Shahrokh Yadegari, composer, sound designer, producer, and interdisciplinary artist, has collaborated with such artists as Peter Sellars, Robert Woodruff, Ann Hamilton, Christine Brewer, Gabor Tompa, Maya Beiser, Steven Schick, David Schweiszer, Lucie Tiberghien, Yolande Snaith, Hossein Omoumi, and Siamak Shajarian. He has performed and his productions, compositions, and designs have been presented internationally in such venues as the Festival of Arts and Ideas, Carnegie Hall/Zankell, (OFF) Avignon Festival,  Ravinia Festival, International Theatre Festival in Cluj Romania, Ruhr-Triennale, Vienna Festival, Holland Festival, Forum Barcelona, Japan America Theatre, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), the Institut fur Neue Musik und Musikerziehung (Darmstadt), Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, and Contemporary Museum of Art, San Diego.

Yadegari holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT’s Media Lab, and a Ph.D. in music from University of California, San Diego. In the 80s and 90s, he worked at such companies at Interactive System Corporation, Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) and ICL, as senior unix kernel system programmer. In late 80s, he worked at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). He is one of the founders and the artistic director of Kereshmeh Records and Persian Arts Society, organizations dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of Persian traditional and new music. Yadegari has produced and presented the work of such acclaimed Grammy nominated artists as Mohammad Reza Shajarian , Hossein Alizadeh , and Kayhan Kalhor.

In 2004, Yadegari was appointed to the faculty of the department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego, where he has founded a progressive program in sound design and composition. He was the Chair for the subcommittee of the Digitally Mediated Performances of the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego. In 2012, Yadegari was appointed the interim director of  the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), and now is the director of the Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Science  (IDEAS) at the California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology (Calit2).

Among his recent projects are composition and direction for Tower Sounds: Ancient Voices and Electronics performed in Ann Hamilton’s Tower on Oliver Ranch; composition and sound design for Stylus, an installation by Ann Hamilton; composition for Ruins True a dance-theatre piece based on the work of Samuel Beckett directed by Gabor Tompa and choreographed by Yolande Snaith; composition of  Intervals a piece for Christine Brewer and Ann Hamilton, premiered at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St Louis; adaptation, direction, and composition for Scarlet Stone, a recent piece based on ancient Persian mythology and related to the contemporary political climate on the Middle East. Yadegari won the Craig Noel San Diego Critics Circle award for Outstanding Sound Design for the production of Blood and Gifts by TJ Rogers and directed by Lucie Tiberghien at the La Jolla Playhouse in July of 2012.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shahrokh Yadegari  was born in Iran and moved to the United States in 1979. He earned his bachelor of science in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1982 and worked as a unix kernel software engineer at companies such as Interactive systems Corporation, Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), and ICL. At Interactive Systems Corp he was part of the PC/IX team (the first unix system for the intel 8080 architecture) and also headed the porting of the AT&T’s System V Remote File System (RFS) to PC/IX. At Sun Microsystem he was responsible for the performance tuning (scheduling, file system, and networking) of the the Solaris port to the x86 architecture. At ICL he worked as a developer on adapting (symmetricizing)  the Unix SYS V.4 for multiprocessor environment. ICL’s symmetric system (DRS/6000 computer utilizing up to 4 SPARC processors) was the first SYS V.4 multiprocessor of its class on the market.

In 1987 and 1989 he worked at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), the computer music research center in Paris founded by Pierre Boulez. At IRCAM he worked on digital audio workstations such as the Sun Mercury and the IRCAM workstation. He also developed the “expr” object (C-style expression evaluator) for Miller Puckette’s Max (later to become Pure Data) interactive graphical language computer music environment. Yadegari earned his Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he developed his own synthesis language based on the concept of self-referentiality and Lindenmeyer’s L-system.

Yadegari left the computer industry in 1994 to follow his passion for music. Yadegari had studied the Radif of Persian Traditional music with Esmaeel Tehrani on the santur and with Hossein Omoumi on the ney. in 1993 Yadegari became aware of the dire condition of music and musicians in Iran at the time. Music in general was highly censored and musicians could go to jail for carrying an instrument or teaching music to anybody under the age of sixteen. Since the 1979 revolution until today, women have not been allowed to be the primary vocalist of a piece. In 1993 in the United States, Persian music was hardly known to the Western public and the concerts and music productions were all carried on by unstable Persian ethnic production channels usually run by amateur aficionados. In response to the condition of Persian traditional music and musicians in 1993, Yadegari co-founded Kereshmeh Records, a record label focused on the preservation and dissemination of Persian traditional music, and later co-founded Persian Arts Society, an organization focused on education and professional presentation of Persian traditional music to the Western audiences. He directed both organizations until 2001 during which time he produced many works and presented many concerts by some of the most important musicians of Iran. Among these productions notably one can name  3 works by the two most prominent female singers of Iran (Parissa and Sima Bina), 5 works by Hossein Alizadeh (who earned a grammy nomination in 2006 for his Endless Vision), a work of  Mohammad Reza Shajarian (who was picked by NPR among the ‘50 great voices‘), and the first published work of Kayhan Kalhor (Eastern Apertures – who now has two Grammy nominations to his name). In 1998, with the help of grants from National Endowments for the Arts and California Arts Council, Yadegari established the first school of Persian traditional music in Los Angeles, which was revived again in 2012.

In 2004, Yadegari was appointed as a Calit2 (California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology) professor at the department of Theatre and Dance at UCSD, where he has established a progressive MFA in Sound Design. The use of technology and sound design is now fully incorporated in the productions of the department and most his graduated students are now  multiple award winner sound designers working in New York and Los Angeles

Yadegari holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT’s Media Lab, and a Ph.D. in music from University of California, San Diego. He has worked at Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), and he is one of the founders and the artistic director of Kereshmeh Records and Persian Arts Society, organizations dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of Persian traditional and new music. Yadegari is currently the director of Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and on the faculty of the department of Theatre and Dance at University of California, San Diego, where he has founded a progressive program in sound design and composition. He was the Chair for the subcommittee of the Digitally Mediated Performances of the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego.

Among his recent projects are composition and direction for Tower Sounds: Ancient Voices and Electronics performed in Ann Hamilton’s Tower on Oliver Ranch, composition and sound design for Stylus, an installation by Ann Hamilton, composition for Ruins True a dance-theatre piece based on the work of Samuel Beckett directed by Gabor Tompa and choreographed by Yolande Snaith, composition of  Intervals a piece forChristine Brewer premiered at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St Louis. adaptation, direction, and composition for Scarlet Stone, a recent piece based on ancient Persian mythology and related to the contemporary political climate on the Middle East. Yadegari won the Craig Noel San Diego Critics Circle award for Outstanding Sound Design for the production of Blood and Gifts by TJ Rogers directed by Lucie Tiberghien at the La Jolla Playhouse in July of 2012.

Provenance

An Invited piece at the ohrenhoch Gallery, Berlin, March 3 and 10 2013.

For general information please see the official site of

http://scarletstone.com and https://yadegari.org/scarletStone

The following script and video are not available publicly and can only be seen on this website:

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An excerpt of
Intervals (2010)
by Shahrokh Yadegari

featuring the hightly acclaimed

Christine Brewer, soprano
and

Elizabeth Zharoff soprano
and
a reading by Ann Hamilton
presented by
The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Wednesday, September 21 at 6:30pm and 8:30pm