Peyman Yazdanian

Born before the revolution, Peyman Yazdanian has lived through the changing fortunes of music in Iran over the last 40 years. He studied classical piano privately from a young age and until 1979 when music was banned outright and a veritable silence fell over the country for some years. Slowly, classical music – specifically, that which did not encourage dancing – was reintroduced into society and Peyman’s musical education continued. Like many of his contemporaries, he did not study music at university but rather trained in industrial engineering at a time when music teaching was sorely under-developed in Iran. Peyman has since built a hugely successful career as a film composer, working with Iranian filmmakers including Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi and Jafar Panahi as well as directors in China, Japan, France, Italy, Germany and the USA.

Peyman is clear that composition has always been an intuitive process for him; freely blending the wide variety of musical styles from which he gains inspiration. He uses instruments such as daf, robab, duduk, kamanche, setar and nay as well as piano and orchestral forces, while also blending Western harmonic ideas with those of dastgah. Much of his work takes the form of collage in which he deconstructs and reconstructs established musical forms, often using post production to realise his ideas, resulting in a musical landscape with a constantly shifting language of expression. Interestingly, his work regularly makes use of Persian modes but rather than moving through them in the traditional manner he moves freely and intuitively, often unconsciously changing mode every bar. Thus Peyman’s music has an immersive cinematic sound with a distinctive Iranian flavour running throughout.

Below is the track ‘Drowning’ from Peyman’s album ‘On the Wind‘ featuring original soundtracks from Reward of Silence (Maziar Miri, director), A Piece of Bread (Kamal Tabrizi) and Friday’s Soldiers (Massoud Kimiai).

‘Piece of Bread’ from the same album.

And ‘Brights Nights VIII’ from the album ‘Second Take‘ featuring soundtracks from White Nights (Farzad Motamen, director), Deserted Station (Ali Reza Raeesian) and Wind Carpet (Kamal Tabrizi).