Maasoo (for Saxophone Quartet)

Composer: Soheil Shirangi

First Performance: June 8, 2024 — Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame with TC4 Saxophone Quartet (Composer’s Voice Online Project)

Second Performance: September 14, 2024 — Composer’s Voice: Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame, Brand Library Recital Hall, 1601 West Mountain Street, Glendale, Los Angeles
Performers: TC4 Saxophone Quartet — Andrew Harrison, Frances Cisneros, Isaac Lopez, Robert Alexander

Maasoo—a Mazandarani word from northern Iran—refers to the delicate light that appears at dawn. This work is both a personal story and a meditation on that quiet radiance. When the sun rises, the people of my region say “Maasoo,” a word that carries a sense of renewal and calm.

In an age saturated with visual and sensory noise, Maasoo embraces the spirit of contemporary minimalism as a response to modern chaos. The piece seeks beauty through reduction, removing excess to uncover the essence of sound and form. The saxophone quartet becomes a single organism, its four voices merging in an intimate dialogue where a suspended phrase gradually finds resolution.

Minimalism here is not absence—it is presence. Each gesture, silence, and resonance becomes meaningful, inviting the listener to pause and reflect. The restrained harmonic language allows texture and breath to take precedence, transforming simplicity into depth. The work celebrates the act of listening itself—where the first light of morning dissolves into harmony, and stillness reveals its own vitality.

Through its evolving textures and meditative pacing, Maasoo captures both stillness and awakening, expressing the fragile beauty of dawn as a metaphor for human consciousness. It invites the listener to rediscover quiet, light, and renewal in a world that rarely stops to breathe.