My most recent work for the Grammy Award-winning Kronos Quartet, will be world-premiered at Brava theater on April 12 at 9 p.m. as part of Switchboard Music Festival along with another premiere by San Francisco-based composer Ryan Brown. The piece written for amplified String Quartet and pre-recorded media (fixed media) is based on work songs, love songs and sounds of Persian carpet weavers.
The piece is in three distinctive sections. Tarh which means “Pattern” in Farsi, depicts the pattern-reading process and in fact this section is designed in the shape of a carpet even on the music score. Bâft meaning “Knotting” portrays the mechanical procedure of carpet knotting and scissoring the extras with all the noises and some actual singing which I spent 6 months recording in different regions of Iran. In the last section Pardâkht meaning “Finish”, I incorporated my own grandmother’s voice singing a carpet-weaving song which translates as follows:
Thread by thread, it is enough with that flower (that symbol)
No matter how long I work, this work will never finish,
Day and night I spend knotting Kermân (a city) rugs,
And even if my finger tips start to bleed,
I’ll never leave my place and will never stop working!
