Navid Bargrizan

Nearly all of Navid Bargrizan’s compositions explore intonational and tuning concepts, ranging from just intonation and extended equal temperaments (e.g. 24-tone or 36-tone equal temperament) to various microtonal concepts adopted from diverse musical cultures. Since 2014, his experiments with microtonality have resulted in 13 premieres and more than 40 performances of his works in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Austria, including at New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium, Eastern Music Festival, Florida Contemporary Festival, and conferences of the Society of Composers, Inc. His works have been performed and recorded by ensembles and artists such as Stacks Duo, Boston String Quartet, Bold City Contemporary Ensemble, Steve Stusek, and Susan Fancher. For his woodwind quintet Tuning Exercise No. 1 (performed at Northwestern University and the University of Florida), Bargrizan was chosen as a finalist in 2016–2017 American Prize for Composition, Instrumental Chamber Music Division. For his solo microtonal guitar piece Se-Chahar-Gah, composed for and recorded by Tolgahan Çoğulu (FIGMENTS II, Navona Records, 2019), he was also a finalist in the 2019–2020 edition of the same prize, same category. As the summer-2018 composer-in-residence of Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville FL, he composed Pictures at the Micro-Exhibition, a suite for solo alto saxophone that employs synthetic, microtonal pentatonic scales and rhythmical patterns inspired by non-Western musical traditions. Laurent Estoppey recorded this piece and has performed it at several venues in the United States and Europe.

Bargrizan’s scholarly research on microtonality, especially the music of American composer Harry Partch and German composer Manfred Stahnke, as well as his secondary focus on sociopolitical implications of Roger Waters’s protest music, have led to many publications, such as in Journal of the Society for American Music, eContact! Online Journal for Electroacoustic Practices, and Müzik-Bilim Dergisi: the Journal of Musicology. He has presented his research projects—supported by awards such as three DAAD Scholarships and the Doctoral Fellowship of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere of the University of Florida—at approximately 30 international conferences in the North America and Europe, including German Studies Association, Society for Music Theory, Society for American Music, Conference for Interdisciplinary Musicology, and International Association of the Study of Popular Music. Bargrizan has served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Composition, Adjunct Lecturer of General Humanities, and Adjunct Lecturer of German Language at the University of Florida. At this institution and Universität Hamburg, Germany, he earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Music History and Literature; Music Composition, Theory and Technology; Systematic Musicology; and Art History. His most important mentors, from whom he has learned much, have been Hamidreza Dibazar, Mehran Rouhani, Mostafa-Kamal Poortorab, Sharif Lotfi, Albrecht Schneider, Friedrich Geiger, Manfred Stahnke, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Silvio dos Santos, Jennifer Thomas, Paul Richards, James Paul Sain, and Paul Koonce. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Music (Theory/History) at Texas A&M University-Commerce and an Instructor of German Language at Dallas Goethe Center.