Season 3 Episode 11: “A Rainstorm of Voices" ft Sahba Aminikia

Narration: Today on Movement, we revisit a story we first recorded in 2021, following a classically trained Iranian composer, forced to flee the country he called home, while finding and defining the source of music for himself. Just as a warning, this story does include an account of violence.

Listen close. Past the technical skill of the musicians, past the shimmering resonance of fingers and strings and wood, past the wholeness of an ensemble becoming a single voice. Artists play the line between pain and beauty, between the hardships we experience in life, and the meaning we make from it. What you’re about to hear is my conversation with a musician who, perhaps more than anyone else I know, truly embodies that connection.

SAHBA: So I am Serbo. I mean, here I am, an Iranian composer based in San Francisco, California, and I've been living here for the last 15 years.

Narration: Sahba’s music has been performed all over the world: in Asia, Europe, South America, North America. But he still makes time to work with young musicians who are just starting out, exactly where he started out.

SAHBA: I have this class that I teach in Iran, belongs to this Baha'i university. I don't know if I told you about that, but it's an underground university. It's illegal for Bahais who are deprived of education.

MEKLIT: I just, am I allowed to ask you about that?

SAHBA: Of course. Yes. Yeah.

MEKLIT: So, so what do you teach at this underground university?

SAHBA: Uh, this semester, I thought counterpoint.

MEKLIT: Wow.

SAHBA: I can tell you a little bit about the background of the university, actually.

MEKLIT: Yeah.

SAHBA: So Bahais are a religious minority in Iran that are under heavy persecution for the last two centuries basically. All sort of citizen rights have been deprived of including the right to higher education. And I come from that background. My father was one of the founders actually of this university, which is created by university professors, Baha'i university professors who were fired from the university after the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

ARCHIVAL SOUND: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDeaOOmfxZ8

the Islamic Revolution of 1979 overthrew the US backed dictatorship in Iran, and replaced it with an Islamic Republic, led by Ayatolla Khomenei. Under this new regime, Baha’is could not practice their faith in public; they could not hold government jobs, or collect pensions, and as Sahba said, they could not attend universities, until his father and some other former professors founded an alternative.

SAHBA: And they created this university called BIHE thatcompletely operates inside of the people's private homes. I studied in it myself. They would offer an associate degree at the time.

MEKLIT: Was that degree in music?

SAHBA: Yes, it was in music. And it was very interesting to see. I grew up with this perspective of kind of a diversity that exists within some sort of unity, you know. Because of the fact that Iran was blocking any sort of Western media coming into Iran. And we had to obtain these illegally basically from people on the street. And and then in that context, the music of Philip Glass and the music of Michael Jackson and the music of Hayedeh, Iranian singer, would be put in the context of the same platform. And then you don't grow up in that environment that there is a hierarchy to this, to the genres you kind of consider consider all of them the same thing and part of the same quality and the same soul, which until this day remains with me. I love every genre of music.

MEKLIT: So, so was the persecution related to your Baha'i faith part of the reason that you left Iran?

SAHBA: That was the only reason.

Narration: When Sahba was 19, he left Iran and went to St Petersburg, Russia, where he studied with a former student of the great composer, Dimitri Shostakovich.

SAHBA: I got into classical music because of the show Zadkovich because I just admire his music. And he also lived under a very totalitarian government there and that effect is very much evident in his music.That is the music that comes from pain.

Narration: A few years later, in 2006, Sahba immigrated to the US as a refugee, and began studying at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. But even as he launched his career here, his music was often focused on Iran.

He wrote about the little things he missed about the country where he was born. He wrote about the protests that were happening in Tehran, following the election in 2009. He experimented with incorporating the actual sounds of mourning and uprising into his pieces.

And his work started to get noticed. Sahba debuted a string quartet with the legendary Kronos Quartet, and later had his work featured at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC.

During these years, Sahba stayed engaged with what was going on in Iran, and even attended protests there, but he didn’t consider himself a political person, or someone the government would even want to bother with. He was able travel back and forth, and to visit family. But as it turns out, he was being noticed by the authorities in Iran.

SAHBA: Back in 2011, when my father actually passed away, I went to Iran for a short trip and I was a U.S. citizen back then. And there were three people waiting for me at the door at the where my parents live. They put the blindfold on me and handcuffed me and basically made me lie on the back of the back seat. And they started driving through the city, interrogating me, basically just asking. And the moment that he was informed that I was a Baha'i actually do things started to become worse.

He took me to the desert outside of a city in the middle of the desert. And they took me out of the car, emptied the two capsules of pepper spray inside my mouth and inside my nose and started beating me over and over again. And he asked me to tell him that I'm a Baha'i three times. And I said, why? And he said that, “if you say that you are Baha'i, if you are say that you are Kāfir, an unbeliever, for three times, I have the religious right here to execute you.”

He put his pistol in my mouth and started counting and pulling the trigger. But there was no bullet, obviously, in there and in the gun. But he did it several times, several times, just giving me enough times, time thought, OK, this was there was no bullet and we're going to do it again and again and again until I don't remember. I kind of passed out and they left a few hours. I don't even remember when exactly I left.

But there was this epiphany, you know, I had. Cause I woke up and I could barely hear anything and there was like all sort of these weird noises in my head. And I started to hear actual music. The second string quartet of Shostakovich. And that was exactly this was the opening of that. And I literally started hearing music in my ears.

SAHBA: It was a very interesting moment for me and I cannot describe it, but it changed my life.

MEKLIT: It's interesting, though, because you, you've had that experience that kind of defines the range of what human beings are or can be. And yet you are this person who is like you just point to like bringing light to people. Like, you have this, you see the range and then you're all the way over here, which is like

SAHBA: I really believe the fact that beauty comes, real beauty comes out of pain. That's what I am looking for people who are suffering in this world, and I would love to serve them in any way I can. And that is not something that I do to make myself feel better. It's a duty that is on the shoulder of every one of us.

Narration: Sahba’s most recent composition is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. It’s called Nasrin’s Dream.

SAHBA: A piece that is dedicated to Nasrin Institue there. She is a human rights lawyer and an activist in Iran. And she's currently in prison. And during the time that we were working on this piece last August, September, the she was in a hunger strike for 45 days.

So I asked everyone around me and I posted this on social media through activists that we are creating a peace with Kronos Quartet and we want everyone to send their own voice. And they should just say her name and they can say it any way they wanted. If they want to cry and say it, if they want to scream the voice is the name, if they want to sing the name. And I receive around 300, 400 voices actually from people.

So it starts with drops of rain and it increases with the name being said over and over again. And these drops of rain, no matter how weak and how insignificant they are, eventually they would create a rainstorm, they would get rain and they would wash this part of humanity. No demagog no dictator can resist such a force.

MEKLIT: It's and it reminds me of what you said earlier, which was also that true art comes from suffering.

SAHBA: I strongly believe that. That's what I that's why music exists. It's a function. It's a national, natural, organic response that our body has to this pain. The music that speaks to the soul comes from the soul and the soul that is full of pain it would sound always better. And we know that deep down as musicians.

Narration: This episode of Movement was produced by Ian Coss, and myself, Meklit Hadero. Our senior editor is Megan Tan. Our co-creator and podcast godmother is Julie Caine. Our broadcast partner is The World and we are distributed by PRX.