Mehdi Hesamizadeh | Composer, Violist, Sound Artist
Resonant conversation
Resonant Conversation is a four-part contemporary chamber music cycle for saxophone, violin, viola, and cello composed by Mehdi Hesamizadeh. The project investigates microtonal organization as both a compositional methodology and a dialogic structure through which memory, displacement, oral transmission, and cultural transformation may be articulated sonically.
The cycle unfolds through a gradual movement from aurally calibrated just intonation toward increasingly elastic intonational environments. While the first work is built around perceptually derived ratio-based relationships, the subsequent compositions introduce flexible pitch fields, controlled indeterminacy, structured improvisation, and graphic organization. Throughout the project, microtonality functions as a primary structural force shaping harmonic tension and timbral density. Simultaneously, the relationship between fixed notation and performer agency continuously shifts across the cycle, moving between fully composed passages, structured improvisation, and graphic notation.
The work operates within a compositional framework that mediates between rigorously organized contemporary chamber writing and the unstable condition of transmitted folk memory. To varying degrees across the cycle, the compositions draw upon modal contours, melodic fragments, ornamental gestures, and narrative structures associated with folk traditions from different regions of Iran. These materials are sometimes quoted directly and sometimes reinterpreted through processes of fragmentation, transformation, and recontextualization within a contemporary microtonal compositional language.
The project further examines the condition of the folklorist outside the original geographic and cultural environment of the transmitted material. Questions of migration, altered landscape, linguistic distance, and cultural dislocation are embedded within the compositional process. The work approaches folklore both as an rchive of preserved material and a mutable and unstable field continuously reshaped through memory, interpretation, and contemporary experience.
Performers:
Bastian Duncker: Alto Saxophone
Niki Yaghmayee: Violin
Mehdi Hesamizadeh: Viola
Golsana Shenasai: Cello
Milad Zendehnam: Audio engineer and Anna Kislova: Visual Artist
The project was realized with the support of Initiative Neue Musik Berlin and recorded live at Galiläa Kirche in July 2025.
The first composition, ”Decision,” combines fixed compositional structures with controlled improvisational passages, developing dense and unstable transformations of musical elements associated with North Khorasan folk traditions while structurally reflecting states of psychological pressure and the process of confronting irreversible decision-making. In particular, it articulates the emotions one experiences when contemplating to decision to permanently leave one’s place of life.
“Remembering Hâji Gholagh” similarly moves between composed and structured improvisational material while referring to the oral narrative surrounding the traditional North Khorasan piece known as “Hâji Gholagh,” historically transmitted through the Bakhshi tradition. According to the story, Hâji, a gifted dutār player, falls in love with Gulbahar after rejecting the daughter of a local khan, who seeks revenge by demanding that he perform an impossible melody heard only in a dream. Realizing the trap, Hâji gathers other Bakhshis and performs a final piece, asking them to memorize and preserve it before the khan orders the fingers of his left hand to be cut off, forcing Hâji and Gulbahar into exile. The story is an allegory for oral transmission and continuity through collective memory and performance.
The composition reinterprets motifs and structural traces from this material while articulating themes of oral transmission, loss, migration, and the altered condition of cultural remembrance outside a tradition’s original social context. Part-autobiographical, this piece reflects on the position of the composer away from home, attempting to sustain a relationship to land, language, and musical memory across distance and time.
“Mournful Finality” (After Duduki by George Gurdjieff) begins with structured improvisation before moving toward fixed composition. Drawing on melodic material from Gurdjieff’s piece and the modal atmosphere of Shah Khatai, the work articulates the emotional state of loss, specifically, the peculiar form of loss in which something continues to exist yet no longer remains accessible in the same way. This kind of loss finds a clear expression in two related emotional conditions: the awareness that precedes departure, when the familiar begins to estrange itself even as one still inhabits it, and the longing for places, belonging, and people left behind, which persists long after one has gone.
The final work, “From Nightmare to Awakening,“ is structured in two parts. The first combines graphic notation, structured improvisation, and flexible temporal organization, while the second gradually moves toward fixed composition. The work draws on a song from the Kurdish region of Uramanat in which a lover attempts to awaken the beloved during an apocalyptic time, calling her to come with him to gather fragrant herbs in the mountains. References to trees and groves, to the mountain Dalani and the ancient plain of Shahrizor shape the atmosphere of the piece, reflecting the close connection between memory, longing, and landscape in Kurdish oral traditions.
The first part evokes the experience of seeing a nightmare with open eyes, suspended between dream and waking consciousness. The second part brings a form of awakening, yet no reprieve from catastrophe: the apocalypse remains present even after clarity arrives. And yet, amidst this, the work returns to the image of going together into the mountains to gather herbs at the end of time, referring to the comforting force of companionship, love, and nature even in the darkest of days.