Iranian Music, Sâz-é Nô

Silken Mobius from the Silk Road - The New Structure

     

Hossein Alizadeh and Madjid Khaladj continue their complex experiments in musical deconstruction in this work. The curiosity and excitement is contagious - you end up discovering the layers that they weave one after the the other, including, it seems, playing with the sense of time by performing set "modal" pieces in reverse for relatively short intervals and then bouncing back to moving forward. This has the beautiful effect of not only making familiar melodies sound freshly foreign, yet recognizable, but also it seems to convert pieces of a normally lamentful, and if I could be allowed to say dour, "dastgah", which are the strict modal compositional frameworks of Persian music, sound like pieces from another, rhythmic, dance based one. In this way they demonstrate the underlying connection between the parts of this complex system they are working in, revealing its unified structure.

Much of Persian poetry is metaphorically the story of the flights of the ancient mythical Simorgh or Homa from its roots. Simorgh is the mother of all birds, and some say creation itself, and the longing her departure creates is pervasive in Persian poetry. On the other hand, most melodies in Persian music are derived from poetry, while the rhythm of the music is the syllabic intonations of each poem, be it high poetry, or a folk songs, joyous or lamentful. Alizadeh and Khaladj easily switch the roles of melody and rhythm to wonderfully tense breaking points beyond anyone's imagination. It is at these absolute instances that Afsaneh Rassai's voice returns us to the core of what has been just deconstructed. Hers can be compared to the voice of the nightingale, the ephemeral offspring of Simorgh, representing our ephemeral lives, with its moments of angst, and pleasure. This nightingale's voice awakens us in the abstracted pardis (garden of paradise) so magically built into space by the music.

Just as each of the deconstructions reaches the verge of making time and place indistinguishable and nearly breaking the "expected" forms of the piece (goosheh) of a given dastgah, in flows the silky voice of Rassai with a floating rendition of a poem to remind us, and our strained brains, that this abstract space is nothing but familiar tapestry twisted into a mobius-strip-like infinity, making its patterns appear new without crossing an edge, a border-less infinity made within a finite system. She represent the silken weave of the tapestry of the here and now, smooth, yet strong, grounding us for the moment on the twisting strip, where ever on it we happen to be at that moment.

Generally it is not so important what the poems say, but how they say it. When she vocalizes their words, the undulating silk relaxes for that moment and infinite space of the system is revealed, allowing melodies and rhythms to flow away to their destinations. Perhaps that is what the title of the CD, derived from the poem in the last song may suggest: Saaz-e No, meaning literally The New Song. In Farsi, Saaz means many things, including an instrument, order, concept, organization, composition, etc. This work truly is a New Saaz, and whichever meaning of Saaz you pick, it fits.