Vahid E. Hosseini: Vahid E. Hosseini

When I set out to write this introduction at the composer’s request, I found myself wondering: how does one articulate the philosophy behind abstract concepts that have been carried through millennia by sound itself in a way that becomes both imaginable and, from another angle, audible? It seemed to me that I should write it this way: If we imagine civilisations as a geography of language, then the great centres of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Ancient Greece, and later, colonial hubs in Africa and the Americas rise like mountain peaks, where grammar solidifies, where »correctness« becomes institutionalised, and where language acquires the formal weight of power. But between these peaks lie the valleys: spaces inhabited by the enslaved, the indigenous displaced, those who exist outside the ordained structures of recognition. Here, in these civilisational valleys, the inhabitants have no formal names in the empire’s records, no officially recognised tongues, no legal ownership, even of their own bodies. The enslaved and indigenous peoples dwelling in these valleys created something extraordinary from their exclusion. Pidgin languages emerged not as linguistic curiosities but as acts of survival, echoes of the »proper« languages reverberating down from the peaks, transforming in descent into something unauthorised yet vital, like Nigerian Pidgin or Caribbean Creoles. Scholars like Dell Hymes and John Holm have documented how these contact languages preserved cultural memory through sound and syntax alone, building subcultures from the fragments of dominant forms. These sounds dwell in the civilisational valley. They inhabit the space where the binary of correct/incorrect loses its relevance, where a citizen’s rights and identity dissolve into absence, where the enslaved speaker doesn’t even know such things could belong to them. Here, languages shift constantly, words that sound similar across tongues but carry divergent meanings, creating a musical function from pure sound rather than semantic clarity. The work itself becomes the valley: a place where meaning moves through transformed and fragmented forms, a site of encounter between East and West not at their peaks but in their shared depths, where the echo matters more than the original utterance. In these valleys, the reverberations of words create a theatre of sound, a sonic stage where survival requires making language from the ruins of Language itself.

Shadi Hadinezhad (Anthropologist)

 

 

Composer’s note

The experience of composing the textual material for this piece was closely similar to musical composition. Words carry sounds that encapsulate time in multiple senses. Once the monopoly of a single language is disrupted through the juxtaposition of foreign counterparts, a new kind of counterpoint becomes possible: a counterpoint between words that sound similar in different languages, yet differ in subtle nuances. When sung together, these nuances generate a distinct ebb and flow, contributing to the delicate complexity of the sound event. This piece is another experiment within the form I call SoundsTheatre: a pre-musical approach that investigates the ontology of intonation and the meaning of temporal stretching of sound within the most intimate human experiences—mourning and prayer. In developing the concept of the work, I drew inspiration from mourning songs across various traditions, as well as from a madrigal by Monteverdi, which is briefly cited in the composition. The piece is dedicated to Saeed Kiani, the brother of my dear friend and assistant who was killed in the protests of January 2026 in my country Iran.