Events Calendar

UI doctoral student Ramin Roshandel and UI Professor Jean-François Charles will demonstrate the Persian sētar and live electronics that they play on the album Jamshid Jam, released last year by New Flore Music. Ramin will speak about Persian classical music and its traditional melodic elements, and Professor Charles will share a little about live sampling and remixing.

Ramin Roshandel’s composition is based around incorporating experience as a fundamental concept through a non-experimental approach in performance. Considering phenomena such as instability, cultural identity, and communicational language on one hand, and being inspired by Persian music intervals as a setār player on the other, has led him to consider indeterminate, improvisatory, and abstract structures in his music to contrast or converge with post- or non-tonal forms. He has been one of the co-recipients of the Iowa Arts & Culture Resilience Grant, Public Art Matching (from the City of Iowa City), and the Arts Across Borders Grants (The University of Iowa) for creating two site-specific collaborative pieces, The Parking Spaces and Mammal Hall. He has been awarded The University of Iowa Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio summer scholarship and is a SICPP (Summer Institute for Contemporary Music Practice) and New Music On the Point alumnus. His pieces have been performed by Anna Elder, Will Fried, Daniel Schreiner,  JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, Kamratōn Ensemble, and LIGAMENT duo, as well as in precept.concept.percept composition workshop, Dancinema Festival, Opine Dance Film Festival, Charlotte New Music Festival, the Society of Composers, SCI’s Summer Student Mixtape, and Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project’s Summer Sounds. Roshandel was the setār soloist of Jean-François Charles’ opera, Grant Wood in Paris in its premiere. He is currently a PhD candidate in Music Composition at the University of Iowa, where he is working with David Gompper. He holds a Master of Music in Composition from the University of Tehran and a Bachelor of Arts in Iranian Music Performance from Tehran University of Art.

Jean-François Charles is a composer, clarinetist, and live electronics designer. After obtaining a MSc in Electrical Engineering at the National Institute for Applied Sciences in Lyon, he studied in Strasbourg with the Italian composer Ivan Fedele. As a clarinetist, he worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen for the world première and recording of Rechter Augenbrauentanz. He earned his PhD in music/composition at Harvard, where he studied with Hans Tutschku, Chaya Czernowin, Julian Anderson, Helmut Lachenmann, Gunther Schuller, and others. He has collaborated with musicians for creations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and China. After serving as deputy director at the Brest Conservatory (Bretagne, France), he joined in 2016 the School of Music at the University of Iowa as assistant professor in composition and digital arts. His research interests include the creation of new musical instruments at the crossroads of acoustics and electronics.