Amusie for flute and piano - Kiawasch SahebNassagh by Mehrdad Gholami

Amusie for flute and piano
Flute : Mehrdad Gholami
Piano : Buddy Bray
Premiere Performance: April 2018
TCU School of Music

Amusia: The inability to recognize musical tones or to reproduce them. Amusia can be congenital (present at birth) or be acquired sometime later in life (as from brain damage). Amusia is composed of a- + -musia and literally means the lack of music. Also, commonly called tone deafness.

Amusia was written very recently and it exemplifies composer’s lifelong search for the connections between spoken language and music. The overall structure of the piece is a recitative and although notated very complicated, it comes through as a free monologue for the flute player augmented with percussive piano chords. SaahebNassagh states “I have been taken with the idea of language and speaking, their relationship between music and how we conceive them and their byproducts. Sometimes this comes forward to me making the performer actually speak like in my 2011 piece for flute solo “Agnosia” and sometimes, it might diverge away to a texture imitating a mental state like Amusia. For me, spoken language is a vast resource to explore. Here, the lines are not merely a transcription based on speech, but they evolve on different dimensions and become a production instead of a transcription.”
The non-symmetrical nature of speaking is very different than what we call form in music. Repetition, cyclic returns, and symmetric ideas are what we mostly call “beautiful music” and here, based on speaking, the composer is getting out of the idea of symmetrical treatment of the phrases. This is an idea that composer calls “Fractal Development” versus linear development. The material of the piece is being constantly refined until taking us to a climax that becomes our most tense moment with numerous technical passages in the music. The tone clusters are often producing a foundation for the flute to play or emphasize one single not out of the cluster. However, this is a technique used by Spectral Music composers, here SaahebNassagh is not intending to take the music into that direction.
Another feature of Amusia is how the composer has reflected the title in every aspect of the piece. The notation, the sounding nature, the slightly out of tune microtones for flute all represent the state of Amusia.
Amusia is music but gone wrong. An AMUSIcal representation of our basic structures, pitch collections and the everlasting connection of music and spoken language.