Cautiously contemporary

Cautiously contemporary
On the first day of marathon of performances in the Fourth Tehran Contemporary Music Festival
by Mani Jafarzadeh

Contemporary music has a limited audience but this small number can’t even reach an agreement on their subject of passion; So far that they won’t reach a decisive common understanding of “What is contemporary music?” This makes performing for such a complicated audience a very trying task.
This difficulty presented itself on the first day of this “marathon” of performances, to the point that some of the more “radical” experts didn’t recognize certain performances as “contemporary” in their view and described certain manners of performance as old or classic.
I, on the contrary, don’t consider contemporary music as a movement “fashionable” in music “festivals” around the world; but as a part of the History of Art that began after world war II that continues to present. As such, the approaches of the young composers and performers were far more important than which “extended techniques” or “new extended techniques” they used that are “fashionable” today. These “techniques”, in my understanding, are parts of a bigger whole that now, gradually, begins to find its meaning in the Iranian artist’s mind. So, their importance is secondary.
What caught my attention was the rational take of the younger generation. We know that the main problem of Iranian music is an inadequate skill in the performance of international instruments. Here, young composers confronted this issue with considerable intelligence and wrote pieces to be performable by this generation of performers. Musicians too tried their best to execute the written pieces correctly and clearly; and succeeded too.
We should keep in mind that it’s been a long time since the unreasonable expectations of performance repertoire have moved contemporary music to the point that it is seriously hard to go through a “concert”. Poor audiences think this torture is part of this music’s nature. But any kind of music performed correctly, is interesting and enjoyable.
The first day’s marathon was a clear, coherent, and interesting collection which was resulted from a smart, attentive and cautious approach to “being contemporary”. You might object that being contemporary does not go well with caution. To this, dear reader, I should answer this: where we stand today, everything should be in line with caution and attentiveness (which are inseparable parts of Iranian culture) otherwise they would be fundamentally incoherent.
The first day of “The Tehran contemporary music festival” was a successful day.