Esfahân

Vali’s idiosyncratic synthesis of Persian and Western classical music traditions is a by-product of his unique life’s journey. Born in 1952, Vali grew up in Iran during a period of intense Westernization. His birthplace was Qazvin (a city which served as the capital of the extremely influential Safavid dynasty in the 16th century) and he subsequently studied at the Tehran Conservatory of Music (in Iran’s current capital), yet he was simultaneously surrounded by his heritage and estranged from it. As he recounted in his book Return to the Origins, Vali’s Eurocentric music teachers disparaged Persian traditional music, claiming it was “out of tune” and that listening to it would “corrupt the ear.” But that did not prevent Vali from collecting folk songs. However, as a teenager, he initially grew even further away from his roots by pursuing further musical studies in Vienna, where, at the time, new musical compositions strictly adhered to the tenets of European high modernism. It was only after moving to the United States, and settling in Pittsburgh in 1978, that Vali began to realize there were many possible contemporary compositional approaches. Ironically, although he was now even further away from his homeland, his early covert passion for his native folk music ultimately led him down an extremely personal, yet universally approachable, sonic path.

Vali’s music grew away from atonality and began to incorporate simple folk melodies, either pre-existing ones or similar sounding tunes of his own devising which he has called “imaginary folk songs.” The contours of these folk songs and the modal system in which they were conceived serve as the foundation for his brand-new kind of modal tonality, but one with ancient origins — Iran’s centuries-old Dastgâh-Maqâm system, which Vali rediscovered through his in-depth studies of Iranian folk music. This system uses an unequal scale of 17 tones within the octave. A cycle of purely tuned perfect fifths is combined with several smaller intervals which are based on other pure ratios, yielding more audibly satisfying consonances which the Western world abandoned to streamline instrument design when the compromises of tempering became codified. Admittedly the West’s 12-tone equal-temperament closely approximates purely tuned fifths, but a tempered closed cycle of fifths gradually diverges audibly from a pure open cycle, and the smaller intervals in the scale have no parallels at all.

In his first attempts at introducing Persian elements into music for Western ensembles, Vali approximated those smaller intervals through equally tempered quartertones, then eighth tones, capturing their spirit but with limited nuance. He later devised a “mixed tuning” system which — to facilitate performance by musicians with Western training from around the world — uses the closed 12-tone equal tempered cycle of perfect fifths, but also incorporates four additional intervals that have no equivalent in Western music. First, there’s a “small minor second” that is slightly sharper than an equally tempered quarter tone. Then, a “small neutral second” that is just noticeably flatter than the quarter tone exactly in between an equally tempered minor and major second. There’s also a “large neutral second” that is just noticeably sharper than that same in-between interval. Finally, a “plus second” that is just noticeably sharper than the quarter tone in between a major second and a minor third. Vali’s “mixed tuning” system, which is relatively easy for most musicians to learn, has been the basis for most of the music he has composed since 2000. Most of the pieces on the present recording, which were conceived in the traditional 17-tone Persian scale, can be performed (as they are in these recordings) by Western classical musicians using this hybrid system.

It should additionally be pointed out here that while Vali’s music from the last quarter century largely eschews Western approaches to counterpoint and musical form, it is nevertheless inherently polyphonic as well as highly structured. Rather than relying on conventional motivic development, Vali explores forms which are inherited from the Iranian Datstgâh-Maqâm modal system, such as call and response-types of polyphony as well as various kinds of elaborations of musical phrases. As Vali has explained, up until around the 16th century, Western and Middle Eastern musical traditions were much more closely related. His music’s reunification of these great cultural legacies, after centuries of separate evolution, offers a wide range of exciting new aesthetic possibilities.

— Frank J. Oteri