This dissertation offers an analytical and ontological insight into my compositional method and creative process. Focusing on three compositional projects produced at UCSD between 2018 and 2020, this dissertation details the synthesis of acoustic and electronics components utilized in my work. Giving special emphasis on the exploration of the facilitation of technology, and annotating the creative journey embarked upon through collaboration, this dissertation outlines the stages of creative process; from the initial creation of a work, to the final presentation of a composition. Structured into three distinct chapters, each chapter provides a detailed analysis of an individual composition with the main principles discussed within each chapter relating to my compositional process. Common themes seen throughout each chapter are concerned with granularity, sound sculpting, and spatialization. Through this dissertation I endeavor to provide detailed explanations of each of these techniques and how they are incorporated into my work. This dissertation is primarily about exploration and intuition. Through unpacking the elements of my compositional practice, I have endeavored to embark on new sonic terrain, situating my work not only within the boundaries and traditions prevalent in Western Art Music, but as an attempt to also expand the compositional dichotomy of acoustic and electronic mediums.

The following Doctoral Dissertation represents the culmination of nearly three years of work in the UCSD department of music. After completing my qualification exams I started to work on a large-scale composition: Transcyptum, opera-installation, which was commissioned by Grand Theater National Opera in Warsaw and premiered in May 2013. This paper combines the most crucial elements of my research, discusses concept of "opera-installation" and most importantly explains the realization process of Transcryptum.

After one year of working on Transcryptum I realized that this opera would certainly transcend the traditional frames of its genre. A strong influence of visual arts, the rejection of setting text to music, and an inability to find an adequate director who would understand the nature of my work encouraged me to combine 3 roles in one: composer, director, and librettist.

Making the decision to fulfill those three positions was inspired by a longtime fascination of interdisciplinary work by one of the fathers of music theater Heiner Goebbles, who creates and supervises most of the layers in his complex stage works from texts, stage directions, and dramaturgy to composing music.

In Warsaw performance of Transcryptum the audience was divided into 5 groups, following 5 different trails and exploring vast off stage spaces of the opera house where they encountered performers, objects, and installations.

The aim of this dissertation is not only to present and discuss the music composed for Transcryptum, but also to explain the structure of the opera's performance and to guide a reader through all the elements of the opera, which were seen and heard by the audience.

This dissertation explores the cyclical relationship between my life and music, feeding into each other through studying five of my recent compositions. My life experience strongly influences my composition, and among all, the grief of losing my brother in 2019 has been the most decisive leader. Conversely, music composition has been the safest and most healing place for me to process my grief. As a result of this grieving process, there have been five pieces composed: Paper Pigeons (2019), Faryad (2020-21), Shabah solo (2021-22), Shabah duo (2022), and In-Contact@Zero (2022-23). Among all these, In-Contact@Zero summarizes the grieving process from the beginning to the final recovery. I have noticed that the experience of grief has intensified the presence of emotions in my work and has redirected my compositions to a much higher level. The leading force expressing grief through composition has also pushed me toward investigating specific research topics during my PhD studies, including exploring my Iranian musical and artistic heritage, such as the Persian language and Radif (Iranian classical music), and how to present them in my work. This force has also led me to study the essence and balance of visual components and their influence on my work, such as performers’ bodies, space, light, and graphics. My compositions, grief, and research form a complex, intertwined network, which makes it hard to track their links precisely. This complexity grows as I age, marking my life-long research process to unfold this network through more compositions in the future.

This dissertation presents my composition Chamber Concerto for nine players and electronics. An accompanying commentary examines notions of hybridity in the work, focusing particularly on the hybridization of overtone-based and equal-tempered conceptions of harmony.

This dissertation discusses a portfolio of five recent compositions: 'Onomastic Gymnastics' (2019), a three-part contrapuntal song for flexible instrumentation; 'a loose affiliation of alleluias' (2019), a concerto for an instrumental improvisor, three offstage vocalists, and orchestra; 'the way we look to a song' (2020), for three voices; 'Pierre' (2021), an orchestral score for the dance-theater work by Bobbi Jene Smith; and 'the power of moss' (2021), for voice and instrument. In all five works, the singing voice plays a central role: both in the performing musical forces, as well as in the processes by which the works were composed. My discussion of these pieces therefore reflects on the various ways in which my compositional practice navigates between historical knowledge and technique—especially that which guides and shapes my singing voice—and creative agency. Drawing from scholarly frameworks such as Ben Spatz on technique, Carrie Noland on agency, and Diana Taylor on the “scenario” and the “repertoire”, I understand this negotiation of historical knowledge to be neither limiting nor regressive, but rather precisely the means by which creative and artistic agency can be exercised.

At the same time, I discuss my critical engagement with historical materials and technique in my compositional practice, which seeks to excavate the socio-political structures within which musical practices resonate, both historically and in the present day. These reflexive efforts to trace and highlight the historical formations which shape and animate my compositional practice I liken to Edward Said’s insistence on making explicit the “affiliations”—between practices, individuals, classes, and formations—which tend to be covered over, but whose excavation is a precondition for political change. All in all, I see this creative practice as contributing to a broader artistic and scholarly current of efforts to challenge the cultural and artistic hegemonies inherited from Eurological classical music, and instead build creative practices out of highly particular, provincial, and personal inflections of our musical inheritances.

Understanding, examining, and observing the creative processes of any piece of art, guide us to a profound insight of the creators thoughts and ideas. In my opinion, Jani Christou was one of the most imaginative and creative composers of the 20th century. His profound knowledge in Philosophy and music, and his radical, fearless musical voice, interconnected an additional layer to his latest pieces, like Anaparastasis I and III ( The Baritone and The Pianist). In Anaparastasis III, which is the focus of this thesis, Christou plays between the “ common”, “traditional”, “ expected” and “dictated “ rolls of/between the performers, the soloist, conductor and the audience. At the same time, he is carefully choreographing and directing the visual aspect of his musical materials. To him, every detail matters and each component plays a significant role toward the perception of this piece. Here, I observed and analyzed the piece, by following the footprints of his creative processes. Creating needs a genuine, especial, multi angled, focused “care”, which I am aiming to point out, its fundamental role in this research and in particular in the creation of this piece.

Three Video Scores and their Compositional & Notational Strategies

This thesis is a portfolio of work completed during my Master’s study at the University of California, San Diego. Included in this portfolio are three papers, written as part of my coursework, and three original compositions.

In this thesis, I describe the state of development for an automatic music notation generator and tablet-based graphical user interface. The programs currently available for the automatic generation of music notation are focused on the compositional and theoretical aspects of the music-making process. denm (dynamic environmental notation for music) is being designed to provide tools for the rehearsal and performance of contemporary music. All of the strategies underlying these tools are utilized by performers today. These strategies traditionally involve the re-notation of aspects of a musical score by hand, the process of which can be detrimentally time-consuming. Much of what performers re-notate into their parts is composed of information latent in the musical model — the musical model which is already being represented graphically as the musical score. denm will provide this latent information instantaneously to performers with a real-time music notation generator. The thesis presents a few of the techniques currently used by performers of contemporary music, the features with denm that are designed to make these techniques more efficient, as well as the underlying algorithms that make this possible.

This dissertation discusses my concert-installation spaces, between in relation to thresholds, embodiment and cross-sensory perception. I draw on the work of Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner’s discussions of liminality as the basis for a consideration of the role of thresholds, brought about through processes of transition, in the musical, visual and spatialcomponents of the work. I examine theories of embodiment in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler to propose a theory of individual embodiment as the basis for spaces, between. I explore the potential for cross-sensory correspondences in the context of embodied perception, and consider how grounding the experience of a live instrumental performance in individual embodiment separates the concert-installation from the broader Western concert tradition.