Solo Vocal
Selected works from this category.Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements is a staged contradiction: a work in which the composer is fully present, and yet refuses the usual performance entirely. Seated in silence before the audience, he becomes the least performative object in the room while the music proceeds without him—through narrated voice, sung fragments, acoustic traces, and electronics that blur the line between human breath and constructed sound. The piece is not interested in explaining itself, nor in comforting the listener with familiar rituals. Instead, it turns its attention outward, asking what we demand of new music, what we dismiss too quickly, and why we so often prefer our composers safely embalmed in history rather than breathing in the room as an ordinary complication. Acknowledgments does not offer a moral or a conclusion. It asks only for endurance, attention, and honesty, and it leaves no curtain call, no catharsis, and no applause—only the lingering question of what it means to listen when the person who made the sound is sitting directly in front of you.
Acknowledgements is a staged contradiction: a work in which the composer is fully present, and yet refuses the usual performance entirely. Seated in silence before the audience, he becomes the least performative object in the room while the music proceeds without him—through narrated voice, sung fragments, acoustic traces, and electronics that blur the line between human breath and constructed sound. The piece is not interested in explaining itself, nor in comforting the listener with familiar rituals. Instead, it turns its attention outward, asking what we demand of new music, what we dismiss too quickly, and why we so often prefer our composers safely embalmed in history rather than breathing in the room as an ordinary complication. Acknowledgments does not offer a moral or a conclusion. It asks only for endurance, attention, and honesty, and it leaves no curtain call, no catharsis, and no applause—only the lingering question of what it means to listen when the person who made the sound is sitting directly in front of you.
Burning Bridges
Burning Bridges is not a lament, nor a spectacle of rupture, but an inward act of chosen distance. Drawn from Dorothy Parker's poetic image of “sweet air with curly smoke,” the work inhabits the quiet aftermath of severance, where solitude is not punishment but clarity. Its musical language unfolds like a dusk landscape: restrained, patient, and unsentimental, illuminated only in fragments, as though presence remains but invitation has been withdrawn. What many would hear as melancholy becomes, here, something more exacting and more luminous: nostalgia without regret, withdrawal without bitterness, and the fierce, tender boundary-making of a life deliberately turned toward stillness.
Burning Bridges is not a lament, nor a spectacle of rupture, but an inward act of chosen distance. Drawn from Dorothy Parker's poetic image of “sweet air with curly smoke,” the work inhabits the quiet aftermath of severance, where solitude is not punishment but clarity. Its musical language unfolds like a dusk landscape: restrained, patient, and unsentimental, illuminated only in fragments, as though presence remains but invitation has been withdrawn. What many would hear as melancholy becomes, here, something more exacting and more luminous: nostalgia without regret, withdrawal without bitterness, and the fierce, tender boundary-making of a life deliberately turned toward stillness.
I Used To Sing
I Used To Sing is a work of memory rendered in negative space. Not a song of presence, but of absence, of what remains when the voice no longer arrives. Written and performed by Amir Zaheri as soloist, the piece inhabits the afterlife of music once it has passed beyond comfort and into recollection. It does not grieve loudly. It simply records what has been taken. Humming and whistling, once unconscious acts of life, become impossible, not only because the voice has faded, but because what remains would return too much. The music moves as though tracing the outline of something irretrievable: a love, a season, a former self. What emerges is not nostalgia, but a quiet severance, the recognition that certain songs do not return because the person who sang them is no longer whole. In the end, the work does not resolve. It remains suspended in the most difficult knowledge of all: that what was sung has been sung, and will not be sung again.
I Used To Sing is a work of memory rendered in negative space. Not a song of presence, but of absence, of what remains when the voice no longer arrives. Written and performed by Amir Zaheri as soloist, the piece inhabits the afterlife of music once it has passed beyond comfort and into recollection. It does not grieve loudly. It simply records what has been taken. Humming and whistling, once unconscious acts of life, become impossible, not only because the voice has faded, but because what remains would return too much. The music moves as though tracing the outline of something irretrievable: a love, a season, a former self. What emerges is not nostalgia, but a quiet severance, the recognition that certain songs do not return because the person who sang them is no longer whole. In the end, the work does not resolve. It remains suspended in the most difficult knowledge of all: that what was sung has been sung, and will not be sung again.