Saman Samadi is a Persian-American composer, performer, musicologist, and philosopher of music based in Cambridge. His work moves across contemporary composition, Persian musical thought, the ontology and ethics of music, and Late Antique Iranian intellectual history, with particular attention to order, listening, authority, memory, interpretation, and the ways in which sound, language, text, and public forms carry ideas across time. He holds a PhD in Music from the University of Cambridge, where his research situated Persian musical practice within contemporary philosophical discourse. His career spans nearly two decades, encompassing over 130 works across acoustic, electroacoustic, and multimedia forms, alongside ensemble direction and performance in New York and Cambridge.
His compositional practice draws on microtonal modal structures, prosodically derived rhythmic systems, detailed pitch organisation, and a notational approach that reconsiders the relation between sound, time, and form. Engaging Persian classical music, poetic metrics, and calligraphic aesthetics, he has developed original methods such as Persian prosodic composition, calligraphic notation, and modal-rhizomatic structuring, treating composition as a site of conceptual and philosophical investigation.
His doctoral dissertation, Becoming Persian Music: A Poststructuralist Approach to Composition, repositioned Persian musical practices within contemporary philosophical discourse, proposing a model of compositional thought grounded in sonic differentiation, temporal multiplicity, and the materiality of language. It established the foundation for his ongoing research at the intersection of philosophy, musicology, and composition, where musical practice becomes a means of examining the conceptual conditions of musical experience and understanding.
His peer-reviewed article Composing Otherwise: Actualising Difference in Persian Musical Ontology, forthcoming in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 151, no. 2, Autumn 2026, Cambridge University Press, develops a new account of Persian musical ontology through difference, order, becoming, semiotics, composition, and the sociopolitical debates around cultural identity, tradition, and transformation in Persian musical thought. His article in Perspectives of New Music examines Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X through rhythmic complexity, pianistic form, and postwar modernist structure. His recent open-access writing on Kartīr’s third-century Sasanian inscriptions examines public authority, epigraphic self-representation, moral classification, and historical memory in early Sasanian Iran. He has presented invited lectures and research papers at the Royal Academy of Music, City University of London, the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Manhattan School of Music, the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance Study Group on Applied Ethnomusicology, and multiple conferences hosted by the University of Cambridge.
His compositions have been performed at institutions and festivals worldwide, including the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, New York University, the Royal Academy of Music London, Lincoln Center New York, Janáček Academy in Brno, NeoArte Festival in Poland, Hanyang University in Seoul, Queen’s University Belfast, the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, MuMa in France, Cambridge Festival, the Tehran Electroacoustic Music Festival, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival. His music has been interpreted by performers including Jonathan Powell, Jared Redmond, Darragh Morgan, Miranda Cuckson, Linda Wetherill, Junya Makino, Mehrdad Gholami, Kristin Loretta Barone-Samadi, Anna Hashimoto, Austin Wulliman, Jaram Kim, Nicholas Swett, Samuel Stoll, and many others.
From 2013 to 2020, Samadi was active in New York’s experimental music scene, founding and directing the Saman Samadi Quintet, Apām Napāt Trio, and Aži Trio. He also served as Assistant Director of The Firehouse Space, an influential venue for experimental music, contemporary classical performance, and multimedia work. In 2021, he founded the Cambridge University Experimental Music Ensemble, CueMe, which he continues to direct as a platform for experimental performance and artistic research. Its debut project, Avec Boulez, Mallarmé, et Foucault, presented at West Road Concert Hall and Wolfson College, Cambridge, staged a musical deconstruction of modernist aesthetics and critical theory.
Samadi currently teaches at Abbey College Cambridge and has served as an Academic Supervisor for the Music in Contemporary Societies course at the University of Cambridge. He has supervised undergraduate students across multiple colleges, guiding projects on composition, sound studies, musical aesthetics, ethnomusicology, and performance analysis. He is also President and Chair of Studies in Composition and Theory at Conservatoire One Cambridge, an independent conservatoire he co-founded in 2013.
He holds a BA in Music Performance and an MA in Composition from the University of Tehran, where he studied under Alireza Mashayekhi, himself a student of Hanns Jelinek, who studied with Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. He has undertaken further study in artistic research at the Orpheus Institute and KU Leuven, as well as in philosophy and critical thinking at the University of Queensland. His early studies in mathematics and physics at NODET, Iran’s National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents, continue to inform the structural and analytical dimensions of his compositional thinking.
His work has been recognised with awards and fellowships including an Artist Diploma from the New York Foundation for the Arts, First Prize at the Counterpoint-Italy International Composition Competition, selection for the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, and the Dr Grantham Scholarship at the University of Cambridge, with additional support from Wolfson College and the Faculty of Music.
His current writing and compositional projects continue to approach music as a form of thought, where sound, text, and historical memory become sites for examining order, attention, and the movement of ideas across time.
