Mohammad Reza Mortazavi

Heartbeat Instruments

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi on Sound, Rhythm,and His Love for Music

Annette Zerpner

“The sound of the tombak is directed inward, while playing the daf means turning outward. It’s like breathing in and out—a beautiful balance.” When Mohammad Reza Mortazavi talks about his music, there is no lack of vivid images. But ultimately it is not about his drums. Nor about schools and traditions and the multiple playing techniques that the 41-year-old from Isfahan in Iran, a celebrated guest at festivals worldwide, has contributed to the traditional art of playing the goblet-shaped tombak and the frame drum daf. Above all, he immediately adds, it is not about virtuosity— his reputation of having “the fastest hands on earth” (as the ZDF show Aspekte put it) or the attention audiences devote to him, the soloist in the spotlight. “It’s not about what I can do. It’s only the stage that essentially forces me to show that. Virtuosity is contrary to what I actually want to do. Music is not a show, nothing one should see; it’s only sound.” And it is sound he has been searching for, again and again, for more than 30 years.

At the early age of six, Mortazavi began to learn to play hand drums from a friend of his father. “In Iran at that time—and to this day—the prestigious thing was to play the piano,” he explains. For the Western-oriented, urban upper class, classical music was considered part of a complete education. The tombak, on the other hand, was thought of as a simple, traditional instrument that many associated “only” with folk music. “I always had a motivation to show: this is music, it’s not about hides and wood!” Soon, young Mohammad was accepted at a music school; at the age of nine he won the first of many competitions, and when he was only 12, he began passing his knowledge on to others— “and the passion too.”

Passion is a word that crops up remarkably often in conversation with Mohammad Reza Mortazavi: much more frequently than is usually the case with musicians. It stands for everything that makes up the core of his being as a human and as an artist, a synonym for love. When passion is absent, the incredible control over his highly sensitive fingers—which occasionally, subconsciously, dab a tiny rhythm onto the table while he is talking—remains meaningless, as does his enormous capacity for memorizing and analyzing, but also the many years of practicing. Without passion, the orbit “never exceeds the familiar, the tradition. If you break boundaries, people will often say, ‘You can’t do that!’ But I’ve always been convinced that music leads me, not the other way around. It comes through me, not from me. I love those moments when I play and no longer have control over my hands. I hear the music with the audience, and the hands play—sometimes I don’t even know how.” Mortazavi can say such things without sounding even the least bit pretentious. When discussing music, he chooses his words with a kind of sacred earnestness. Marketing strategists would probably use the word “charisma” to describe his effect and quickly add the label “world music” to prevent anyone from fearing that Mortazavi is after profound and serious ideas—ideas that are, in the end, quite simple. At any rate, he would never deny that his music spans the world and has universal appeal.

But what happens in practical terms when the Iranian hand drummer, who has lived in Germany for 18 years, takes a seat on stage with his two instruments? How does he adapt to the atmosphere of a hall? In fact, he enters the stage with a basic compositional concept that he describes as “secure, open, and round.” Each performance develops differently, since Mortazavi absorbs everything happening around him in the moment. Moving through inner spaces, he remains highly aware of the events that surround him: “Time is the metronome that keeps ticking and flowing. When I let go completely, I lose even time. But the pulse has a different beat every moment, in connection with what I play and perceive. I focus on a point and then keep approaching it. There is a natural balance between the two hands, in resonance, in harmony—that’s what I try to attain. Concentrating and letting go at the same time, that’s the most beautiful moment for me. If you only let go, you are not in balance yet, and if you concentrate too hard, everything is blocked. In a concert hall, I can’t determine things the same way I would when playing in my living room since I’m subjected to other thoughts and feelings that swing back and forth between the audience and me.”

He learned long ago to deal with the distance the stage creates between him and his listeners, so that now he no longer feels cut off from them: “We are in one room, and the music belongs to us jointly. I don’t feel like a soloist. I feel the energy of the room and all the people in it, and I reflect them in my playing.” He prefers not to sit dead-center, but “slightly to the side,” as he did last year when he was first invited to play at the Pierre Boulez Saal. Its architecture, he says, contributes enormously to the connection he forges with the audience, both due to the elliptic form and the closeness of the listeners.

When he performs with an orchestra, as he did in 2016 with the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, that energy also flows between the musicians—to Mortazavi, this is the basis of any shared music-making. He realizes of course that making music together in a larger ensemble requires scores, even if his wish would be (as he says, only half-jokingly) for all musicians to love every composer in such a way that would allow them to play entirely freely, in a kind of telepathic connection. As a child, he learned to make music according to written parts. The fixation of music education on the printed score, however, worries him: “Printed music belongs to the sphere of the eye and claims a large part of our attention. Today I often find that the energy of music is blocked. Since I began working with students without sheet music, they trust their ears more, intuiting more precisely what a certain rhythm is, what it means.”

After living in Munich for six years, Mohammad Reza Mortazavi was invited to play a major concert at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt. This inspired him to move to the German capital in 2007: “Here I can breathe more freely; it’s easier for me. Berlin has changed over the years, but it remains creative.” Many people here are interested in his music, not only in the concert hall. After a lengthy hiatus, he began giving group lessons for tombak and daf again in Kreuzberg three years ago: “These encounters with enthusiastic people who are inspired by concerts and want to play themselves do me a world of good—they eliminate the distance that the stage usually imposes between us.” Age is of no consequence: at a hospital for mothers and children in Buckow in Brandenburg, he worked with mothers and their small children. Drumming was part of their healing process. He remembers one moment very well that he refers to as one of his most dearly-held musical memories of all and that also shows how the drum, that ancient heartbeat instrument of humanity, still influences us profoundly: “I played together with the children, and suddenly they were all perfectly in time and rhythm on their small drums. They had their eyes closed. At the beginning of the class, they were often aggressive, unfocused, fighting. At the end, they spent an hour and a half together without speaking at all. We only took a short break in the middle, in silence. I will never forget their faces. Music can have an incredibly strong and positive effect on society, if the right balance is struck.”

He has also observed a deep connection between mothers and children in this work. “When the mothers could let go while playing together, the children could, too—it was like telepathy. But when the mothers were trying to retain control, the children complained. They craved this unrestricted way of playing.” It is a kind of freedom that also applies to other, entirely practical musical issues: “A 17/8 measure is much closer to my inner balance than 4/4 time.” Indeed, for Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, boundaries hardly seem to exist. “When I look at my past, whether in music or in life —to me, they are the same—it seems like one big dream to me,” he says. “I was and I remain open, and find myself at the beginning of a large circle, again and again. This gives me energy. There’s lots left to do!”