Month: October 2022

Nourbakhsh’s three-movement “C Ce See”— a commemoration of the contemporary music advocate Cecille (Cece) Wasserman — closed the program. And it employed a conceit reminiscent of the Fluxus movement, courtesy of a kinetic sculpture, by the artist Roxanne Nesbitt, that circled six instrumentalists and sometimes made sounds with them; picture small conical objects rotating, in Rube Goldberg fashion, among string players and percussionists, with all those elements connected by a long, single thread manipulated by the percussionist Ross Karre.

In the first and second movements, the result of that string-on-string interference was often a hazy yet interdependent din. But at the end of the second movement, when the conductor, Steven Schick, dramatically cut the wires snaking through the string instruments (and into the rotating mini-sculptures), there was a sense of release. The short third movement — featuring scalar, zigzagging, independent parts for flute, vibraphone and strings — heralded a brief but hard-won freedom.

In two NYC music events, composer Niloufar Nourbaksh emphasizes connectivity:

Comparing the events of 2009 to protests happening now in Iran in the wake of the death of Mahsa Amini, Nourbakhsh said she feels the need to “protect the truth of what happened to [Amini].”

“I think it’s important for us to understand and realize our history, and how things happened, to make sure they don’t happen again,” she said. And she is optimistic, finding hope in the slogan of the recent protests: “Women. Life. Freedom.”

She emphasizes the significance of a movement out of the Middle East that has women at the center. For Nourbakhsh, it demonstrates that the people of Iran understand “equality and freedom is only possible when everybody is free.”