Darius Paymai

“In a broader sense, it reflects the way that I think would be a good way for people to relate to one another in general. An openness, and a generosity, a welcoming kind of music — music that doesn’t grab your wrist and force you along with it, but merely opens the door.”

Darius Paymai

Darius Paymai is an Iranian-American composer and performer based in London. His work is characterised by a clarity of approach and economy of material: often fragile, static, cyclical, found and reused in new contexts. As a composer he has worked with ensembles such as the London Chamber Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, EXAUDI, Quatuor Bozzini, and cellist Francesco Dillon, and his music performed at St. John’s Smith Square, The Place, Milton Court Concert Hall, and Hundred Years Gallery. As a performer he is interested in experimental repertoire, drone, and free improvisation, often with harmonium, percussion, or live electronics, as well as making and presenting independent radio shows. He is a postgraduate at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he has studied with Laurence Crane, Paul Newland, and Paul Whitmarsh.

On Friday 21st June, Darius’ work ‘quintet’ will be premiered by Plus-Minus Ensemble at Milton Court Concert Hall, London; ahead of the premiere, we caught up with Darius at the Barbican to speak about handwritten scores, cycles and stasis, Howard Skempton, and the “right material”…

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Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Darius! Thanks so much for joining me today. Tell me a bit about your musical background, and what drew you to composition — you grew up in the States, right?

Yes, I was born in California. I grew up first playing the trumpet, and then my mother told me I had to play the piano, as well… -laughs- My parents are not musicians, but they love music. I grew up with a lot of Persian pop music, and hard rock from the 80s. Then through playing the piano, I eventually [got into] jazz, as well; I started to play a lot of jazz. I think the first time I wrote music was probably around the time I was 11, or 12, or 13. I was in bands back then, covering rock songs, stuff like that. And then with jazz, as well; looking at it from a compositional side, as well as the performance side.

When I was in high school, I had a really great music teacher named Eric Delson, who was teaching us IB Music. That class was basically a whistle-stop tour of Western classical music — which I had never really encountered in the past, I’d never really learned about it. I think that historical approach — starting with Léonin, work[ing] up well into the 20th Century — that was really interesting for me. Before that, I had never considered that as something I could do: write music without performing it myself. With his encouragement, I started to write things down with pen and paper — and at the time, Finale. -laughs- I found that really, really exciting.

What excited you about writing down ideas in that way?

Because I could just be alone with it; work on it by myself, take my time, and try different things, without being on stage and without my hands sweating. That was the first time I started composing in this kind of way — when I was 16, or 17.

Interestingly, I’ve seen that many of your scores are still handwritten — what makes pen and paper an important medium for you? Did you always handwrite your scores?

All along the way… All of my teachers and mentors have encouraged me to write with pen and paper — pencil and paper, even. When I started my undergrad, I was very excited to learn how to use Sibelius; [but] it wasn’t until slightly later on that I reconnected with pen and paper.

The process of writing it is a big draw for me. I haven’t had the time this year — but if I have the time, I will write my final copy in pen and paper. I draw the staves myself, as well. I like that handmade quality. You look at other composers’ scores, handwritten ones, and you get a sense of their personality. I saw a thread on Twitter maybe last year, when someone was saying [that] there’s so much you can learn from a score — how you’re supposed to play it, how you’re supposed to interpret it, what your options are — based on just how it looks. Not even the decisions made notationally, but literally how the lines look: are they shaky, are they thin, are they thicker? Are the stems of the notes really long, are the flags really gregarious? I like that. That handmade quality, imparting something personal in the score. It feels like there’s more of a connection with it, somehow.

Of course — there’s something about how we piece material together when we have it laid out on paper, versus when we input it directly into software.

The way I sketch, often, is with one of those A3 landscape [pads]. I’m able to have multiple ideas on the same page, in different corners — I work corner to corner, and then work in and see how things connect sometimes. That’s really valuable, having it all there. You don’t have to scroll to the next page, you don’t have to scroll down: you just look at the bottom corner of the page, and “oh — that material connects with the material on the left side of the page!”

One thing that strikes me about your work is your treatment of cycles, and working with limited musical material — would you say that comes from, or is influenced by, your interest in handwritten processes?

I think that the process and my aesthetic preoccupations have grown together, hand in hand. When I started studying composition, I was a little all over the place; I was interested in trying lots of different things. But “where does it come from” is a really good question; if I had been somewhere else, maybe I would be writing different kinds of music. I think the environment I was in in the UK, at Guildhall… I spent a lot of time early on learning about the history of the situation we find ourselves in right now, in London — looking at British experimental music. That was a big influence for me. Particularly composers like Howard Skempton — I found his work really inspiring. And the people at the Guildhall, like Laurence Crane, Paul Newland — and the people studying around the same time as me, like Christian Drew. That approach was everywhere. What drew me to that, versus other things… that’s the mystery for me.

I think I get easily overwhelmed. I like to focus when I’m listening. I like music which allows me to focus on it, and isn’t telling me how to listen to it; more offers something that you may engage with. I find that a really interesting stance. [There’s] something very generous, I find, with a lot of experimental music — the kind of experimental music which uses limited musical materials, or lots of repetition. It feels very generous, very inviting. In a broader sense, it reflects the way that I think would be a good way for people to relate to one another in general. An openness, and a generosity, a welcoming kind of music — music that doesn’t grab your wrist and force you along with it, but merely opens the door.

Tell me more about discovering Howard Skempton — what was it about his work that resonated with you?

My first encounter with his [Skempton’s] music was a collection of piano pieces that I found in the library. The absolute clarity of the music, I find really admirable. Paul Newland showed us a piano piece of his called ‘Even Tenor’. It’s made very simply; the first half is just four chords, that go back and forth — and the rest of it is a slowly descending sequence of four-note chords as well, arpeggiated. But when I listened to it the first time, I couldn’t tell how it was made. I didn’t know that it was put together that simply, I was just experiencing it: “okay, big wide chord, slightly narrower chord, long decay, you feel like you’re in the piano.” Even with everything so pulled back, you can still drown in stimulus, because you can listen to these things in that finer way — you can allow yourself to be taken over by it. You’re not constantly trying to figure out what’s going on.

The thing that’s really great for me about that collection of Skempton piano pieces, is that it seems like a lot of them were written in one day, I think. The dates are written in a way that makes it seem they were written in one day — which is just amazing.

It’s such a vignette kind of outlook.

Exactly. It’s an experience. It’s one of so many things that it could be. That’s something I’ve been thinking of so much, as well; there are so many versions of the “right material”, and we spend so long looking for the “right material” — the perfect material. Especially when you’re working in a way where you might only have three or four discrete bits of material in a piece — in a 10-minute piece, for example — that search becomes very important. Music like Skempton’s, the fact that those [pieces] were presumably written in such a short time… As someone who’s playing them, or listening to them, you don’t feel that struggle. It just feels like an experience — a viable piece of material that sounds great, and beautiful.

It’s not just Skempton — that was an example, there are so many composers who are brilliant at doing this kind of thing. But you just get into the material somehow. The most amazing thing is when you have a piece that has such limited range of material, and it repeats — and there’s a moment where you feel like nothing else exists. You’re lost in this world, but it’s such a narrow, small collection of things that you feel like the rest of the world doesn’t even exist. All you know is these four chords, you’ve been living with these four chords for a really long time — and you’re just like, “Okay, this is my life now. I live in these four chords and I’m very happy here.”

There’s something really fascinating I found in the experience of listening to your work ‘for two (spring)’ which embodies this perfectly; where the sound world of the piece consists of just B for such a long time, that when you introduce an A# a few minutes in, it suddenly feels like a momentous shift.

You know, it’s the oldest trick in the book, really. -laughs- You grow up looking at scores and saying “Oh well, you know, in this movement, Bartok withholds the E natural until such-and-such moment, and when you hear the E natural, everything opens up”… Okay, I agree. But in my language, that means: there is just one note until there are two. Because there is so much in that one note, I think.

The things I find really exciting about composing, a lot of times, are more about pacing and form. That’s where I really get my rocks off. -laughs- Like I said, any kind of material might be the “right” material… Obviously, I think it’s important to choose the right material, but I’ve been wondering if that even exists. Maybe if they’re “good enough”, you can fit them together into a form; and that becomes really exciting, and satisfying.

I like surprises. I like trying to write music that’s surprising. When something doesn’t change for a really long time, you either think it’s going to change, or that it will never change. Living in that moment of “you don’t know which one it’s gonna be”, and dragging that out for quite a long time… That is fun.

There’s two pieces of yours these ideas reminds me of — in the ways they treat found material, or already existing material. One of them is ‘me fait languir’, which I heard played by the London Chamber Orchestra a while back…

The [London Chamber Orchestra] piece uses it very rigorously — only uses found material, almost. I guess the way I was thinking about that was: you have an orchestra, and you ignore the whole concept of “sections” and instrument families, section leaders, concertmasters — and split the orchestra into three uneven, asymmetrical groups. Most of the instruments are playing from a page of material that they can play in any order, in any combination. If you try to follow each instrument — which would be quite difficult to do in that texture — you wouldn’t hear a cycle, you would hear a line. But because it’s constantly being repeated across the orchestra all the time, it feels like it’s looping. All these things looping, together.

I think it’s that very Jürg Frey thing; how a sound can be a silence, and how a cycle can be stasis. It just depends on how long you’re listening to it for. If you hear something loop once, or twice, maybe you won’t feel like it’s static; but if you hear it looping a bunch of times, at different rates across [a] whole orchestra… Then it’s a kind of stasis. Ultimately, I come from a place of being interested in different kinds of stasis, and different kinds of silence. That was a big thing I was thinking about.

The second piece I’m reminded of is your 2024 work ‘old logic’, featuring text by Alexia Peniguel — tell me a bit about your collaborative relationship, and how that piece relates to found material?

That piece has a strange, roundabout story. We talked to the singer and pianist we were gonna be working with, and they said “oh, we really like late 19th, early 20th Century French art song.” We had a discussion about using found material; how that relates to memory. Remembering as a form of creating, as reconstructing. I was talking about how I want[ed] to take these Debussy, Ravel, and Chausson songs, and blur them up and put them back together. Then Alexia wrote [a] poem called Reconciling Time and Memory, which is kind of about that.

I started out taking lots of bits of these songs, and finding materials from them — working them into a little bit of a shape, finding ones that I liked. I had these materials, and I said: okay, what if these materials not only come from these multiple sources of French music, but also came from one made-up song that I’m gonna write and pretend is an original source? So I took these materials and retrofitted them to an early Debussy pastiche song that I wrote. So I had two sources: I had actual-Debussy and I had my-Debussy; I actually translated Alexia’s poem to French, and set it as if it was a Debussy song. And then the electronics use a recording of Harriet [Cameron] and Jingyi [Cao] playing the pastiche song that I wrote. So the material does come from all of those sources, but it’s not exact; it’s a hazy remembering of it.

I mean, even the idea of pastiche — that’s based on remembering, or misremembering, something.

I’ve had discussions with Christian about this. Letting these sources, and inspirations, come through memory, but not really “checking” them; more an impression of what that kind of music is like. He’s done that a couple times before, and I think it’s really exciting. I think for me, I have to do it a little bit more systematically. I like taking myself on that journey: writing myself into corners, and breaking out of them.

I feel like a lot of the time, the nakedness or honesty of that process can produce results that feel more reliable to the listener — even if they come from an unreliable memory.

Yes, of course. You’ll never know what experiences the audience is coming to listen to your piece with. A lot of the material I’ve been working with recently — the material that’s not found — the ones I’ve been gravitating towards have been packed with what I feel like are associations, reference, to other kinds of music. I’m allowing myself to follow my nose, and let the gut feeling take over. I feel like I’m doing it for myself, for my own sanity — because it’s what I want to hear. I feel like a lot of people have similar touchstones.

Even in an unconscious way — the violin and piano piece [‘for two (spring)’], all of the material in that piece comes from an improvisation that I did with choreographer Samara Langham. I was sitting and improvising with her. I didn’t think about it — I didn’t say “I’m gonna play this collection of notes” — I just played it, and it ended up being a major 7th chord and a minor 7th chord, and I thought okay, that’s sounds fine, it’s material; I’m [gonna] roll with it.

Speaking of which — you collaborated with Samara Langham last year on an interdisciplinary piece called ‘as if almost erasing’…

We had eight weeks to make a piece together. Paul Newland — who has a lot of experience facilitating collaboration between composers and choreographers — said to us: “You have to start making stuff. Don’t think about it, don’t talk about it, just start making stuff.” So a lot of what I did at the beginning was in Logic; I would make a bit of sound, loop it, and layer one on top of the other. That went on for a while. I think at the same time, that inspired Samara to create some material that was repetitive, and looping, in these tight cycles.

I actually had coffee with Christian, and I said “you know, I’m feeling really fed up with this material, I don’t like it, I want to use electronics but I don’t like how it’s sounding in Logic.” And he said “you have to start writing for instruments now.” -laughs- And that was the key, and that blew everything open. I was able to take those principles of what I was doing in Logic — looping, pitch shifting, layering things on top of one another in these loose temporal relationships — and translating that to the instruments. Finding new material on the instruments, and letting that same associative work go through.

How did your collaborative process develop with Samara?

We built the piece up, step by step, together. All along the way. There was no point at which either of us were particularly ahead in our side of things, in the whole process. I think that was a really positive thing; in the last weeks of the project, she was composing more than I was, and I was choreographing quite a bit, as well. We both had a hand in what the other was doing. And it’s because we made the piece together, and we trusted each other.

Tell me a bit about how you build up or layer ideas in your practice?

I have all these things circling around in my head, or on my desk, at any one point. I sit and idly sketch, or copy something down in my sketchbook, because I like to have things ready to go if I need them. It’s again, back to this idea of what the “right material” is: maybe if it’s good enough, and you have a few things circling around in your head that you’re interested in, you can put them together in a way that feels good. For me, that comes with layering. It’s not like I write one, and then I write the other, and build it up slowly; it’s not a slow process. It’s about pulling things together really quickly.

What’s exciting for me in the formal dimension, and the textural dimension, is hearing things together, hearing things separately, hearing things overlapping. All the different combinations that you can get out of a couple bits of material that have their own personal integrity. I think in really simple terms when I’m putting a piece together. The simplest terms: on or off? Here’s a bit of material I like — is it on, or is it off? When is it on, when is it off? Even that simple way of thinking opens up so many possibilities. It’s a really satisfying way of working for me.

I guess thinking that kind of simply about layers doesn’t shut off possibility, but rather opens up parameters you wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.

Yeah — or letting the performers choose whether something is on or off.

On that same note: a lot of your scores have quite an “open” nature to them, particularly when it comes to elements like duration. How integral to your practice is the idea of open scoring?

Well, in this layering thing that I was talking about… When these things come together quite quickly, and they’re layered on top of each other in my head, it makes sense for me to leave them temporally disconnected. The way I hear it, the way I feel it, is that it’s these simple things coming together, and there’s an emergent complexity from that.

It’s usually open with regard to co-ordination, and speed, and things like that. A couple years ago, I was trying to write something — I don’t remember what it was — and Paul Newland, in his infinite wisdom, said: “Well, you really like to control pitch, you really like your notes, your chords. So keep that; don’t give that up. And think about what you do feel comfortable giving up, and leaving out.” I find the aspect of co-ordination to be the most exciting thing for me [to leave out], because of that emergent complexity. I also think it really does change the way that musicians play. I’ve tested similar, or the same material, notated differently — and I think it does sound different.

I mean, it’s a comfort thing too, right? If you write something in a super complex manner, even if it’s “supposed” to feel natural, the struggle in getting that right will naturally make the music feel different from if the naturalism came from something notated more loosely, or openly.

And if they’re playing in that relaxed way, it sounds completely different, yeah. That is a big draw for me. It’s also exciting not knowing exactly what’s gonna happen each time; that’s really obvious, but I do find it exciting.

Would you say then that the sonic resultant of the score is the “ultimate” form of the work for you? What would you say characterises a work you’re happy with?

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, and I don’t have a very good answer for it. It’s a really strange thing for me to think about. If you had asked me that question a couple years ago, I would have said [that] it’s all about the sound — [that] I’m 100% focused on the material quality of sound, and that aspect of music is the single most important thing to me. But I don’t think that’s the case.

The thing that I love to hear from a member of an audience, in response [to my work], is that there was something memorable — something that sticks with them. That’s why I’m interested in surprises, I guess; even these little surprises. If you go out into the foyer after a concert, and someone says “oh, I liked your piece [that] just had one note for a really long time,” that feels good — because I feel like I was able to get that important thing across.

I also completely recognise that a lot the material I’ve been using recently — because of these associations — could have this emotional quality to it, this emotional dimension. At least an associative dimension. It’s interesting for me, because it’s slightly uncomfortable… Again, if you had asked me a couple years ago, I would have said “no, I don’t want any member of the audience to feel like they have to feel any particular way” — but people do. So now, I’m leaning into it a little bit, and I don’t know if I feel comfortable with that. But I’m trying it.

I guess that’s the inherent subjectivity of music, right. -laughs- But what makes a piece of work you’ve created satisfying, for you — whether in the compositional process or in performance?

It’s tough. -laughs- When I’m working on [a piece], there’s always an element of struggle for me. It’s not like I’m fighting anything, or fighting against myself — it’s not like that — but there’s a certain effort, and the product of effort, and intense concentration… That element is satisfying.

I want the musicians to enjoy playing it. I want the musicians to have a good time, I want them to feel cared for — [that] their musicality and their skills have been respected. That there’s something they can connect to — especially if I’m writing for a particular person, or a particular set of people.

The way I feel about my pieces changes all the time, in retrospect. A lot of it does come down to: when we use the word satisfying in music, as composers, I often feel like it has to do with form, and timing… The timing of things. For me, that’s so important. I think that’s what I find the most fun about composing; working out exactly when something has to happen. The right time for that change. Especially when there are so few things going on in [a] piece. When that “works” — when that clicks onstage, in front of an audience, [when] you can feel “okay, that was well-judged” — that’s such a good feeling.

The most satisfying experience [in a composition] was when I wrote a piece for chamber ensemble, and recording and playback. They were recorded in the first half, and I played back that recording in the second half and pitch-shifted it. I didn’t know if the Max patch was gonna work, I didn’t know if the microphones and interface were gonna work… And then it did. Six minutes into the piece, I heard the pitch-shift come on. I think I did a fist bump, I was like “fuck yeah!” -laughs-

I’ve been there, for sure — when you can’t tell whether something will work until you’re in the space.

At the same time, there are pieces I’ve written and heard performed that I’ve completely written off. But after some time, I’ll go back, look at the score, and say “you know, there’s actually something here, it’s not all bad.” The material is good, but the form isn’t good, or whatever… It’s salvageable, somehow. That’s also part of me re-using material — maybe it doesn’t only have to be in one piece. In 2020-2021, I wrote three pieces using the same set of chords, because I liked them so much. I can look at it in a different way, in a different piece.

It’s so much work, so much effort, to come up with new material. -laughs- It’s so much time spent, and labour, and agony. If you’ve got something perfectly good in front of you, and you can use it in a different piece, you might as well. I don’t think the value of music is lessened by that at all. If it’s still something you’re interested in interrogating, conceptually, and you just wanna do it in a new piece — that’s fine. We don’t have to constantly be reinventing ourselves.

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Learn more about Darius and his practice at:

• https://dariuspaymai.com/
• https://soundcloud.com/darius-paymai

References/Links:

• William Howard, ‘The Piano Music of Howard Skempton’ (2020), The Cross-Eyed Pianist
• Howard Skempton – ‘Even Tenor’ (1988)