Calling out from Iraqi Kurdistan in a gorge that constitutes the border with Iran, Kurdish singer Hani Mojtahedy received echoes from the other side. Being a singer she is not welcome in her Iranian motherland, but her calls entered it and came back to her. They were ‘forbidden echoes’. It is the title of a composition for which that event and recordings made of it by Andi Toma were the starting point. The same title is given to the program in the Holland Festival in which she will perform the piece with Toma and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. This program features works by Golfam Khayam and Nader Adabnejad, two other Iranian composers who have encountered problems getting their music heard.
Hani Mojtahedy, Andi Toma, Golfam Khayam, Nader Adabnejad, Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest
27 - 28 juni 2025
Muziekgebouw
'It is music of deep longing', says Hani Mojtahedy about Forbidden Echoes, with Andi Toma by her side. 'It is connected with my life story, which I had long wanted to express artistically. I haven't been able to travel to Iran for 22 years. I can't see my family. I even couldn't attend the funeral of my mother in 2009. That drove me mad. As soon as I could travel to Iraqi Kurdistan, I went to one of the gorges on the border with Iran, and sat there and wept, and the echoes, the mountains, the entire gorge wept with me. Later, when the pandemic hit five years ago, the distance with my family became still deeper. I had to go to that border between Iraq and Iran again and express the pain of missing them. I went there with Andi. My emotions erupted like a volcano. I wept and screamed. He recorded my voice in these natural surroundings.'
'Our idea was to record it with multiple microphones to create an image in sound of the surroundings', Toma adds. 'We went to this gorge, and to a waterfall, and I recorded Hani. The way she expressed her pain, and the way it ricocheted from the other side was just incredible. We had gone there without a plan to make music out of it, but when we returned to Berlin we started to work the recordings into a composition. Andre de Ridder heard it, and proposed to perform the piece in Freiburg. Ian Anderson did the arrangements. We used electronically processed fragments of Hani’s voice with the rustling of the waterfall. I transcribed the melodies she sang in the gorge for instruments.'
The two parts of Forbidden Echoes were named after the locations where Mojtahedy and Toma made their recordings. She has put the melodies she sings to texts full of longing by Kurdish authors. They write about lost happiness, about places they cannot reach; words that reflect and express her feelings of grief.
The two parts alternate with movements of Golfam Khayam’s Concerto for viola, santur and ensemble. Born and raised in Tehran, where she still resides, she studied in Europe and the United States. She still visits European countries from time to time. Khayam is struck by irony in the title of the program. When she recently wanted to attend a performance of one of her compositions by the London Symphony Orchestra, the United Kingdom Home Office denied her a visa. 'It'ms not just that I face limitations in my own country, you come across them in the international community, too', she says with a wry smile. 'You'll find forbidden echoes in various places.'
Her composition juxtaposes the santur (an old Persian instrument with horizontal strings that are played with light mallets) with the viola. 'The santur can only play in one key because of its tuning. That was a bit of a problem, as I wanted to have a sonata form in the first movement, which usually calls for a change in tonality. I solved that by shaping it as a mirror, making the music gradually return to the initial material. The second movement is based on javab avaz, a Persian call-and-response kind of improvisation in which musicians imitate one another and introduce variations in doing so. One will start responding while the other is still playing his own line. The third movement is based on an energetic Balochi dance, which is not necessarily joyous. Balochi dance and music play a fundamental role in their resilience in harsh circumstances. In a sense that is also a forbidden echo, expressing a reaching towards light.'
The need for resilience is also personal, she adds. 'When my children were very young, I had many sleepless nights. Because it was difficult to find energy I briefly thought I had to give up composing, but I kept telling myself that I had to go on, repeating it all the time, like a pulse. That pulse is reflected by the santur in the first movement. So the concerto is a metaphor for resilience, for resistance, which is also expressed in a poem of Ahmad Shamlou: We have endured loneliness and silence, And [our hearts] still beat in the depths of the ashes…'
The concert opens with Nader Adabnejad’s Towards Affinity. 'I thought about the friends I have always had from different countries', he tells about what inspired him to write it. 'What I love about these friendships is that our ideas may be very different. We may disagree on things, but we are still friends. I remembered a poem that one of these friends, Naeem Salehi, had written about that. I used the form of that poem as the basic structure of the music.'
In Towards Affinity Adabnejad often uses 'airy sounds', not just from the ney (an end-blown flute with a breezy timbre), but from the other, Western instruments as well. 'In Persian poetry the ney has a connection with the soul, because the breath of the player is always audible. But I also love to use unusual colors, to keep the listeners alert, to make them question what they hear. So I tried to find the same breezy effect in other instruments. I want them to sing together, to share this affinity despite different geographical origins.'
Adabnejad, who currently works from Maastricht, feels connected with 'forbidden echoes'. 'It has to do with the fact that as a practicing Baha’i I couldn’t get the musical education in Iran that I wanted. But first and foremost, in the world as it is today polarisation can make people feel unsafe to express their thoughts. In that sense sounds, or echoes, are forbidden. In my piece I want to remedy that, provide common ground for instruments with different origins. Just as they are all instruments, we are all humans.'