Although he was born in Tehran, Bobak Salehi didn’t grow up playing the music of his own Persian tradition. The first time he remembers traditional instruments really exciting him happened after his family left Tehran for Istanbul, where saw Turkish musicians “walking the streets with instruments hanging from their backpacks,” he recalls, “and thinking, ‘This is so cool and crazy!’”  

After his father Hossein, a renowned Iranian musician, moved the family to Munich, he took the children to various museums — including an instrument museum. A photo of the time captures the young teenaged Bobak raptly regarding early music instruments in a glass case there. 

It wasn’t until he’d moved to Portland that Salehi grew interested in the music of his own ancestry. While studying at Portland State, he went to a concert at Mount Hood Community College that included an expert musician playing the Persian spiked fiddle. Salehi was entranced. 

That encounter ignited a career in both performing and composing music in the Persian tradition, including in Portland ensembles and with Portland Youth Philharmonic. This week, the orchestra’s Camerata PYP premieres a new work it commissioned from Salehi, along with two more new PYP commissions and more contemporary music. 

Curated by longtime PYP artistic director David Hattner , these shows in the chamber orchestra’s fascinating Sound Garden series represent the kind of fresh, wide-ranging, globally informed program that makes PYP one of the world’s most artistically ambitious orchestras — of any age group.

East Meets West

Though he grew up playing violin, Bobak Salehi traces his own devotion to the kamancheh to that MHCC concert encounter with the musician who turned out to be the great Tehran-born composer and spiked fiddle master Kayhan Kalhor, who later won wide acclaim in Yo Yo Ma’s original Silk Road Ensemble. When Kalhor returned to Portland, Salehi asked his father to arrange a lesson with Kalhor. Soon, he was pestering his father (who plays and teaches traditional instruments such as santoor, daf and tombak) for information about traditional Persian music, and began acquiring instruments, some brought by his grandmother on visits.

“My father is the real master,” Bobak says. “I just had the extremely good fortune to grow up in this family, to have all these access points to the music.“

At the same time, Salehi was studying Western classical music and the folk music of Latin America and Spain at Portland State University, including with the late, esteemed composer and professor Tomas Svoboda (who also collaborated with PYP and Hattner). 

“He told me, ’Don’t try to write everything the same way,” Salehi remembers. “Chamber orchestra, string trio, orchestra — if you think of each one of those as an instrument, each one has its own characteristics, textures and flavor profiles.” 

Salehi went on to a career in medical tech yet continued performing traditional and, increasingly, original music in the Persian tradition. Along with violin and kamancheh, he also plays sehtar, tar and more. He’s performed around the US with many touring masters of Persian and other global musical traditions, with the Oregon Symphony and Pink Martini. In 1999, the Oregon Historical Society recognized Bobak and Hossein as master artists. 

A mainstay of the local global fusion ensemble Shabava with the great Portland flamenco guitarist Nat Hulskamp, Salehi is also a collaborating artist in Hulskamp’s duo Seffarine, performing with them 10-12 times per year. (See Joe Cantrell’s ArtsWatch story.)

Salehi’s new collaboration with PYP continues a relationship that began in 2012, when Hattner needed musicians conversant with traditional Persian instruments to perform Henry Cowell’s early East/West fusion masterpiece, Persian Set for what turned out to be a splendid concert at the amphitheater of Wieden+Kennedy’s Pearl District HQ. Salehi and his father (a renowned musician in his home country of Iran before emigrating to the US) were and remain local go-to masters on those instruments. 

Salehi credits Svoboda’s lessons with helping him move into composing for Western classical orchestra, which began in earnest after that first PYP concert when Hattner then invited Salehi to contribute some of his own original music to a PYP concert. For that performance, and again for a 2019 PYP show, he arranged several songs he’d composed for a theatrical production for chamber orchestra. 

Rostam on the Hunt

For his composition for this week’s Camerata PYP shows, Salehi drew on a 10^th century Persian folk tale. The three-movement suite Rostam on the Hunt blends Persian folk instruments with Western classical string ensemble, following the Hercules-like hero’s journey on horseback through a trio of vignettes as he hunts his prey.

“I grew up with this character,” Salehi remembers. “He’s super powerful, protects the land. His story is recounted the Persian poet Ferdowsi Shahnameh, or Epic of Kings that Salehi compares to  Gilgamesh, The Iliad or The Odyssey. He says it was a kind of literary form of protest when the Arab conquerors of Persia banned the Farsi language. 

“If we were creating a cartoon of that story and somebody said write a theme for it,” Salehi asked himself, “what would I write?” 

He started with a lick on the Persian lute that became a recurring theme throughout the piece, repeating and varying and appearing in different instruments. Percussion instruments intrude in the second movement, evoking the hero’s horse’s galloping hooves. “Then it goes into a dance, because all Persian music has to end in a dance!” Salehi laughs. “Everything is rooted in Persian motifs but stretched outside traditional guidelines.”

To arrange the music for orchestra, this time Salehi and PYP enlisted an old friend of both. Salehi worked with Portland composer extraordinaire Kenji Bunch — a PYP teacher and alumnus who’d also played in the orchestra with Salehi at what was then Wilson High School, now Ida B. Wells, in the early 1990s. Along with writing his own music, Bunch has long been a skilled and prolific arranger of others’ works.

“Kenji has an exceptional gift for reading the unwritten clues a composer leaves, and making it come to life,” Salehi says. “It’s so refreshing to hear someone else arrange your composition and like it better than you did before!”

Salehi’s 76 year old father also performs on the santoor hammered dulcimer. And Bobak praises Hattner as a collaborator. “Having a conductor that’s such a fine tuned  master at getting exactly what the composer wants out of the orchestra is such a gift,” he says. “I could not ask for better opportunities to collaborate.”

Hattner says that despite the differences between the two musical worlds that Salehi’s composition, and two others on the program, bring together, they’re not overly challenging for the young musicians. 

“Bobak’s pieces are very accessible technically and musically,” Hattner says. “Most of the complicated material is carried by the Persian instruments. Once the soloists come in and tell us what the tempos are going to be, we’ll adjust to that,” which is pretty much what happens in most concertos anyway. “All the composers treat our instruments as Western instruments,” so the musicians don’t have to make special adjustments or improvise, as the soloists might.

Music of This Moment

Rostam is one of a trio of new works on the program commissioned by PYP from composers of Iranian heritage. Inspired by a sad teenage memory that happened decades ago, UK-based composer Farhad Poupel’s counterpoint-laden Dance of the Blossoms showcases the santoor soloist, Mahtab Nadalian, with the Persian and Western instrumental groups alternating playing in their own styles before converging. 

Hawaii-based composer Kamyar Mohajer‘s Lights Away features world-acclaimed Delaram Amiri, a world renowned tombak (drum) player, as guest soloist, along with Bobak and Hossein Salehi on kamancheh and santoor, respectively. 

The concert also offers three other works written in the past three years, including Dinah Bianchi’s Isolation, Eric Simonson’s Short Variations for String Orchestra, and a movement from the 2023 second symphony by Polina Nazaykinskaya, whose first symphony the orchestra recorded and released last year along with the first symphony by another, even more prominent contemporary composer, Lera Auerbach. 

Poupel sent PYP a composition in 2020, with the planned performance scotched by the pandemic. The orchestra played the second two years ago, and commissioned this new one.

Hattner was likewise so impressed by Mohajer‘s first submission to PYP that he introduced the composer to the Salehis and decided to commission him and the other composers of Iranian background for this concert. 

Fertile Garden

The selections are a testament to Hattner’s diligent cultivation of contemporary music to broaden and enrich his young musicians’ artistic palettes. “I do go through a lot of scores,” he says. “I consider it part of my job to listen to as many composers as I can. Then there are specific submissions where composers will send a score and [digitally synthesized] recording. We’ve tried to embrace composers who send us music. If it suits what our orchestra can do, we’ll try to find a place for it. That’s my responsibility, to pick something they’ll enjoy spending eight weeks rehearsing. They almost always find something to love in everything we do.”

While this program is as fresh and exciting as any offered by an Oregon orchestra this year, Hattner notes that PYP has been performing contemporary music since at least the 40-year tenure of music director Jacob Avshalomov in the last half of the last century, and his successors Huw Edwards and Mei-Ann Chen. Its YouTube page teems with performances of new works, some by Oregon composers, PYP recently made the first recordings of some Svoboda compositions, and recorded a playlist of music by Oregon composers. Appropriate to its name, the Sound Garden series is especially varied. 

“We chose that name because we have such a variety of music,” Hattner explains. “Like a garden, you want a little of everything — some for show, some nutritious. It’s a place we get to experiment, to try newer works, [and feature] composers you don’t get a chance to hear as often.”

Encountering such an unusually wide range of music provides obvious educational value for PYP’s young musicians, preparing them for a 21^st century classical music scene that ranges far wider stylistically than America’s mostly hidebound previous eras. PYP is actually freer to venture farther than a typical professional orchestra, limited by the often narrow, conservative tastes of many of its subscribers and donors, although this has been happily changing in recent years. 

“The primary customer of our organization is the musicians who play in it,” Hattner acknowledges. “I have a responsibility to give them a balanced diet. They need to play the great orchestral works of the past, and also a wider stylistic variety of contemporary music.” 

Also, unlike some orchestra veterans entrenched in the habits of years of playing mostly in the limited Western classical tradition, “our musicians are so unjaded,” Hattner continues. “Students are more open minded. We start from scratch every time, whether we’re playing Brahms or a world premiere, whereas a professional orchestra would burn out if they had to play new music every week. We have the opportunity to do that,” with only a few concerts per year and much longer rehearsal time for each.

Hattner especially values the global and historical perspectives this concert offers both musicians and listeners. 

“It’s easy to forget that we’re in basically a new country,” he explains. “[America’s] 250 years is not very old. Persian history is millennia old. It’s among the great societies in the world. It was way ahead of the West in music, art, architecture, medicine. These new works are coming out of this traditional music which predates Islam and is an important part of world culture. So it’s great for [the PYP musicians] to be exposed to it. ”

Expect more omnicultural sounds in future Camerata PYP shows. “There’s a substantial Iranian community in our area, and it’s wonderful to collaborate with them,” Hattner says. “I’m so happy to have an authentic representation of their culture in our program. I’m hoping we can do that with other cultures that we don’t typically have in orchestra programs in the future.”

Experience Camerata PYP’s Sound Garden concert at 2 pm Saturday at the Walters Cultural Arts Center, two blocks from the Blue Line Max stop in downtown Hillsboro.. Tickets and info.