Primary Call by Nasim Khorassani
Performed by Zeitgeist: Heather Barringer, Pat O’Keefe, Patti Cudd, and Jill Dawe
“When I read Sohrab’s poems, I hear music. His words turning into colorful images of phonemes, motions, and breaths. This piece is an instrumental recitation of a part of the poem ‘Primary Call’ by Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980). The following is the text translated into English by Bahiyeh Afnan-Shahid in 2013:
‘[The] morning with break. And to this bowl of water, the sky will emigrate. I must leave tonight. I, who from the most open of windows to the people of this quarter, spoke but heard nothing about the quality of Time. No eyes were fixed on the earth with passion. No one [was] enchanted at the sight of a garden. No one took a magpie [on] some farm, seriously. [So] a gloom the size of a cloud seizes me, when from the window I see Houri, the neighbor’s young daughter reading jurisprudence, under the rarest elm tree on earth.'”
Nasim Khorassani (b. 1987) is an Iranian composer currently studying for her PhD in Music Composition at the University of California San Diego. She studied with Dr. Andrew Rindfleisch and Dr. Greg D’Alessio at Cleveland State University for her second master’s degree. In Iran, she studied composition with Mr. Mohammad Reza Tafazzoli and Mr. Arman Noroozi, as well as Mr. Siawasch Sahebnassagh and Dr. Sara Abazari.