PhilPaine.com

‘Ali Riza Mashayikhi is the dom­i­nant fig­ure in mod­ern Iran­ian con­cert music. Born in 1940 in Tehran, he stud­ied in Vien­na and Utrecht, and was intro­duced to mod­ernist tecb­niques by Otto Jelinek. How­ever, he does not appear to be com­mit­ted to any of the dread­ful “sys­tems” that ide­ol­o­gized com­po­si­tion in the 20^th cen­tury. He sen­si­bly draws on any tech­nique that is use­ful to the cre­ation of a par­tic­u­lar piece. Some of his works draw heav­ily on Iran­ian folk­loric tra­di­tion, intend­ing to con­very a region­al spir­it, while oth­ers pur­sue oth­er ends entire­ly. Mashayikhi was one of the first com­posers to bring com­put­er­i­za­tion into mid­dle-east­ern music. The pieces in my col­lec­tion are: Sym­phony #2. Op.57, the Con­certo for Vio­lin and Orches­tra, Op.96, and Nous ne ver­rons jamais les jardins de Nishapour for Two Pianos and Orches­tra, Op.56. The lat­ter piece is an exam­ple of a work that does not direct­ly employ any Per­sian mate­r­ial that I can see, but nev­er­the­less con­veys a dis­tinctly Per­sian mood. His out­put is huge, so it will require a lot of explor­ing. I like very much what I’ve heard so far. A curi­ous thing about the composer’s name: While he is undoubt­edly Per­sian, “Al-Mashayikhi” is Ara­bic for a per­son of the Mashayikh tribe in Iraq, cen­tered in the towns of Tarmiya and in Al-Hawe­jah, quite close to Sad­dam Hussein’s (and Saladin’s) birth­place in Tikrit. Mashayekhi or Mashayikhi seem to be com­mon Iran­ian names. Jamshid Mashayekhi is an Iran­ian film star, and Ario Mashayekhi is an expa­tri­ate painter, sculp­tor, and actor liv­ing in Chica­go. Anoth­er curios­ity: there is anoth­er com­poser, named Nad­er Mashayekhi, also trained in Vien­na, but born in 1958 (a bit old to be a son, and a bit young to be a broth­er — are they relat­ed?). I have not heard any of his music. There is also a folk­loric group from Iran called Mashayikhi Ensem­ble. The name seems to be pro­foundly musi­cal. Are we deal­ing, here with an extend­ed tal­ented fam­ily like the Bachs were in Thuringia? Or is it all coincidence?