Elnaz Seyedi – A Mark of Our Breath (World Première)

by 5:4

There are times when it can feel like all contemporary music is split down the middle, with half the composers concerned with frantic activity and movement, and the other half obsessed with the opposite, stillness and immobility. That’s an exaggeration, but there’s more than a little truth to it, and it’s one of the reasons why i enjoy Iranian composer Elnaz Seyedi‘s enigmatic orchestral miniature A Mark of Our Breath, composed in 2021. Depending on your perspective, it’s either caught between these worlds or occupying both simultaneously.

Her programme note also speaks of opposites, of landscape and destruction, but in practice A Mark of Our Breath is not a music of extremes. On the contrary, it’s a poised music, permanently tense, a state that’s illustrated from the opening bars, where timpani rolls and vague percussive movement occur while all around them consists of long, sustained notes, changing slowly. Whether the timps and percussion are a catalyst is hard to tell; either way, string pizzicatos and brass chords slowly start to militate against the hovering suspension, producing more and more marked accents.

By the halfway point, around two minutes in, the brass are really getting in our face, but Seyedi isn’t interested in bringing about any kind of familiar climactic outburst. Something far more troubling happens: rather than swamping the suspended notes, they start to drop out, the texture now peppered with silent lacunae. Though the percussion accents become more distant, they – with the brass – seem jointly responsible for breaking apart the musical fabric, which as it recedes to almost nothing, is coloured with far-off but unsettling brass vocalisations. It’s a small but potent window into a dark, mysterious soundworld.

The world première of A Mark of Our Breath was given by the WDR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Cristian Măcelaru.


Programme note

The composition was created in 2021 during a stay in the Wendland. Inspired by the vast view with three-quarters of the sky, which is different in every weather and at every time of day, but always truly spectacular, and by a landscape with a rich spectrum of green and, later in the autumn, yellow. The piece begins in this peaceful landscape, but gradually breaks apart from within. The human voices – played and sung simultaneously in the brass instruments – are, on one hand, part of this landscape, enriching it with their very unique color. On the other hand, their flipside represents the destruction of the seemingly unspoiled.

—Elnaz Seyedi
(translated from German)

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