How Much – How Little (for Baritone and Electronics)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi • Text: Emily Dickinson
Year of Creation: 2025
Performer: Andrew White — Baritone • David Wolfson — Piano
Performance: August 18, 2025 — The Ellington Room at Manhattan Plaza, New York City
Event: Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame featuring Andrew White, presented by Vox Novus in collaboration with Composers Concordance
Curator: Robert Voisey
Watch on Facebook | More Information – Vox Novus | Newsletter (NM421 – July 26 Issue)
How Much – How Little is a contemplative work inspired by Emily Dickinson’s brief yet profound poetry. Written for baritone and electronics, it explores the delicate balance between agency and limitation, presence and absence. Sparse textures and subtle electronic processing frame the voice in a meditative sonic space where emotion emerges through restraint. The dialogue between sound and silence becomes a metaphor for human fragility—how much can be expressed through how little is said.
Presented by: Vox Novus | Composers Concordance | Curator: Robert Voisey
When Words Live (for Amplified Voice and Electronics)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi • Text: Emily Dickinson
Year of Creation: 2025
Performer: Yifan Shao
Performance: April 13, 2025 — Vocalverse Repertoire, San Francisco Conservatory of Music
Venue: Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall, 50 Oak St, San Francisco, CA
Watch on YouTube
A word is dead when it is said,
Some say – I say it just begins to live that day.
Emily Dickinson
When Words Live transforms Dickinson’s brief yet profound poem into a sonic meditation on voice, breath, and the afterlife of language. The amplified voice, intertwined with electronics, explores how words resonate beyond their moment of utterance—how sound can extend meaning into space and time. Through delicate processing and evolving textures, the piece reflects on the fragile boundary between silence and expression, where language itself begins to live anew.
Eshareh (for Flute and Fixed Media)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi
Year of Creation: 2025
Performer: Lisa Bost
Performance: April 4, 2025 — Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame Concert Series, Vox Novus Festival – 15 Years of New Music, Kansas City Kansas Community College
Watch on YouTube
Eshareh—meaning “a passing reference” or “a brief indication” in Persian—was inspired by a fleeting thought found in one of my personal diaries. The work seeks to narrate something that almost disappears as it is spoken: a reflection, a memory, or a feeling just beyond reach. The flute interacts with fixed media in a delicate dialogue, moving between sound and silence, gesture and echo. Through subtle phrasing and resonance, Eshareh becomes an intimate meditation on transience—the beauty of what is sensed, but never fully grasped.
Skepticism No. 1 (Independent Album)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi
Year of Creation: 2024
Published by: Noise à Noise and Post Orientalism Music, Berlin, Germany
Commissioned by: Post Orientalism Music
Collaborators: Khayam (Text) • Reza Davarzani (Tenor Vocal) • Niloufar Shahbazi (Kamanche)
Publisher Publication: 2024 – Berlin / Tehran Spotify Link
Listen / Purchase on Bandcamp
Radif of Iranian Music: Skepticism No. 1—a commissioned work by Post Orientalism Music—blends electronics, kamanche, and voice to set several rubāʿiyāt by Omar Khayyam in traditional Iranian modes. The piece reflects Khayyam’s timeless contemplation of doubt, mortality, and living in the present. Reinterpreting the radif tradition through modern sound design, it creates a dialogue between heritage and innovation—a meditation on existence where poetry, philosophy, and music converge in quiet reflection and luminous uncertainty.
Your Concept (for Piano, Electronics, and Spoken Words)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi
Year of Creation: 2020
Performer: Anoush Moazzeni
Performance: Deterritorializing the Realm of New Music — Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival, Montreal, Canada
Festival Link | Instagram Link
Your Concept combines piano, electronics, and spoken word to question the boundaries of musical identity and authorship. It reflects on the shifting nature of creativity in the modern era, where sound, language, and interpretation continually redefine each other. The performer’s voice and gestures become part of the composition, transforming the act of performance into a dialogue between thought and sound. The work invites both performer and listener to reconsider where meaning originates—within the music, the mind, or the moment of connection itself.
Suspension No. 3 (for Piano, Narrator, and Fixed Media)
Composer & Pianist: Soheil Shirangi • Narrator: Rob Snikkar
Year of Creation: 2020
Performance: April 2022 — Arts Letters & Numbers, Averill Park, New York
Watch on YouTube
Suspension No. 3 continues my exploration of uncertainty, reflection, and dialogue between sound and silence. In this work, piano, spoken word, and electronic texture merge to form a layered narrative. The piece meditates on the tension between expression and restraint—where music becomes language, and language turns into sound. The narrator’s voice acts as both participant and observer, blurring the line between internal thought and external experience. Through fragmented phrases and evolving resonance, the work captures the fragile balance between meaning and silence.
Sing for Ghazal No. 183 (for Solo Baritone and Electronics)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi
Poem: Hafez (1315–1390)
Year of Creation & Recording: August 2018
Performer: Armin Mohamadi — Baritone
Recorded at: Minor Studio, Tehran, Iran (2018)
Published by: Nous Publishing, London — August 2020, as part of the collection Akati
Listen on Spotify
Sing for Ghazal No. 183 reinterprets one of Hafez’s timeless poems through an electroacoustic lens. The baritone voice carries the emotional weight of the text—its longing, mysticism, and lyrical devotion—while the electronic layer expands its atmosphere beyond the limits of tradition. The interplay between voice and electronics reflects the eternal dialogue between the earthly and the divine, transforming classical Persian poetry into a contemporary sonic meditation on love, fate, and transcendence.
Indemnity (for Two Accordions and Fixed Media)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi
Year of Creation: January 2018 • Last Edit: June 2020
Performers:
Accordion I – Parsa Sotudeh • Accordion II – Armin Mohamadi
Performance: June 21, 2019 — Dream House Ensemble, 4th Tehran Contemporary Music Festival, Hafez Hall, Tehran, Iran
Watch on YouTube
Indemnity is a personal reflection on a ghazal by Hafez, reimagined through my own musical world. The two accordions engage in a dialogue that moves between tension and serenity, embodying both the mystical and human dimensions of Hafez’s poetry. The fixed media layer extends this dialogue into a larger, atmospheric space, where echoes of tradition meet modern sound. The piece contemplates love, loss, and acceptance—turning poetic spirit into a resonant, introspective landscape.
The Vital Sounds (for Fixed Media and Accordion)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi
Year of Creation: March 2017
World Performance: May 2020 — Lake Radio, “Corona Time” Series
Featured: Radiophrenia — April 14, 2025
Listen on Spotify | Listen on SoundCloud (Lake Radio)
The Vital Sounds transforms the concept of existence into sound. It envisions an environment where life itself—its rhythms, patterns, and pulses—is translated into music. Each vibration and irregular beat represents a living presence, forming a sonic ecosystem that constantly strives to persist. The accordion, with its breathing resonance, interacts with electronic textures to evoke the continuity of being. Together, they reveal that vitality is not found in perfection but in motion, fragility, and the shared pulse that connects all living things.
Abandoned Land (for Cello and Fixed Media)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi
Year of Creation: 2017 • Performed & Published: 2021
Performer: Ulrike Brand — Cello
Watch on YouTube
Abandoned Land is a meditation on despair and the fading traces of hope. It portrays a place—real or imagined—where motivation and meaning have nearly disappeared. The cello’s human voice struggles against the fixed media backdrop, symbolizing isolation within an indifferent world. Through fragile gestures and unresolved phrases, the piece reflects on collective longing for a better future that remains just out of reach. Its silence and emptiness speak as powerfully as its sound: a quiet lament for persistence amid desolation.
(for Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Narrators, and Electronics)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi
Year of Creation: Winter 2015
Performers:
Clarinet & Bass Clarinet – Soheil Peyghambari
Narrators – Mahoor Nasirian & Sina Jabbari
Recorded at: Kargadan Studio, 2018
Published by: Noise à Noise Record Label — July 2020
Listen on Spotify
Absurd Thinking explores the relationship between performer, language, and sound. Two clarinets—each following independent musical lines—interact with a recorded text drawn from my own writings on contemporary music. The narrators’ voices serve as both commentary and texture, questioning the meaning of structure and interpretation. Through this interplay, the work reflects on the absurd beauty of artistic creation: the coexistence of freedom and limitation, clarity and confusion, thought and noise. It is both a critique and celebration of modern expression.
Suspension No. 1 (for Accordion and Fixed Media)
Composer: Soheil Shirangi
Year of Creation: 2012 • Recorded: 2020
Performer: Benoit Ray — Accordion
Dedication: To Rahim Moazen Zadeh, whose voice remains a part of the collective memory of the Iranian people
Watch on YouTube
Suspension No. 1 reflects on memory, nostalgia, and silence—elements that define both personal and cultural identity. It explores the sounds that linger in consciousness: the remembered voice of Azan from childhood, the resonance of faith, and the echoes of shared experience. For me, “suspension” is everything and nothing—moments that cannot be erased, sounds that remain even when unheard. Through the dialogue of accordion and fixed media, the piece becomes a meditation on remembrance, longing, and the invisible presence of sound that never fades.