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Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei is one of eight Resident Composers selected to participate in the 2025 Mizzou International Composers Festival. MICF Resident Ensemble Alarm Will Sound will perform his composition Residues III. The Cheers of Dawn at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 26, at Columbia’s Missouri Theatre. The concert is free and open to the public.
Sabzghabaei is a creator who is interested in looking at time through different lenses: unpacking notions of tradition, exploring memories of those past, and investigating nostalgic frameworks that lean forward. His music has been commissioned and presented by organizations including the GRAMMY-winning New York Youth Symphony, JACK Quartet, Ensemble Proton Bern, National Sawdust, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Loadbang, the Duisburg Philharmonic, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Hub New Music, Intimacy of Creativity Festival, the American Composers Orchestra, the Bergamot Quartet, TAK Ensemble, Beth Morrison Projects, the New York Festival of Song, bassist Robert Black, the Banff Centre, Contemporaneous, the MATA festival, Vincent Lucas [principal flute, Orchestre de Paris], Guerilla Opera, the Moab Music Festival, Chorus Austin, the Young New Yorkers Chorus, Pro Coro Canada, The Esoterics, OPERA America, and VocalEssence, among others. He has held residencies at the I-Park Foundation, Copland House, the Banff Centre, the Ellis Beauregard Foundation, the Lake George Music Festival, and the Busan Choral Festival. Some of his prizes include a First Music Commission from the New York Youth Symphony, the Maurice Gardner Prize from the American Viola Society, the Israel/Pellman Prize from the Society for New Music, a 2024 New Music USA Creator Fund Award, and an IDEA Grant from OPERA America.
He holds a doctorate from Cornell University and is currently a GATES Postdoctoral Fellow at Université Grenoble Alpes, where he is completing a large-scale opera project focusing on the history of the hijab in Iran. Outside of music and interdisciplinary projects, Daniel also translates Persian poetry.
We recently chatted with him via email.
What is your musical background?
I trace my musical roots to a few different places. I grew up singing in the Lutheran church with an organist mother, so hymns and baroque music were common for me, as was the choral music canon. (I actually didn’t have the chance to hear an orchestra live for the first time until I was 18 at the University of North Texas). My father was born in Abadan, Iran, and came to the US in 1975. He was not a musician, but he was a music lover. He shared dozens of pre-Revolution tapes and CDs with me throughout my childhood: names like Shajarian, Lotfi, Marzieh, Vigen, and Delkash were synonymous with Bach and Buxtehude for me. Some of my fondest memories with him were Sundays where he’d cook a Persian breakfast and play these tapes on an old cassette player, the sounds and smells of Iran greeting me with the sun. Finally, growing up in Texas, I was very close to Chopped & Screwed music, a hip-hop genre from Houston, and still today, hip-hop is what I listen to most regularly and voraciously.
When and how did you begin composing?
I actually started college as a biology major, and while I did well in my classes, there came a moment where I had a mountain of notes to study for my final exams, and I just got kind of paralyzed thinking about how many more years I’d have to study the Krebs Cycle, and I decided I just didn’t care enough. Around that same time, I attended that aforementioned first orchestra concert, and was obsessed with how my experience of time changed during my encounter with the sounds, space, and musicians; I realized I wanted to create these experiences for others. My girlfriend at the time saw how excited it made me and encouraged me to explore that feeling more. I decided to start writing a few choral meanderings and really enjoyed the creative process. I took some music theory courses at UNT that summer, and I really loved it, so that fall, I decided to switch to music, and I never looked back. That was 2011, so I guess it’s been 14 years. Today, I thrive on a blend of varying projects: opera, chamber, orchestral, choral, and everything in-between. I thrive on getting to work with diverse collaborators on projects that challenge me. I feel my work gets tired when I have too many projects in one genre/focus.
How did you hear about MICF?
I heard of MICF in 2016, after meeting my colleague Texu Kim (2014 Resident composer), and he encouraged me to look into it!
Tell us about your piece that will be performed at MICF. What should we listen for?
For the past few years, I have been fascinated by the web of connections that exist between us and what we create. In particular, the myriad of influences we take-in throughout our lives and how these influences commingle to make us who we are. How one influence influences another and the chain that forms in these interactions: the leftovers of leftovers forming their own entity.
In my Residues series, I am interested in exploring the ways that sounds and practices influence each other, not simply as mimicry, but as things which exist as things themselves, related to their sources, but not attempting to be those separate constituent parts.
My work is called Residues III. The Cheers of Dawn and it blossoms from a joyous and patriotic work by Persian music master Mohammed Reza Lotfi and seminal poet Houshang Ebtehaj, Oh Iran House of Hope. The work revels in the original’s exuberant celebration, its festive noisiness of incessant plucked strings, and the brightness of its bursting sunlight. Through close examination of the original recording and repeated fastidious listening and analysis, Residues III acts as an archaeology of joy emerging from reconcatenations of Lotfi’s initial, shining impulse.
I encourage you to listen for a series of repeating themes from the original that change in shape, size, and density as the work progresses. Focus your ears on the ways that noises join together with clear melodic material and harmonic impulses, which ebb and flow together to embrace the brightness of Lotfi’s original. Linked here is the tune my piece grows out of. Lotfi, the composer, is the man with a long white beard, playing the tar (plucked string instrument).
What does it mean for you to work with an ensemble like Alarm Will Sound?
I’ve known of Alarm Will Sound since I heard their Aphex Twin album when I was a senior in high school. I’ve since followed their various projects over the years, being especially fond of the recent album with Donneca Dennehy Land of Winter. With their long track record of compelling projects across the field of contemporary music, I am very excited to be creating this new work with AWS. It’s rare for an ensemble of this size to be as adventurous and committed to contemporary music, and I can’t wait to join with them to share in the joy of this new creation. I look most forward to our rehearsals and working sessions. This is where I feel I grow the most as an artist: hearing the work come to life and getting feedback from everyone involved, especially from contemporary music experts like AWS.
What do you hope to learn from your MICF experience?
I’m excited to learn about and meet my fellow resident composers, hear presentations from and receive feedback from Judd and Hilda, and see how each musician reacts to my work. I love the small bits of feedback that really move a good work to a great work. I collect this feedback from players into my tool bag, incorporating these lessons and suggestions into my next works. These small pieces of feedback really go a long way! Finally, as someone who wants to run a festival myself in the future, I’m particularly excited about seeing how MICF is run behind-the-scenes.
For more information on Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei, visit his website.