Sarah Ma, OC ’23; Max Ball, OC ’23; Jasper de Boor, OC ’23; and Drew Dansby, OC ’24, formed the Poiesis Quartet while studying at Oberlin. They just won the prestigious Banff International String Quartet Competition in Canada, taking the final round with a program of exclusively 21st-century BIPOC composers. They have two major concerts scheduled at Oberlin this year, the latter of which features premieres by five queer BIPOC Oberlin composers, who were commissioned to create ten-minute pieces for the ensemble this past year through the Oberlin Commission Project. These pieces are now being completed and sent to the quartet to start rehearsals. As Poiesis takes on the next phase of the project, two of the featured composers, College fourth-year Max Lang and Conservatory fourth-year Zola Saadi-Klein, discussed their process.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you get involved in this project?

ZSK: I’ve been friends with Poiesis since 2021. They were amazing people, and seeing their passion and compassion was really special. I was at a party, and Sarah was talking about this project that they were doing with their group.

They were graduating that semester, so I said, “I love what you guys do, and if there’s any chance to write for you, I would love it.” You’ve got to really put yourself out there, right? A few months later, Sarah reached out to me about the Oberlin Commission Project.

What is your composition process?

ML: It starts generally on paper at a piano, coming up with general melodic ideas and a feel for the piece. After that, I tend to like to use a verbal outline where I write out the trajectory of how I want my piece to go. Then I’ll bounce back and forth between paper, my electronic notation software, and a piano to hear the ideas that I’m writing down and elaborate the ideas that I’ve written on paper.

ZSK: It really depends on who you’re working with. I was very happy to write this string quartet — I had grown up playing violin, and chamber settings were always my favorite, but I haven’t played much in college.

Since 2023, I’ve been doing a lot of research on Persian traditional court music — the dastgāh.

It does come from folk music, but it is definitely classical Persian court music, codified between 1300 and 1600. One particular scale interested me: the dastgāh navā scale.

I felt that using it allowed me to explore this new sound world more intentionally and simply. The harmonic and rhythmic palette and the concept of the piece formulated from this dastgāh.

What is your piece about?

ML: My piece for Poiesis is largely about the experience I had living and working as a wrangler on a horse ranch in Colorado one summer. I was confronted with how dangerous nature is.

In that, I saw a lot of parallels to the normal dangers that queer people, people of color, and marginalized people experience daily. I also saw a lot of parallels between the acceptance of these dangers in both settings.

ZSK: It was Sept. 13, 2022, when Mahsa Amini was kidnapped by the morality police for not complying with the ongoing hijab enforcement of the Iranian government. She fell into a really deep coma and died three days later in custody due to brain injuries. Her death sparked outrage in Iran and internationally. She became the reinvigorating face for the Women Life Freedom Movement.

She’s not the only one who’s been beaten and disappeared. It’s still happening.

At the time, I didn’t know how to express it in words, let alone music. It took me this long to say, “I strongly feel I need to speak out about this. She should be known and honored. How can I honor her?”

This piece is an homage to Mahsa — her life, her bravery, her courage, her strength. It’s for her and all women and gender-nonconforming people in Iran and worldwide who struggle for basic human rights. At our core, we’re all just human.

We should be able to see that, even if we don’t agree politically, socially, spiritually. What matters is we’re all human.

What challenges or discoveries have you encountered?

ML: Lots of them. Since I’ve started writing classical music, I’ve written a lot of bite-sized pieces, and ten minutes feels long to me. I’ve learned a lot about myself as a composer and what helps me get a piece of this length done. I’ve learned about different sounds and sound worlds I find appealing. My quartet is based on folk music and shoegaze rock and their big atmospheric sound. I’ve learned I can reach beyond classical music and mash together different sound worlds from various genres in my music.

ZSK: I had to challenge my own beliefs and ideas of what activism looks like. I was not active in 2022, and I think with that comes a lot of shame, to be honest, because I was not supporting the community that needs help, even with the privilege and power that I have here. I had to look inward, reflect, and be honest about why I’m doing this.

How will this impact people — not just myself, but the community who needs to hear and feel this, and those that already do feel this? The Iranian community is mourning and honoring her and all the martyrs since. It was really challenging to write something so emotionally heavy.

Musically, this piece kind of just spilled out over the summer. I wanted to be mindful that using this “new alternate scale” is not necessarily super radical, but it might be new to many. I have to be intentional to get the point across: it’s not new or foreign; it carries culture and weight. There’s beauty in it that I, in the past, struggled to find within myself, but I’m finding it more now. I’m more connected because of this research to my family on both sides — my Dutch and my Persian family.

Max, how has your experience been as a College composer?

ML: As a whole, it’s been very positive.

I’ve found great role models in my Conservatory professors, especially the Composition faculty. I’ve found a phenomenal community in the Composition department that welcomed me and encouraged me to seek out exciting opportunities. I love taking lessons with Conservatory professors. I’ve learned so much. I look at the musician I was in high school when my music theory teacher told me she thought I would be a composer and I said “no way,” and I look at the musician I am now and all I’ve written — I’m so grateful to the Composition department and my colleagues.

How do you approach bringing disparate genres or sounds outside of the classical Western canon into the traditional concert hall?

ML: It starts with finding sounds and gestures I like. I have a Spotify playlist for most pieces that I write. I’ve taken various guitar sounds or electronic sounds from those songs and tried to emulate them on a violin, viola, cello. There’s a section of my piece that uses a lot of glissondos, or slides from one note to another. I found that in a shoegaze song that I felt really inspired by; it got the core of what I was trying to get at with this piece.

I started writing words before I started writing music, and that’s such an important part of my identity as a musician. When Poiesis said they were open to doing spoken text, I knew immediately I wanted to include it. 

A lot of the texts that I’m using come from poems that I wrote last year that are now a part of my senior capstone Creative Writing project.

ZSK: Exploration — just play. What sounds good? What feels good in the body is really important to me. I love not only vocalizing it, but moving my body to the vocalization.

I’m trying to learn the kamancheh, the Indigenous violin, and I would also love to learn the hammer dulcemer, or santur. Both instruments influenced the overall sound world of my piece.

I think I can cross these two cultures’ music by emulating those instruments.

I grew up playing the Eurocentric classical repertoire, and it had a very good impact on me. I’m here, right? But I’m always striving to find ways that I can reimagine and retrain my ear into the worlds of the music that my Iranian family has so deeply ingrained in them. I remember the lavish Persian parties my family would throw when I was younger. My aunts were dancing in four-inch heels, and their shoulders were shaking. That rhythm is in their bones, their body, their blood. Some of that does come through, hopefully in my music.

How do you view concert music as relevant to marginalized communities, considering its exclusionary history?

ML: Especially when I first started composing, it was really difficult to find representation; a lot of the composers we talk about in classes are white cis-het males. I think it’s important that we can be the representation for people younger than us. That’s a really exciting opportunity.

ZSK: Even though it might be through an institution with structural violence against marginalized communities, it’s still a platform for us to share our experiences — joy, grief, wealth — with a community. Thankfully, Oberlin has been very open musically. I hope to also expand the repertoire of our ancestors — our transcestors. I see it as an archive: these pieces will join the catalogue for others to explore these stories, whether they be this serious homage or joy — queer joy is very important. I think we like to harp on negative things; the space might be not quite what many of my counterpoints might enjoy, but it can be uplifting.