ART AS A TOOL

Iran has been silencing protesters for decades. So this Philly resident turned to music to dissent.

• By Massarah Mikati
• Published Mar 10, 2023

Everybody was getting arrested for expressing themselves.

Activists, authors, intellectuals, students, journalists — hundreds of people across Iran were arrested over the course of a year, for demanding political change and the removal of their president during the Green Movement in 2009 and 2010.

Sepehr Pirasteh, who uses the pronouns he and they, was a freshman in high school in Iran at the time. Watching fellow countrymen get punished and silenced made Pirasteh realize that he needed to speak out. So he turned to what he knew: music.

“Experiencing all of those things got me into this field,” said Pirasteh, now a doctoral student in music at Temple University. “I realized that I should be expressing myself and writing music about all the censorship that we were experiencing.”

Ever since, Pirasteh’s career has been dedicated to composing music as a form of political dissent. Pirasteh’s music blends the sounds of Iranian classical music with traditional Western techniques.

The songs evoke nostalgia and a sense of cultural pride, then dramatically shift to what sounds like a scene from a horror movie. The music speaks to everything from the imprisonment and torture of political prisoners to the grief that loved ones left behind.

“With the very tragic moments in my country, I feel like my music has been shifting toward a violent or graphic reaction,” Pirasteh said. “Art has been one of the tools for me to express the feeling of extreme sadness that I have consumed and absorbed within all of these years.”

One such piece Pirasteh composed, “Solitary Confinement,” was written for a string quartet. Inspired by the book White Torture by the Iranian human-rights activist Narges Mohammadi, Pirasteh used the song to highlight solitary confinement, one of the primary methods that the Islamic Republic of Iran has used during the interrogation of political prisoners, according to groups such as Human Rights Watch.

“Solitary Confinement” tries to capture the psychological effects political prisoners go through, conveying the moment that political prisoners may be forced to give false confessions or information about their political views.

From the perspective of political prisoners, Pirasteh then swoops the audience to the perspective of prisoners’ loved ones.

“When They Broke Down the Door” is based on a poem written by Fatemeh Shams, a specialist in Persian literature at the University of Pennsylvania. The poem speaks to political prisoners, activists, or those in exile who have lost their loved ones.

“The work actually tries to intimately portray brutal moments of torture and execution while intertwining with a devastating loss of love,” Pirasteh said. “You see moments of torture, but there’s these beautiful elements to it that is still showing … the desire and love that you have for someone and how you have lost them.”

Pirasteh moved to the United States five years ago, and they haven’t been back to Iran since. They’re afraid of what they would face there after their vocal activism. At the same time, they’re in this country on a student visa, so a future here is not secure either.

“I’m in this limbo and can’t go back, I don’t know what to do,” Pirasteh said. “But I’m willing to take this risk, because this is very important. When I see my friends are being arrested in Iran, or people are being killed — this is the least I can do, no matter what happens to me, no matter if I’m not able to go back.”