Shathiyat (Album)

Trying to play a piece by Javād Ma’rūfi from memory at the age of nine, I realized the well-tempered major third interval sounded oddly out of tune to my ears. Having studied western music and composition at sixteen, I began writing a piece for piano in the Persian dastgāhi music. I did not know, however, what exactly these Persian microtones were. Were they really “one quarter” of a tone, as the Persian term suggests? What was their musical distance to the scale’s tonic? How about other intervals and tones? Etc. After that, I started studying and calculating different tuning systems and the physical, mathematical, and musical relationship between different tones and sounds; the walls of my office were covered with tables, charts, and numbers.
A year before the pandemic and later on during the lockdowns, I organized those studies and calculations, eventually putting them together in a book entitled “Kanz al-Ab’ād,” the first volume of which is soon to be published. I also made three albums called “Shathiyāt” based on those studies. What you hear on this first volume of the trilogy is based on Fārābi’s scales and Avicenna’s theories, written for six pianos with different tunings.
I believe that for an Iranian composer who understands the need to be contemporary and intends to move toward it, there are no more than two ways. The first one is to utterly abandon your own musical tradition and history, to be contemporary through Western music. The second one is to look at your musical tradition and what history has inherited for you as “contemporary material” that has a dynamic flow of its own, without an immutable, rigid nature that is only good for being displayed in a museum as an artifact.

I went down the latter road in “Shathiyāt”.
–
Hamed Sabet
Winter 2022