In December 2022, Annie Kahane and I set out to create a new music and dance work in which we would each learn from the other’s cultural heritage. I would immerse myself in Jewish music, Annie would study Persian dance, and we would then draw from our experiences to create a truly bicultural work of art. Our piece would be structured around the idea of ancient seasonal rituals, reminding us of our shared connection to the earth and its miraculous ways of marking time.
This is how The Four Seasons of Hamadan came to be. The title refers to the city of Hamadan in present-day Iran, where it is believed that the Old Testament heroine Esther and her husband Mordecai are buried. Because of its location and history, Hamadan represents a meeting point between Persian and Jewish culture, an apt metaphor for my collaboration with Annie.
I spent a year taking lessons in Jewish music and klezmer composition with Sherry Mayrent, once associate director of the legendary KlezKamp—an annual culture festival responsible for the promulgation of Yiddish art in the United States. Sherry is not only one of the most generous people I know, but also one of the leading figures in Jewish music preservation. The Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an outgrowth of her preservation work, houses over 9,000 Yiddish recordings, each one painstakingly catalogued from her personal collection. In our lessons together, she critiqued dozens of my original klezmer tunes (having written hundreds herself) and introduced me to a wide range of Jewish musical traditions, from Yiddish vaudeville to cantorial singing.
While studying Jewish music with Sherry, I also began learning to play the setār, a Persian long-necked lute. My teacher Fariborz Azizi insisted that the only way to further my understanding of Iranian classical music was to learn a traditional instrument; so he repaired my setār, a dust-worn instrument my father had bought in Iran years ago, and gifted me a plectrum made of iron and leather. I studied from the method book of the great setār player Hossein Alizadeh, who was Fariborz’s teacher, and I composed a paraphrase of Alizadeh’s Chāhārmezrābe Chāhārgāh which is included in the second movement of this piece. Playing the setār gave me an embodied understanding of countless nuances of Iranian classical music, which years of theoretical study never did.
The first movement pays homage to Nowruz, the Persian New Year occurring on the Spring solstice, and Purim, the Springtime celebration of Jewish deliverance as recounted in the Book of Esther. Alternating between the Persian mode Darāmade Māhur and the Jewish mode Hashem Molokh, the improvisatory melody is accompanied by a musical device common to both traditions: the drone. Early klezmer recordings feature melodies played over a cimbalom intoning a single note, while Iranian classical compositions often use the drone note to fill in rhythmic gaps. Drones also bring to mind the pastorale genre of Western classical music, characterized by sustained background notes thought to evoke the verdant countryside.
Zarbi, the Persian word for a rhythmic composition, encapsulates the character of the second movement, which shines a light on the energetic rhythms of Jewish and Persian music. In Jewish traditions, rhythmic pieces are for dancing, often as part of wedding festivities, while the zarbis of Persian classical music evoke the idea of dance but primarily function as art music. The specific forms I incorporate include: the freylikh, a jaunty klezmer dance in double time; the hora, another klezmer dance, but in triple time, and with an idiosyncratic lilt on beat 3; and the chāhārmezrāb, a fast, etude-like composition typically played on the Persian tār or setār, both traditional plucked string instruments. Vivaldi’s effervescent depiction of summer storms from his Four Seasons came to mind as I contemplated the spirit of Shuavot and Tirgan, both celebratory summer festivals.
While writing the third movement, I had front of mind something that Fariborz told me in one of our lessons, as he tried to get me to play with more poetry and elegance: “All Persian art—especially music—strives to match the greatness of Persian literature.” In a similar vein, Sherry emphasized the inextricable link between Jewish linguistic and musical practice, showing how melodies draw from the cadences of Yiddish and Hebrew language. Therefore, this movement aims to demonstrate how Persian and Jewish vocal traditions—specifically Persian classical singing and Jewish cantorial singing—translate into the technical idioms of kamāncheh and klezmer fiddle playing. I composed original melodies to the Hebrew prayer Avinu Malkeinu (“Our Father, Our King”) and to the Persian poet Hafiz’s Ghazal No. 1, instructing the violinist to sing the lyrics internally, letting it guide their performance. It happens that vocal practice in both Persian and Jewish music centers improvisation, giving this movement a feeling of melodic abundance, which seems fitting to commemorate the harvest festivals of Mehregan and Sukkot.
The winter rituals of Yalda and Hanukkah complete the cycle, and it is both the sense of completion and cyclicality that inspired me to end with a chaconne. Like Bach’s beloved D Minor Chaconne, the violin weaves a repeating pattern of harmonies, but while doing so evokes myriad styles of Persian and Jewish music. For example, the principal theme which begins the movement mixes a Jewish terkisher with a French overture (a nod to Bach), and is shortly followed by a Persian tasnif, or ballad. In a way, this final movement is a compact summation of the transcultural polystylism that the work as a whole sets out to achieve. Just as winter turns to spring and the seasons begin anew, the piece ends on the same drone note from the beginning.
Annie and I hope that this work may serve as an example of empathy and cultural understanding between individuals with different backgrounds and identities. In the face of ongoing political hostilities between Iran and Israel, who have been in a proxy war for over four decades, our aim is to demonstrate the potential for people to unite around rituals, seasons, and cultural commonalities. We extend our gratitude to New Music USA for supporting our collaboration through the New Music Creator Fund, to Bridge to Everywhere and the Music Department at Mount Saint Mary’s University for helping us workshop the piece, and most of all, to our teachers, who graciously passed on their knowledge so that we might keep these art forms alive.
