutely. It comes down to this really subjective and personal take on the poem. It can be the language, it can be the imagery. Words definitely evoke some sort of a sense for us. They can be colours, they can be textures or something else. But the combination of what they mean and what they evoke and how they sound, I'm really fascinated by that. Just in a very direct manner, I try to find any kind of sonority timbre, texture, anything that would be some sort of musical equivalent of that. 

In your new piece of distempered corpses and distilled winds, which will be premiered this year as part of Outernational at the Chios Music Festival and at radialsystem, you also deal with poetry, more specifically with Walt Whitman's This Compost. Can you give an example of how you translate language directly into timbre or texture?

In the opening, it says »Something startles me where I thought I was safest«. I start with these quiet air sounds in the ensemble and in the piano, I have some sort of really simple preparation for the piano, which mutes the upper octave. And I have these air sounds and these tremolos of air sounds in the strings. And when it comes to the word »startle«: For me the sense of being startled is, some sort of being stopped or all of a sudden you stop for a second and then you react to something. The sense of being startled translates musically for me into taking the letter »r« and rolling it - »rrrrrr«. I have the ensemble actually speak and whisper, so the musicians recite the poem at times. 

Walt Whitmann wrote the poem in 1856, five years before the Civil War, when he himself was positively startled. As a science fan he had just read a new book by Justus Liebig on organic chemistry and was thrilled. He wrote his Poem of Wonder at The Resurrection of the Wheat (later This Compost), based on the facts he had read. It is about the realisation that continuous change, growth, formation and decay are elemental to our world and nature. What fascinated you about the poem? 

In the project »EXT INC / REMEMBER ME«, on a curatorial level, there is this idea of disintegration, of fading, of dying out. I was reading a lot and searching for a suiting text to work with. Then I came across this poem by Walt Whitman! It deals with those topics, and it also deals with death, and I have a weird relationship with death in general.

What do you mean?

I don't believe in an afterlife or rebirth, but I think that with death everything that is alive disappears. I find it fascinating how your perspective changes completely when you experience death. It becomes a turning point in your life and you start to look at life in a completely different way. I imagine that in most people's lives, they experience it more than once. We lose people over the years for different reasons. The shift of perspective, the way we re-evaluate even death itself every time it happens and every time we are somehow exposed to it – that’s interesting to me.

I come from a part of the world that is very unstable for a very long time. Parts of it have turned into ruins. Millions of people are displaced because of that. These crises bring deaths with themselves in so many different ways. Sorry, it's getting kind of dark. If the government of your country is a totalitarian government, is a dictatorship, then it's very likely just erasing people and silencing them and killing them, whether it's through execution or just if there's a protest, they just open fire and kill people. Earlier I spoke about a pleasant aspect of Iranian culture, about poetry and the fact that it is present in the lives of millions of people. I think that death is probably equally present. I was born during the Iran-Iraq war. It was towards the end of it and I don't have any memory from it. But yeah, it is there. And I have the feeling that unfortunately  more and more people all over the world get to experience such kind of instability and a closer or more immediate distance to death.

You also mentioned a poetic aspect of death. What do you mean with that? 

Transience can also have something beautiful in it. I can also relate this to a poet, Omar Khayyam. He was not only a poet, but also a scientist, mathematician, philosopher - a very interesting person. And at his time a lot of his contemporaries, they could be very religious, be either Sufis or have a very strong connection with mysticism in different ways. But he was just the opposite: He was this hedonist philosopher who just only talks about enjoying and savouring life as it is. He has quite a few Ruba’is which are poems that have four lines. And in a lot of them, it's either the mention of wine and getting inebriated or enjoying life or the transience of life and the unfairness of the whole world. 

As there are several pieces of you that are directly influenced by Persian literature – are there also some who are directly influenced by Persian/Iranian music, if you can even put your finger on it? 

I have pieces that are directly influenced by Persian or Iranian music. But actually, I don't care. During the first years I had started writing music this was something I was particularly interesting in. But at some point, I started re-examining the position. Asking myself, where would that put me in terms of how my music is being received. Is it something limiting? Is it going to exoticize me or my music? Is it going to put me in a box that I don’t necessarily desire? And I had a lot of conversations about this with my non-Western teachers, colleagues, and friends.

How do these conversations and your experiences affect your work?

There is this phase, which I am still in. It starts with getting to know more people who play your music and are genuinely interested in it. They are musicians who might find something that is Iranian or sounds Iranian. Even though I might not have consciously chosen to use an element from Iranian music, this feedback from musicians can be interesting for me, because sometimes I don't pay attention to it in the way I work. I deal with my moves, my intuition, my memory - and with material to which I have an immediate, very intuitive connection. So it's actually quite natural and also normal that you can hear Iranian elements. But then when it's the only thing people perceive, it really bothers me. But of course you can't really stop people from thinking what they think or feeling what they feel. And I can live with that now. ¶