Morteza Shirkoohi’s Music About Architecture

Iranian composer Morteza Shirkoohi (from the booklet for the album being discussed)

Back in my student days, I often hung out with a crowd that, at the drop of a hat, would cite the maxim:

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

I am not surprised that this sentence has its own Wikipedia page, particularly since so little is known about its origin. (Personally, I side with Elvis Costello, who claimed that the comedian Martin Mull was the creator. Truth be told, however, that Wikipedia page was my first encounter with Mull’s name in several decades. Still, I liked him for the cerebral qualities of his humor, which is why I have no trouble crediting him with that aphorism.)

This trip down Memory Lane should serve as prolog to my latest account of another Nicolas Horvath Discoveries album. The title of the album is Divine Thoughts, and it consists of fifteen short solo piano compositions by Morteza Shirkoohi all given the title “Arteeman.” Shirkoohi was born in Tehran in 1978 and is currently a lecturer there at the University of Art. The booklet notes by Bertrand Ferrier provide the following text by Shirkoohi regarding the music on this album:

Arteeman means Sacred Thought.

These fifteen pieces were inspired by my trip to Isfahan, in Iran, by my moments of solitude in the mosque of Sheikh Lotfallah as well as in the church of Bethlehem. Through them, I pursued the impossible desire to transcribe these magnificent architectural masterpieces into musical language.

In his own words, Ferrier introduces the music on this album as follows:

By agreeing to travel in extenso in the sunny mists of the fifteen Arteemans, the curious gourmet will be able to gorge themselves [sic] on the plural in one, on the diversity that hides behind unity, on the inventiveness that turns into shimmering mysticism.

He then leads the attentive reader along a path that accounts for the salient qualities of each of the fifteen compositions without suggesting that they all come together by virtue of some sort of “grand plan.” Horvath provides his own thoughts on the Bandcamp Web page for the album:

It makes me dream awake, it reminds me of Satie music, but with a more oriental touch.

I appreciate the association with Erik Satie, as well as the awareness of “oriental” qualities. Nevertheless, there tends to be a brash sense of humor in much of Satie’s piano music, leaving me to wonder whether Satie would have had the patience to sit through Shirkoohi’s rhetoric of meditative quietude.

Personally, I would say that Shirkoohi’s quietude recalls early “minimalist” efforts that I encountered when Brian Eno shifted away from rock to release his Obscure albums, as well as encounters with ECM New Series composers, such as Arvo Pärt, Gavin Bryars, and Valentin Silvestrov. Back when I was writing for Examiner.com, I observed that Silvestrov “provides yet another perspective on composition that places more priority on ‘the sound itself’ than on the usual grammatical conventions of melody, harmony, and counterpoint.” That perspective permeates Ferrier’s “guided tour” of the fifteen short pieces on this Divine Thoughts album. However, while compositions like Silvestrov’s bagatelles deploy a rich vocabulary of embellishments, there is a “bare bones” quality to each of those fifteen Arteemans that give Shirkoohi’s approach to composition its own unique perspective.