21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / September 2011

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC


September 2011

Volume 18, Number 9


Work-in-Progress, 7/31/11


Chronicle of July 2011


Illustration / Amy Winehouse


Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS


INFORMATION FOR SUBSCRIBERS

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC is published monthly by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. ISSN 1534-3219.

Subscription rates in the U.S. are $96.00 per year; subscribers elsewhere should add $48.00 for postage. Single copies of the current volume and back issues are $12.00. Large back orders must be ordered by volume and be pre-paid. Please allow one month for receipt of first issue. Domestic claims for non-receipt of issues should be made within 90 days of the month of publication, overseas claims within 180 days. Thereafter, the regular back issue rate will be charged for replacement. Overseas delivery is not guaranteed. Send orders to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. email: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Typeset in Times New Roman. Copyright 2011 by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC. This journal is printed on recycled paper. Copyright notice: Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC.

The Journal is also online at 21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com


INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC invites pertinent contributions in analysis, composition, criticism, interdisciplinary studies, musicology, and performance practice; and welcomes reviews of books, concerts, music, recordings, and videos. The journal also seeks items of interest for its calendar, chronicle, comment, communications, opportunities, publications, recordings, and videos sections. Copy should be double-spaced on 8 1/2 x 11 -inch paper, with ample margins. Authors are encouraged to submit via e-mail.

Prospective contributors should consult The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), in addition to back issues of this journal. Copy should be sent to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.


INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Chronicle of July 2011

July 23

Death of Amy [Jade] Winehouse (b. 9/14/83, London, UK), at 27. London. "[She was] the British singer who found worldwide fame with a sassy, hip-hop-inflected take on retro soul, yet became a tabloid fixture as her problems with drugs and alcohol led to a strikingly public career collapse. "[A]lmost from the moment she arrived on the international pop scene in early 2007, Ms. Winehouse appeared to flirt with self-destruction. She sang of an alcohol-soaked demimonde in songs like Rehab -- whose refrain, 'They tried to make me go to rehab/I said, ‘No, no, no,’ ' crystallized Ms. Winehouse’s persona -- and before long it seemed to spill over into her personal life and fuel lurid headlines. The interplay between Ms. Winehouse’s life and art made her one of the most fascinating figures in pop music since Kurt Cobain, whose demise in 1994 -- also at age 27 -- was preceded by drug abuse and a frustration with fame as something that could never be escaped. Yet in time, the notoriety from Ms. Winehouse’s various drug arrests, public meltdowns and ruined concerts overshadowed her talent as a musician, and her career never recovered. . . . [A]s the news of Ms. Winehouse’s death spread, many . . . took to Twitter with deep sadness but no surprise. . . . Winehouse’s most recent comeback attempt faltered badly. Last month, she canceled a European tour after a performance in Belgrade on the first night, during which she appeared to be too intoxicated to perform properly" [Ben Sisario, The New York Times, 7/23/11].

Festival of International Laureates. Eduard Schmieder's iPalpiti. Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA. "Schmieder began and ended with pieces by young composers who later rejected the works. The opener was Benjamin Britten’s Young Apollo, an odd but cheerful eight-minute fanfare for piano, string quartet and string orchestra written in 1939. The closer was the two movements of a student string quartet that Rachmaninoff never finished but later in life revived by orchestrating for strings as Romance and Scherzo. The Britten is worth the bother. The 26-year-old composer, a pacifist who had fled England, was newly arrived in the U.S. He wrote the fanfare on commission from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. His inspiration was Keats’ Hyperion, with its 'new dazzling Sun-god, quivering with radiant vitality.' Britten played the brilliant piano part at the premiere in Toronto. But without explanation, he withdrew the piece and it was only revived in 1979, three years after his death. . . . [In this concert,] it quivered with radiant vitality anew. Svetlana Smolina, an outstanding Russian pianist with a luxuriant tone, was the evening’s underused soloist. Her piano was placed behind the orchestra, and she didn’t stand out quite as much as she might have. Still she caught both the flicker of the young Sun-god and also found urgency in the flashy solo part. Smolina was then the harpsichordist in the next piece, a Concerto Grosso for string quartet and string orchestra by Avner Dorman. Written in 2003 when the Israeli composer was 28, this is a piece that Dorman, who has become hot lately, may, himself, think about withdrawing. It is an update of Handel and Vivaldi, something that was already tired a decade or two ago. But the players sawed away with verve and the score went down easily. Different members of the ensemble formed the solo string quartets in the Britten and the Dorman. There wasn’t a weak player to be heard all evening. A controversial arrangement of the slow first movement of Mahler’s unfinished 10th Symphony by a German composer and conductor, Hans Stadlmair, was the most significant piece on the program. Here, a great dying composer enters new ethereal realms while simultaneously struggling with his deepest despair. The Adagio is one of music’s most profound depictions of the ineffable thin thread that separates life and death. Stadlmair reduced Mahler’s large orchestra to 15 strings, in a version that Gidon Kremer recorded with his Kremerata Baltica a decade ago. Schmieder has raised the ante slightly to 23 strings, which still means that without the weight of a full orchestra, Mahlerian ecstasy and anguish are both moderated. On the other hand, there is something very moving about intimately confronting Mahler’s beatific and tortured last thoughts with only a few strings. Schmieder’s approach was very much in the direction of chamber music. With sweeping and expressive arm gestures, he led an even-handed and slightly otherworldly account of the Adagio, more on the side of Mahler’s angels than his devils. The intonation and balances were beautiful. . . . The Romance and Scherzo proved an unnecessary curiosity, though. The teenager who wrote these two movements was not yet Rachmaninoff, although the intimations of his harmonic fingerprints could be detected. A week earlier in Beverly Hills, Schmieder gave the U.S. premiere of Kareem Roustom’s Three Klezmer Dances for violin, tambourine and strings, and he repeated it in a shortened version as an encore Saturday. No one knows where the Middle East is headed. But here was hope. A composer from Syria has made lovingly fanciful arrangements of Jewish music. The violin soloist, Daniel Turcina -- stepping out from an orchestra made up of Jews, Christians and Muslims from 19 countries -- is Slovakian. He played with improvisatory sounding fire and soul" [Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times, 7/24/11].


July 24

Summergarden: New Juilliard Ensemble. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. "New Juilliard Ensemble offered a concise overview of contemporary quartet composition that touched on several contrasting approaches: among them the painterly, the emotional, the dramatic and the abstract. In Barefoot Boy! (2004), Jiri Kaderabek captures a peculiarly evocative image from Humility, a poem by the early-20th-century Czech poet Jiri Wolker . . . . Kaderabek’s arsenal includes a slow opening unison figure that sounds vaguely folkloric; then the individual instruments peel off to investigate separate rhythmic and harmonic worlds. The interplay is striking, and toward the end of the score, a variant of the folk theme -- a bit eerier this time -- is restored. The Figure (2007), Judith Lang Zaimont’s quartet, is concerned with the way a musical line -- the 'figure' of the title -- can waft through a work, sometimes varied, sometimes without variation but with different character and coloration. The figure itself, graceful and consonant, is inviting enough to sustain this kind of exploration, and Ms. Zaimont makes the most of it: in relatively quick succession she takes her theme through driven, rhythmically involved, darkly introspective and sweetly lyrical episodes, often weaving textures around it that are more fascinating than the figure itself. Carson Cooman is drawn toward sophisticated pictorialism. The titles of his Four Aphoristic Inventions (2003) -- 'Disparate Conversation,' 'Mountain Climber (Unyielding Peak),' 'Wishing Well,' and 'Guillotine' -- accurately describe the music, but Mr. Cooman avoids predictable effects. “Mountain Climber,” for example, has the cello trying to surmount the harsh, aggressively sawed wall of sound that the other three instruments produce, and though 'Guillotine' ends with the expected sharp cutoff, the music leading to it is fresh and appealing, and the final gesture is more subtle than its predecessor in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Mr. Cooman was also represented by his melancholy Tombeau-Aria (2003) and by Estampie (2008), a vigorous, glancingly neo-medieval violin duet. The expert quartet -- David Fulmer and Rebekah Durham, violinists; Jennifer Chang, violist; and Avery Waite, cellist -- closed the program with a high-energy reading of Louis Andriessen’s bebop-inspired Facing Death (1990). This is an unabashedly jazzy piece, both melodically and rhythmically: death, presumably, is to be faced with a certain swagger and vitality. The players kept that essential quality in focus, even as Mr. Andriessen’s themes ventured into increasingly dense harmonic territory" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 7/25/11].

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / August 2011

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC


August 2011

Volume 18, Number 8


Chronicle of June 2011


Illustration / Sebastian Currier


Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS


INFORMATION FOR SUBSCRIBERS

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC is published monthly by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. ISSN 1534-3219.

Subscription rates in the U.S. are $96.00 per year; subscribers elsewhere should add $48.00 for postage. Single copies of the current volume and back issues are $12.00. Large back orders must be ordered by volume and be pre-paid. Please allow one month for receipt of first issue. Domestic claims for non-receipt of issues should be made within 90 days of the month of publication, overseas claims within 180 days. Thereafter, the regular back issue rate will be charged for replacement. Overseas delivery is not guaranteed. Send orders to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. email: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Typeset in Times New Roman. Copyright 2011 by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC. This journal is printed on recycled paper. Copyright notice: Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC.

The Journal is also online at 21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com


INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC invites pertinent contributions in analysis, composition, criticism, interdisciplinary studies, musicology, and performance practice; and welcomes reviews of books, concerts, music, recordings, and videos. The journal also seeks items of interest for its calendar, chronicle, comment, communications, opportunities, publications, recordings, and videos sections. Copy should be double-spaced on 8 1/2 x 11 -inch paper, with ample margins. Authors are encouraged to submit via e-mail.

Prospective contributors should consult The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), in addition to back issues of this journal. Copy should be sent to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.


INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Chronicle of June 2011

June 1

Ryoji Ikeda's The Transfinite. Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY. Through June 11. "Data has no aesthetic properties, and the composer Ryoji Ikeda, making music out of data, goes in hard for aesthetics: so much that he dares you to think his art contains nothing but. His best work makes epiphanies out of simple digital noises: tiny, evenly separated blips of static, soft applications of sub-bass, a bell tone, lots of space; dance rhythms, sometimes, if you want them to be. (They involve much more thought and organization than that, but he doesn’t make you very aware of the creator’s hand.) His CDs seem to describe a physical environment, but it’s better if you hear them in a room where he’s set up the speakers. The Transfinite . . . lasts only 9 minutes 20 seconds before it loops, but it’s dynamic and intense, almost orchestral, without a single melody. On giant screens, including part of the floor, it visualizes the music’s digital cross-breezes into bar codes and binary patterns. The Armory puts the piece in an environment you can walk through, with different sounds pointing in different directions in the hall. It’s dark, and you feel insignificant in the big room amid the big sounds; it seems like a natural world in there, a clearing in the digital forest. You may find yourself reacting to music on a more basic level than usual, going animal: you may want to prowl in circles, feel the cool white floor with your cheek, chase after echoes" [Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, 6/3/11].


June 2

Violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Alan Gilbert, in the premiere of Sebastian Currier's Time Machines. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "She was riveting in the premiere of the American composer Sebastian Currier’s Time Machines (2007). Mr. Gilbert, a consistently impressive conductor of contemporary music, drew assured and rapturous playing from the orchestra in Mr. Currier’s demanding 30-minute score, composed in 2007. . . . Currier writes that each of the seven movements of Time Machines explores 'some aspect of the relationship between the perception of music and time.' Of course, you could argue that every musical work is an exploration of time. But this one takes that challenge seriously. In the first movement, 'Fragmented Time,' the violin plays a near-continuous line of buzzing, fitful notes, riffs and chords. The orchestra reacts with nervous harmonic bursts, skittish figures for an intrusive piano and, now and then, a sustained series of chords that seem to want to stop the music cold. In a way, the violin is all that holds the movement together. The subsequent movements explore other elements of time and space. 'Delay Time' is like an eerie prolongation of a reverberating sound. 'Compressed Time,' true to its title, is all wired energy and abrupt phrases, with the violin tossing off a stream of 16th notes that could be some crazed perpetual-motion toccata. Though this work is driven by Mr. Currier’s handling of rhythm and time, the music’s harmonic allure and textural richness were often its most striking qualities. Mr. Currier’s musical language, which draws from tonal and atonal sources, if not pathbreaking, is very personal. With his acute ear and sensitivity to color, whole passages of the piece were rapturously beautiful, especially the mystical final movement, 'Harmonic Time.' Ms. Mutter played magnificently" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 6/3/11].


June 10

Someone Talked! Joan Morris and Robert White, accompanied by William Bolcom. Metropolitan Museum, New York, NY. "[T]he show was a cozy, familial affair well stocked with little anecdotes -- Mr. Bolcom’s memories of his boyhood newspaper route . . . . But the 28 selections, by names like Loesser and Mercer and Berlin, gave a good sense of the range of work during the period, from peppy anthems to melancholy ballads. The audience was told to 'just imagine you’re in a radio station during World War II,' but the mood was really closer to Mr. Schumacher’s observation about Eddie DeLange and Sam H. Stept’s stirring This Is Worth Fighting For, which closed the first half: 'It’s like a Norman Rockwell painting in music.' . . .
Ms. Morris, a wonderful artist who introduced many of Mr. Bolcom’s works, including his masterpiece, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, pointed the texts of her selections with purpose" [Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, 6/12/11].


June 11

Philip Glass. Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. "Followers of the composer Philip Glass could scarcely miss a turn in recent decades from the hypnotic extended works that earned him the Minimalist label toward the traditional forms and trappings of the classical music mainstream. Interviewing Mr. Glass onstage in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Saturday night, Richard Guérin, the associate director of Mr. Glass’s record label, Orange Mountain Music, noted the development. 'If you told somebody in 1972 that we’d be here listening to your Fifth String Quartet, a lot of people wouldn’t believe it,' Mr. Guérin said. 'They still wouldn’t believe it,' Mr. Glass replied. His response drew laughter from the large, clearly devoted audience on hand to hear the Days and Nights Festival Players, the house band Mr. Glass has assembled for his new summer festival in Carmel Valley, Calif., scheduled for August. Tradition must surely be on Mr. Glass’s mind: with his recently completed Symphony No. 9, which will have its American debut at Carnegie Hall on his 75th birthday next January, he has achieved a fearful symmetry with Beethoven, Schubert, Bruckner and Mahler. (Lest you worry about Mr. Glass’s health, know that he mentioned having already finished a 10th Symphony.) His festival will look partly back to the chamber music he admired in his youth, including performances of pieces by Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schoenberg, Bartok and Shostakovich. Mr. Glass’s quartets provide evidence of a mostly graceful transition. The First, from 1965, is like a sliver chipped from one of Morton Feldman’s imposing glaciers; three more quartets, unnumbered, count among his juvenilia. But Mr. Glass’s four mature quartets, Nos. 2 to 5, show him using the surging, shifting rhythms and tumbling arpeggios of his early Minimalist works as building blocks for pieces that hew close to Classical notions of proportion and pacing, along with an almost Romantic emotional acuity. The repetitions remain but seldom linger. In the violinists Maria Bachmann and Tim Fain, the violist David Harding and the cellist Matt Haimovitz, Mr. Glass had performers well versed in his style and keenly aware of what precedents he meant to evoke. If the group did not yet sound like a polished ensemble in its account of Mr. Glass’s genially restless Fifth Quartet, it compensated with deliriously beautiful sound and expressive spirit. (In a sense, this was a premiere: in the interview Mr. Glass said that he had fixed a wrong note present since the work’s inception in 1991.) With the pianist Jon Klibonoff, Ms. Bachmann played Mr. Glass’s Sonata for Violin and Piano with the kind of intensity and ardor normally reserved for Romantic fare, an approach that suited the restless permutations of the outer movements and the limpid central section. Mr. Klibonoff also joined Mr. Fain for the American premiere of Pendulum, a brief, coursing showpiece given a whirlwind account" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 6/19/11].

Book Review

Balint Andras Varga. Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers. University of Rochester Press, 2011.

Few books seem to merit immediate review. This is one of them. The queries posed by Balint Andras Vara in his Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers are

1. Have you had an experience similar to Witold Lutoslawski's: he heard John Cage's Second Piano Concerto on the radio -- an encounter which changed his musical thinking and ushered in a new creative period, the first result of which was his Jeux Venetians (1960-1961).

2. A composer is surrounded by sounds. Do they influence you and are they in any way of significance to your compositional work?

3. How far can one speak of a personal style and where does self-repetition begin?

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / July 2011

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC


July 2011

Volume 18, Number 7


Good and Evil with Behzad Ranjbaran

Mythologies / Phillip George

Chronicle of May 2011

Recording


Illustration / Behzad Ranjbaran


Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

Elizabeth Agnew
Alexis Alrich
Katherine Buono
Ken Bullock
A.J. Churchill
David Cleary
Jeff Dunn
Phillip George
Elliot Harmon
Brian Holmes
Jeff Kaliss
John Lane
Arel Lucas
Michael McDonagh
Chip Michael
Tom Moore
William Rowland
Lisa Scola Prosek
Andrew Shapiro
Alice Shields
CORRESPONDENTS


INFORMATION FOR SUBSCRIBERS

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC is published monthly by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. ISSN 1534-3219.

Subscription rates in the U.S. are $96.00 per year; subscribers elsewhere should add $48.00 for postage. Single copies of the current volume and back issues are $12.00. Large back orders must be ordered by volume and be pre-paid. Please allow one month for receipt of first issue. Domestic claims for non-receipt of issues should be made within 90 days of the month of publication, overseas claims within 180 days. Thereafter, the regular back issue rate will be charged for replacement. Overseas delivery is not guaranteed. Send orders to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. email: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Typeset in Times New Roman. Copyright 2011 by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC. This journal is printed on recycled paper. Copyright notice: Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC.

The Journal is also online at 21st-centurymusic.com and 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com


INFORMATION FOR CONTRIBUTORS

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC invites pertinent contributions in analysis, composition, criticism, interdisciplinary studies, musicology, and performance practice; and welcomes reviews of books, concerts, music, recordings, and videos. The journal also seeks items of interest for its calendar, chronicle, comment, communications, opportunities, publications, recordings, and videos sections. Copy should be double-spaced on 8 1/2 x 11 -inch paper, with ample margins. Authors are encouraged to submit via e-mail.

Prospective contributors should consult The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), in addition to back issues of this journal. Copy should be sent to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com. Materials for review may be sent to the same address.


INFORMATION FOR ADVERTISERS

Send all inquiries to 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC, P.O. Box 2842, San Anselmo, CA 94960. e-mail: mus21stc@gmail.com.

Good and Evil with Behzad Ranjbaran

Behzad Ranjbaran is an Iranian-American composer who teaches at the Julliard School of Music in New York. I caught up with him at the Four Points Sheraton on May 1, 2011, just before a performance of his Mithra, with the Marin Symphony.

ALBURGER: Perhaps you can tell us about Mithra.

RANJBARAN: Tonight's concert features Mithra, which I wrote last year.

ALBURGER: How did you get connected with the Magnum Opus Project?

RANJBARAN: I received a call from Meet the Composer that I had been award one of the grants from Kathryn Gould.

ALBURGER: Just out of the blue.

RANJBARAN: It was a very generous gesture towards promoting new music. I was very happy to accept the offer, which involved performances with three orchestras.

ALBURGER: Oakland as well.

RANJBARAN: And Santa Rosa, which was where the premiere occurred last year. I think this should be a model for the rest of the country: to initiate large works, not just for one orchestra, but several at once. I'm very happy that a number of performances are happening here. Next year the Philadelphia Orchestra is going to bring my Saratoga for the centennial of the San Francisco Symphony.

ALBURGER: Assuming the Philadelphia Orchestra's still in existence, what with the bankruptcy.

RANJBARAN: That is just a phase to reorganize their finances. I assume that will be short term. And also, this summer, Cabrillo Festival will bring my Piano Concerto here. I am discovering the beauty of this area, and seeing what a fertile ground it is for music and art. People love to nurture quality, whether it is music or art or wine. This area reminds me of the city of Shiraz, which has a similar climate. It is famous for, obviously, Shiraz wine, which dates back several thousand years. It was there that the concept of paradise was developed! The San Francisco Bay Area also reminds me of the wine and the paradise! I feel very much at home.

ALBURGER: Are you from Shiraz?

RANJBARAN: I was born in Tehran, but I went to Shiraz in my younger years. I wrote a chamber piece, that is becoming popular, called "Shiraz" Piano Trio.

ALBURGER: Mithraism seems to offer a spin on paradise, too.

RANJBARAN: It does. It is one of the early believe systems, and the more I read, the more fascinated I became. My connection to Mithraism is very personal. In Iran, "mithra" and "mihr" are very interchangeable. "Mihr" is the aspect of Mithraism that represents "love," "affection," and "obligation." When men and women marry, the obligation is called "mihr." If you have affection for someone, this requires obligation. It's a beautiful tradition. And the seventh month of the Iranian calendar is called "mihr," and my older brother was born in that month. Mithraism is a fascinating belief system that was very popular from India all the way to England for an extended period of time, until Christianity took over. The idea of resurrection, the concept of drinking wine and eating bread.

ALBURGER: That good Shiraz wine!

RANJBARAN: So, a lot of these traditions influenced Christianity -- although the Roman concept of Mithraism was very different from the Persian origins of the religion. And Mithrasism was never unified the way Islam or Christianity was. But it influenced Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- a common heritage for all these cultures, all these religions. That, to me, is a message of universality: that we are all connected; that we are all one.

ALBURGER: How does this work out in the music?

RANJBARAN: I tried to explore three aspects of Mithra in the piece, as three sections: interrelated and connected. A continuous piece of music. The first part is very meditative. It features the solo flute, inspired by the Persian ney. I always felt that the bamboo flute is the most universal instrument around the world. From thousands of years ago, it was natural to express one's feeling through the bamboo flute.

ALBURGER: Performed on a metal flute! What kind of accompaniment? Drone?

RANJBARAN: Harp, which, in ancient times, was the instrument that accompanied reciting poets.

ALBURGER: You're buying into ancient music traditions. What about more contemporary Persian influences?

RANJBARAN: All the melodic characters, rhythms, and improvisatory features are inspired by Iranian models, although I never use traditional Persian melodies -- rather more subtle allusions, rather than imitation.

ALBURGER: What about the second section?

RANJBARAN: More aggressive and rhythmic, representing the battle of Mithra in overcoming evil. We have that eternal conflict. Mithra represents the goodness in humans.

ALBURGER: What's the bad side in Mithraism?

RANJBARAN: Mithra overall is all good.

ALBURGER: But is there a personification of evil?

RANJBARAN: We call it "Satan."

ALBURGER: Not a different name?

RANJBARAN: "Shaytan."

ALBURGER: How about that? So close!

RANJBARAN: So the second section is energetic, with rhythmic drive. It is not a battle, but it is grand and vast. It is tense, but never reaches a finale.

ALBURGER: Well, you have another section to go.

RANJBARAN: Two numbers are important in Mithraism: "4" and "7." At the end of this middle section, we hear four strokes, and then seven.

ALBURGER: Both numbers are important in Western traditions, too.

RANJBARAN: Absolutely. Including the seventh month, when my brother was born! And the final second represents "Love." And it is soft and full of lyricism. A picture of how we hope the world will be someday!