Incantations

In recent years, there has been an effort to broaden the expressional potentials of Iranian classical music. The genre has traditionally been associated with a lyrical mood. However, some musicians have tried to change this mood by examining new orchestrations, harmonies, performative techniques, rhythms, and modal experiments. Incantations, the eighth album of Mohammadali Najafpour, is one of the latest endeavours of this kind to express ‘fear, anguish, love, mutiny, and liberation’ of an enchanter.

On Incantations, the young composer-virtuoso tries to reach these potentials through dynamic polyphonies, playful complex rhythms, and stirring phrasing in the first half of the album. The second half has a traditional atmosphere, strongly bonded to the classical repertoire. Although this part has few correlations to the first half, it provides a surprisingly more individual taste of the artist’s work; as the first part is heavily influenced by the work of Hossein Alizadeh, despite the fact that it is meant to be more experimental. While listening to the first part, this question pops up in our minds: if we were unaware of the feelings that the composer tends to describe musically, how could we differentiate his work with that of Alizadeh?