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Artistic Statement

I like to think of the act of composing as choreographing gestures and movements of the musical performance in which the kinetic energy of each sound is vital in determining the sequence and the direction of the musical text.

I like to work with poetic texts and musically respond to them through multiple levels of meaning and comprehension while presenting them as generators of sonic and structural attributes and proportions.

Spectromorphology and timbral dramaturgy are two notions I often contemplate when I compose.

Growing up in a unique Baku (Azerbaijan) neighborhood, where church bells and the azan from the mosque are periodically heard, creating immensely enchanting and contrapuntal soundscape, I enjoy experiencing multiplicity and simultaneity of textures in a piece of music. In that same fashion, I like the music I write to be heard as a multilayered and multilingual cultural phenomenon.

"Makam is an ocean", as goes a saying of a prominent ustad (master) makam-singer of old generation from my hometown. I like to dive into that ocean of poetry, rhymes, complex and alternating meters, heterophonic textures, miniature calligraphy, and sonically provocative relationships. The latter entails dualities such as pulsed versus non-pulsed sections, pre-composed versus improvised materials, tone centers versus alternating quarter tones observed in a makam performance.

I like to think of my music as a memory in which a listener can navigate freely between past and present while nostalgically experiencing sonic relationships of vertical and horizontal time. ”Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form,” writes Mevlana Jalaladdin Rumi, a sufi poet of the 13th century.

NEWS

  • My new solo guitar piece blurred/unblurred is to performed by Dan Lippel among other premieres at the Tenri Cultural Institute (NY) on May 12 as a part of the Sounds New series curated by Reiko Füting.

  • New work commissioned by William Hayter and Corey Robinson to be performed during the CLARINETFEST® 2023 in Denver.

  • Three of my works - “Breath”, “…seen when night is silent” and “9 rubai” will be performed as part of the 1st Baku Contemporary Music Days Festival to be held in May 21-24, 2023 at the International Mugham Center, Baku, Azerbaijan.

  • I am commissioned to compose a full-scale ballet for the Azerbaijan State Opera and Ballet Theatre. I will be working on completing the piece this summer that is planned to be choreographed and staged in 2024.