Dariush Dolat-Shahi

Dariush Dolat-Shahi (1947, Tehran) is an Iranian-American composer and instrumentalist on the tar, the traditional Persian lute. His compositions include electronic and instrumental music as well as music for traditional Persian instruments. Dariush Dolat-Shahi studied traditional Persian and Western music at a conservatory as a child. He graduated from the Tehran Conservatory in 1968, where he studied with Alireza Mashayekhi, and he conducted a band in the Army. In 1970, Dolat-Shahi travelled abroad to study in Amsterdam where he began to compose electronic works, including Two Movements for String Orchestra (1970) and Mirage for orchestra and tape, both performed at the Shiraz Art Festival in Iran. The official Festival program observed: “Electronic music liberated [Dolat-Shahi] from old concepts of melody and harmony and provoked further explorations into the raw material of music, i.e. sound.” Dolat-Shahi returned to Tehran in 1974, but again travelled abroad to study at Columbia University in New York City due to his interest in Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center composers Vladimir Ussachevky and Milton Babbitt. He completed his doctorate at Columbia in 1981 and continued his compositional work at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, welcomed by director and former Columbia-Princeton staff member Bülent Arel. Several of his works from this period were released on a Folkways recording. He turned to designing album covers because of the loss of Iranian government student subsidies following the 1979 revolution. Dolat-Shahi subsequently moved to Portland, Oregon, where he taught at several universities before becoming a freelance performer and composer of music informed by an array of world cultural traditions.