| Compositions |
Nina Barzegar, Childhood Reveries(خیالھای کودکی)
for Two 25-String Gayageum and String Quartet, 2025
Performers:
Soloists of Korea’s National Gugak Center:
Ji-Eun Lee & Se-Youn Park (Gayageum)
Del Sol String Quartet (San Francisco)
Conductor: David Milnes
This Piece is based on the Iranian folk song “Daye Daye” (Oh Mother, Oh Mother) from the Lorestan province in western Iran. The song, more than a century old, originated during World War I, when Russian and British forces were present in Iran. Its deeply sorrowful lyrics reflect the oppression the Lori people endured under foreign powers.
For me, however, the piece carries no martial spirit. It belongs to the songs of my childhood, sung at home by my mother with her beautiful voice. Since the lyrics were in the local dialect, I could not fully understand them as a child. In my composition, I sought to convey my own childlike interpretation of the song, rediscovering its simple and unpretentious spirit—a quality found in much traditional folk music. The main motifs of each section are scattered and playfully passed between the instruments in a call-and-response manner, before returning in their original form at the conclusion of each section.
Nina Barzegar, Vulnerable for Solo Cello, 2018 Premiered by Brian Thornton, 09.06.2023 Cutting Edge Concerts New Music Festival Symphony Space, NYC
The title “Vulnerable” reflects the two main influences behind this piece: the vulnerability found in Persian music and in human beings. In Persian classical music, I drew inspiration from its delicate modal system, ornaments, intonations, and timbres. The vulnerability of this music lies in how even the smallest interval, quarter tone, sonority, or touch can profoundly alter its meaning and expression. Yet vulnerability is not merely about being easily hurt. It encompasses a deep spectrum of human emotions—shame, sorrow, gladness, love, belonging, empathy, and the courage to embrace our true selves. Both our physical and emotional vulnerability foster profound connections between ourselves and the world. In this piece, I set out to explore my own vulnerability as a woman and the music that lives within me. It invites listeners on an emotional journey, reflecting different facets of vulnerability.
Nina Barzegar, Suspended Canon & Morning Dance for Piano
Premiered by Ava Nazar, 10.30.2025
National Opera Center, NYC
These two pieces are part of a series of eight works for piano. This performance was featured in the concert Song & Whispers: A Tribute to Women Composers from the Iranian Diaspora
Nina Barzegar, Baadbaan for Alto Saxophone, 2023 Premiered by Thomas A. Giles, 12.11.2023 National Sawdust Brooklyn NY
In Persian, the word Baadbaan translates to Sail. Comprising two components, Baad (referring to wind) and Baan (a suffix which means Keeper or Guide), Baadbaan can be interpreted loosely as “Wind Keeper” or “Wind Guide.”
The inspiration behind writing a piece with this title stems from the fact that in Persian, Baadbaan embodies notions of resistance and resilience. I think this word possesses both a profound and melodious quality, poetic and subtle.
This piece narrates the expedition of a Baadbaan (sail), navigating the sea of life’s unpredictabilities and reaching its ultimate fate.
Nina Barzegar, Two Pieces for Piano, 2019 Premiered by Ava Nazar, 07.24.2020 YouTube Concert Featuring Works by IFCA Composers
Mother tongue is a marvelous phenomenon. Even if you are away from it for years, you still think in that language, dream in it… Iranian music is a part of my mother tongue, always present in my pieces.
In 2018, as in many other years, the bitter news of protesters being killed spread across my country. I decided to write a piece in their memory, working on it sporadically for about a year. When the piece was nearly finished, hundreds more were killed in the protests of the following year.
I: Mourning Heritage You don’t know how to erase this endless mourning. This heritage carries a long, painful history.
II: Fragile Horror An incessant fear lingers at the back of your mind, always with you.
Nina Barzegar, Inexorable Passage for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Cello, Piano, 2020 Premiered by International Contemporary Ensemble, 10.15.2022 NYU Skirball NYC
I wrote this piece during the COVID lockdown, sitting at home and hearing the devastating news of people dying all around the world—living in fear, wondering who close to me, or even if I myself, would be next. Those experiences made me reflect on life in a different way. We begin our journey in this world with hope. We learn, strive, struggle, fail, triumph, and we give love. Yet despite all our desires, we ultimately surrender, accept the inevitable, and disembark from the train of life. This, to me, is the miracle of being in this world. Inexorable Passage seeks to capture these profound stages of life.
Nina Barzegar, Three Pieces for String Quartet, 2023 Premiered by Del Sol Quartet, 04.14.2023 Santa Cruz Festival of New Music University of California Santa Cruz
I wrote this piece during the Woman, Life, Freedom revolution in Iran, dedicating it to the valorous people of my land who have sacrificed their lives in the fight for freedom.
I: Inner Ecstasy
Sorrowful in joys
rejoice in sorrows,
weep in merriment
laugh within pains,
the ecstasy inside us.
II: Threnody for Homeland
Lands dying away
hearts shattering,
words fading away
hands voided of entity
III: Irresolute Dance
Not a transient dance
a hesitant,
though being trodden
they dance involuntarily
Nina Barzegar, Chronoception for Two Pianists and Two Percussionists, 2022 Premiered by Yarn/Wire, 05.20.2022 TENRI CULTURAL INSTITUTE OF NEW YORK NYC
Chronoception explores the relativity of time—not in terms of physics, but through its psychological dimensions: how individuals subjectively perceive time and how that perception impacts their emotional and physical reality. Time is an irreversible continuum that governs all existence—objectively measured but subjectively experienced. While we can never fully understand another person’s sense of time, I believe music can reflect a composer’s personal temporal experience. Through emotionally charged musical elements, music influences our perception of time and distorts our sense of its passage. These reflections shaped the creation of this piece.
Chronoception emerged from a year marked by decision-making, urgency, struggle, hope, anticipation, inertia, and timelessness—a period in which my perception of time constantly shifted. Like the difference between twenty seconds for a runner finishing a race and for a prisoner receiving a ten-year sentence, the same span can feel vastly different. I aimed to reconstruct my personal experience of time for both performers and listeners—though each will interpret it differently. Performers enact time; listeners observe it, each forming their own relationship to the unfolding sound.
Nina Barzegar, Emancipation Pondering for Solo Clarinet, 2023 Premiered by Joshua Rubin, 04.19.2024 Santa Cruz Festival of New Music University of California Santa Cruz
Emancipation Pondering explores a musical form shaped by the “non-repetitive repetition” of three distinct figures derived from Persian melodies, all within the homayoun mode of the Persian music modal system. The two main degrees of this mode, C and F, serve as focal points around which the composition revolves and concludes. In this composition, musical elements, confined to specific registers, engage in free improvisational dialogues devoid of repetitive rhythmic patterns. Ultimately, they dissipate without reaching a consensus or a common point.
Nina Barzegar, Composition-Improvisation Piano: Nina Barzegar Violin: Michael J. Fleming 12.16.2023 University of California Santa Cruz Department of Music
This is a composition-improvisation piece created from my compositional ideas and improvisation sessions with fellow composer and violinist Michael J. Fleming. While all sections are scored, there are open spaces that allow both of us to improvise in spontaneous musical dialogue.
Nina Barzegar, Fugue for Disklavier Piano, 2022 12.16.2023 University of California Santa Cruz Department of Music
My long-standing interest in fugue as one of the earliest algorithmic musical forms inspired me to write Fugue for Disklavier. This four-voice fugue features two contrasting subjects and a countersubject, all generated using a Max/MSP program. While I employed several traditional fugue techniques, I also experimented with unconventional ideas—for example, presenting the answers in four consecutive tonalities to create harmonic clusters through vertical voice interactions. I placed the piece’s climax at the golden ratio point, approximately halfway through measure 16, where the main subject reappears in its highest register with a delayed unison.
Additionally, I devised a Fibonacci-based rule for the stretto entries: the subject restates on beats following the first five Fibonacci numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5), each occurring progressively earlier relative to the full subject. This sequence (last beat, second-to-last, third-to-last, etc.) then reverses during the subject’s inverted entries, forming a symmetrical progression: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1.
Nina Barzegar, Remnant Strands for piano and fixed media 2021, Premiered by Anoush Moazzeni, YouTube Concert
Remnant Strands was commissioned by Anoush Moazzeni under a call for score (West Asian composers) for the « Deterritorializing the Realm of The New Music » Project – Supported by Canada Council For The Arts & Canadian Music Centre Ontario, Special thanks to Pouyan Ramezanpour
This piece was commissioned to be one minute long. It is for piano and fixed media. The recorded part is based on my manipulation of a recording of an Iranian folk song, with the piano part composed around that.
In recent years, the question of ‘identity’ has preoccupied my artistic life. Due to a lack of support, the gradual disappearance of the identity and roots of Persian classical music, along with the loss of invaluable cultural treasures that can hardly be recovered, has become increasingly evident. Remnant Strands reflects this feeling—although inspired by Iranian music, it is fragile, fading, and ultimately vanishing.