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Artistic collaboration can be a tricky business. Each artist comes to the process with a specific musical language, history and point of view. This is especially true for composer Eve Beglarian and Persian musicians Manoochehr Sadeghi and Pejman Hadadi.

While the collaborative process of L.A. is the World is deeply respectful of the traditions of the master musician, the goal is to find enough common ground upon which to build a piece of music. Both master musicians and composer must be willing to release some of their traditional or personal methodology in order to be open to new musical ideas. The challenge of each collaboration, then, is to capture the tension between the places where the artists are divergent and those where they intersect — and to harness and express this tension in a new, dynamic and completely original choral work.

In this first commission, artists need to bridge not only cultural differences but two entirely different musical philosophies — the ancient Persian Radif and the Western classical tradition. While the two traditions have in some ways cross-fertilized over the centuries, they have largely left each other alone.

“I got interested in L.A. is the World because for some time now I have been thinking of a meeting of sorts between Western classical music and Persian music,” says Hadadi, “I am excited to be sharing my knowledge in the hopes of creating a musical bridge that can be built upon by future generations.”

— Miki Shelton

Next: The Persian Radif