Mashayekhi, Alireza

Ornamentalism

Label: Sub Rosa Country: Belgium

Subtitled: Ata Ebtekar and the Iranian Orchestra for New Music Performing Works of Alireza Mashayekhi, a followup to Sub Rosa's Persian Electronic Music.

"Alireza Mashayekhi: a short biography

Alireza Mashayekhi was born in 1940 in Tehran, Iran. He is one of the pioneers of modern music in Iran. Mashayekhi's works have been performed in Iran and abroad for more than 35 years. Mashayekhi believes that contemporary composers should create music in wide range of styles. His own compositions have tended towards three major direction: pieces that are directly inspired by Iranian music (e.g. Symphony No. 5, Persian Suite and Shahrzad) and compositions that are not directly related to Iranian music (e.g. SymphonyNo. 6, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra,Sonata for Piano) and multicultural compositions (e.g. Symphony No. 8 and the electronic composition East-West).

At the time of Stalin in the USSR, many pieces were composed with predetermined identities in honor of Marxism and Leninism by the request of the governmental authorities or by the artist's own whishes. Among these pieces those with artistic rightfulness remained and they were honored in both East and West, but the political weight of the other ones did not succeed to help them survive.

Alireza Mashayekhi

Alireza Mashayekhi is regarded as a pioneer Iranian avant-garde composer whose ideas and works, which have been performed in Iran and abroad for more than 35 years, have greatly influenced the contemporary music in Iran..

Hooman Asadi of the University of Tehran, Iran

Ata Ebtekar aka Sote: a short biography

aka Sote is an Iranian-American electronic composer and sound artist. he was born in Germany to Iranian parents, spent the first eleven years of his life in Iran and the next six years in Germany. at the age of seventeen he moved to the United States and lived in the Bay Area for fifteen years. he has spent the last few years living in Tehran and working on several projects. one of these projects was released in 2007 as a double disc set called 'Persian Electronic Music - Yesterday and Today' (sub rosa SR277) for which he compiled early electronic music from Alireza Mashayekhi who had created these compositions forty years ago. disc two features Ebtekar's own electronic compositions to present a timeline in modern Iranian music history. Sote's compositions are sonic tales synchronously decoding and regenerating customary patterns of thought in nature; aural designs of crisis and harmony where contempo meets folklore, orchestrating an artificial saga with a variety of illuminations and analysis. he believes that music is a cultural habit of sound and anti-sound (silence). therefore, he generates music without a specific culture, which he believes to be 'The Other Sound'. He has released several cds and vinyls on Dielectric/RLR, Spundae and especially on Warp."-Sub Rosa