Dariush Dolat-Shahi Selected by Del Vaz Projects

For this sound session at Canary Test, Jay Ezra Nayssan, Founder and Chief Curator of Del Vaz Projects, presents a selection of albums from the oeuvre of Dariush Dolat-Shahi (b. 1947), the Iranian-American electroacoustic pioneer and composer. With a conservatory education in Persian and Western music traditions—graduating from the Tehran Conservatory in 1968—Dolat-Shahi’s revolutionary compositions fuse classical Persian instruments with contemporary electronic sound. With scholarships from the Iranian government, the musician began his studies at the University of Utrecht in 1970, where he was first exposed to electronic music, after which he began a doctorate at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1976. That same year, he was commissioned by the Shiraz Festival of Arts to create an original piece for electronics and chamber orchestra. Dolat-Shahi’s work is emblematic of the festival’s aspirations: to celebrate both ancestral and contemporary Iranian music, film, theater, and dance on a world stage and to create a cross-cultural platform for the arts that emphasized the seminal influence of Middle Eastern, Asian, and African expression on Western imagination. Dolat-Shahi’s album Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar (1985), the spotlight of this program, includes five tracks of electroacoustic sound originally performed at Carnegie Hall in 1983. The second album featured in this session, Otashgah (1986), was recorded at the Electronic Music Studio at Stony Brook University. Using an electronic vocabulary to both honor and revolutionize the musical and literary history of Iran, while in the 1985 album he samples traditional Iranian instruments with electronic synthesizers, in the 1986 album—the title of which translates to “place of fire”—he uses pure synth to pay homage to the Persian poet Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, an epic that recounts the discovery of fire. From his earliest experiments and tests, overlaying tape recordings of classical music across multiple channels, Dolat-Shahi’s career is a testament to the interdependence of traditional and innovative soundscapes. As Rachel S. Siegel describes in the liner notes of Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar, “There could not be a more seemingly disparate compositional scenario as a work for tar or sehtar and electronic music: one a mystical primitive instrument whose musical performance heritage is one of improvisational spiritualism; the other a highly technical, modern medium founded in acoustical science in direct defiance of any traditional notion of performance. Yet, in the skillful work of Dariush Dolat-Shahi, a common, basic mandate of each ‘instrument’ is profoundly explored.”

Bibliography

Martyna Kosecka, “Electroacoustic Music in Iran: Creation, History, Transformation, Revolutions,” Glissando, Audio Papers, 2023. <https://audiopapers.glissando.pl/electroacoustic-music-in-iran/>

Bob Gluck, An Eclectic Iranian-American Composer and Artist, Conversation with Dariush Dolat-Shahi, eContact! 15.2, Toronto Electroacoustic Symposium, 2012. <https://econtact.ca/15_2/gluck_dolat-shahi.html>