Composer Prize 2025

Ashkan Behzadi

Essay

Poetic perspectives and the trace behind

by Marina Kifferstein

“Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.” – Mahmoud Darwish

In a recent chat with Ashkan about life, art, identity, and politics—a typical conversational arc with my deeply thoughtful friend and collaborator of over a decade—he told me something I thought was strange at the time: he sees himself as a snail. The analogue seemed obvious to him, but from the look I gave him, he realized I had no idea what he meant. He went on to explain: he moves slowly and cautiously through the world, carrying the weight of his lived experience on his back like a shell. Just as a snail tracks mucus, he leaves a trace of his experience behind him as he goes, which will last for some time and eventually disappear. That trace, of course, is his art.

I paused, smiling, to absorb the image.

After knowing Ashkan for so many years, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the depth and imagination of this metaphor. He speaks this way about everything, from music to nature, from politics to homemade pickled garlic – a reflection of the way his mind has the tendency to view the world around him in shades of poetic significance. His way of framing the mundane with an air of enchantment, and the complex with an aura of organicity, never fails to delight me. He is a lover of poetics, and nearly all of his music engages with poetry, whether explicitly through text setting, or implicitly as a starting point or a guiding star.

The metaphor of the artist as snail is at once simple and deep, obvious and eccentric. There is something humble and even base about it, conceiving of art as a sort of excrement or byproduct of lived experience. And yet the image acknowledges something that is somehow essential about being human, which is also at the center of Ashkan’s work. The snail is small. He is elegant and understated. Moving slowly about the world, he observes the relatively fast-paced motion of his environment as if in a timelapse. The glossy trail he leaves behind is both reflective and ephemeral, a digested byproduct of the conditions that produced it.

Ashkan’s music is an extension of this perspective, embodying a constellation of dialectical relationships that come from the perspective of one who observes both global and local events on a grand time scale. Expressing stasis as a pathway to change, hope as a function of despair (and vice versa), loneliness and isolation as one with the universality of the human experience, his music runs the gamut from delicate and spare to layered and dense. But even his sparsest textures are lyrical, imbued with the inevitable unfurling of their uniquely poetic internal logic. To my mind, these throughlines that trace between his diverse catalog of works are in many ways the most indelible mark of his masterful craftsmanship as a composer.

Ashkan belongs to a generation of Iranian expat composers whose music engages in various ways with the lived experience and trauma of growing up in the tense sociopolitical climate of Iran in the years immediately following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as well as the challenges of leaving home and building a life in a foreign land. He grew up in Kerman, a mid-size desert city in the Southeast of Iran, and stayed in Iran through his undergraduate studies in Tehran, where he majored in architecture and studied piano and music composition. Like many artists of his generation, he left Iran to continue his studies, first in Montreal and then in New York City, where he still resides and serves on the composition faculty at the Manhattan School of Music and his alma mater, Columbia University. He has experienced multiple immigrations and dislocations, and this is reflected in a genuine feeling of transformation in much of his art, of forging a path through struggle.

We first collaborated in 2013, for the premiere concert of my group TAK Ensemble. He had recently moved to New York to begin his doctoral studies at Columbia University, and TAK was a newly formed quintet of performers in the graduate program for Contemporary Performance Practice at the Manhattan School of Music. His “Romance de la luna, luna,” a trio for violin, voice, and percussion, features shimmering glockenspiel, ghostly high violin harmonics, and expressive vocal lines. The evaporating threads of whispers and resonance are eventually whipped into a frenzied dance, like an imagined folk music experienced in relief. This trio eventually became the seed of his song cycle “Love, Crystal, and Stone” (2017), written for the full ensemble.

Soon after this collaboration, TAK’s vocalist Charlotte Mundy and I began performing Ashkan’s duo “Az hoosh mi…” (2013, originally written for Rachel Koblyakov and Colin Infante at Fontainebleau). We would go on to perform this piece many times over the years, and featured it on our album “Oor” (TAK Editions, 2019). Setting a poem by the same name by Iranian contemporary poet Reza Baraheni, “Az hoosh mi…”  explores intense romantic and erotic tension, giving voice to a lover who is so overcome with emotion that he cannot even finish a sentence without fainting. Charged vocal lines that whisper, stretch, groan, and soar are accompanied by violin writing that is constantly shifting roles between mirror, counterpoint, and shadow to the voice.

Several years later, Ashkan began developing “Love, Crystal and Stone” for TAK, which turned out to be one of the most ambitious undertakings we had ever attempted. The evening-length song cycle sets lyric poetry by Federico García Lorca in seven movements. Growing up in Iran, Ashkan was heavily influenced by the audio recordings of Ahmad Shamlou reading his Farsi translations of these poems, which capture the intimate lyricism of Lorca’s words with the added layer of contemporary Persian reference points, hidden in the translations like Easter eggs. The musical gestures of “Love, Crystal and Stone” mirror the tone of these readings, in the way the phrases seem to roll off the tongue, or the bow, or the drum, as if spoken to oneself. In the first and last movements, “Deseo” and “La granada,” fragmented melodies linger and curl like smoke; in “Arqueros,” an energetically restrained prologue bubbles with anticipation, until the tension is released in a cloud of impulses that whip through the air like arrows; in “Ay! El grito en el viento,” truncated, dramatic outbursts are punctuated and emphasized by prolonged, pregnant silences and tensely sustained sonorities in the extreme upper and lower registers. In 2022, TAK released a studio recording of the full cycle with a companion book, featuring the poems in Spanish and Farsi translation, prints of paintings by Iranian artist Mehrdad Jafari, and essays by Saharnaz Samaeinejad—an appropriately multimedia presentation for a work that engages with such a rich breadth of substance beyond the musical space.

My most recent collaboration with Ashkan was as a soloist, with his piece “how quiet—at the bottom of a lake, peaks of clouds” (2023). The work’s title is the full text in translation of a haiku by late 18th/early 19th century poet Kobayashi Issa, whose chosen name “Issa” translates to something like “one tea,” or according to poet Robert Hass, “a single bubble in steeping tea.” Again, poetry is the starting point. The words evoke a bizarre, almost uncanny kind of stillness. One imagines the author looking up from the bottom of the lake, seeing the clouds through the water’s surface. Is he dead? There is no sense that he is conscious of holding his breath, no urgency or anticipation. Time seems to have slowed nearly to a stop. Much like the poem, the piece seems to exist outside of time. It is almost entirely extremely quiet, and the performer is instructed to hum quietly along at will. The harmonic palette is based on a microtonal scale that Ashkan developed intuitively, which sets all of the intervallic relationships just slightly out of balance, creating an unmoored sense of floating in harmonic space. Many of the gestures are choreographically complex, requiring the violinist to make large movements that produce very little sound. This is music that is meant to be played to oneself, for oneself, with great care. The audience is invited to be in the same space and to listen in as voyeurs, as the violinist sings and struggles through a soft, complicated melody. There is no real sense of development; it exists in a space of rumination and circularity, returning again and again to similar phrases that never seem to fully resolve. Each iteration is unique, and yet it feels increasingly as if we’ve heard it before. By the final section, in retrospect we understand that the stillness and quietude we had felt for most of the piece was almost chaotic, erratic in comparison. We leave the piece with at least a sense of clarity and focus, if not resolution; a transformed perspective of what was already there. Of all of Ashkan’s music, this to me seems to most perfectly embody the image of the composer as snail.

Although I have limited myself in this essay to discussing those of Ashkan’s works which I have direct experience of as a performer/collaborator, there are many other important, substantial works in his oeuvre that bear mention. Both “Carnivalesque” (2014, written for Talea, revised for Divertimento Ensemble, and recorded by Oerknal) and “Convex” (2019-2020, for Grossman Ensemble) spin core harmonic or rhythmic ideas into an expanded universe through fragmentation and transformation; “Till-Still-Again” (2016, for Yarn/Wire and Ekmeles) is a powerful rendering of poetry by Samuel Beckett, utilizing the resonance of piano and percussion, a capella voices in microtonal clusters, and frenzied shouts and glissandi to bring life to the evocative, absurdist text; “Five Sketches for String Quartet” (2017, for JACK Quartet) is a masterclass in string quartet writing, each movement a detailed exploration of a singular and complicated idea, like a microscopic view into the inner workings of a cell body—to name a few.

All of Ashkan’s works convey equally ambitious sound worlds, demonstrating his striking ability as a composer to draw together complex forms in organic and poetically logical architectures. His interest in lyric poetry, the idea of poetry read aloud, is a throughline—even the most extreme textures he writes, from tangled webs of screams and shouts to inward lullabies at the edge of audibility, seem to yearn for communication and human expression. There is an inevitability in this music, a sense that it could be no other way. The composer moves slowly through the world, absorbing his conditions and experiences, always leaving a trace behind. But I have a feeling Ashkan was being too modest with the end of his metaphor—as a close follower and admirer of his work, I’m certain that his music leaves too indelible of a mark to evaporate any time soon.