UC San Diego

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.