SEPTEMBER 2025
Building Musical Objects Workshop
In early September composer and instrument builder Mehdi Hesamizadeh led a workshop on creating musical objects from repurposed materials. Working collectively with salvaged materials, from parts of old broken instruments to dry tree branches and discarded household items, participants built musical objects while exchanging skills, stories, and personal approaches to sound. Apart from focusing on materials and techniques, we also talked about how instruments emerge through particular contexts and relationships, between bodies, materials, language, and environment, and we used collaborative making as a way to strengthen communal bonds and attentiveness to local resources.
One of the participants, Anna Kislova, decided to continue her work after the workshop and spent several more months building her instrument.
I was sure from the start that this wasn’t for me, because it sounded quite serious and unfamiliar – ‘making musical instruments’ – and I have no musical education, I don’t know how to play anything, and I’ve never tried composing music. At the time, I didn’t really have any expectations; I just wanted to make some kind of sounding object. I sketched a very rough idea of a string instrument, guided more by how it might look than by whether it was actually feasible (that first sketch has changed a lot since then). Back then, I had no idea that this experiment would take eight months (and it’s still ongoing). At some point, I realized I wanted to make a real instrument. And luckily, Mehdi didn’t stop me or try to simplify my idea. That summer, I didn’t really understand what I was doing.
Since I had almost no experience working with wood, during the workshop I only managed to cut a piece of wood for the neck over the course of the entire day. As I continued building the instrument, I worked somewhat intuitively, assembling elements from different string instruments. What emerged is something of a hybrid, a kind of chimera, somewhere between a kamancheh, a violin, and something else. I relied a lot on Mehdi, so there isn’t much of my own theoretical input in the instrument; often I simply followed instructions without a deep understanding of why things were done in a certain way. All the calculations that determine the instrument’s sound (for example, the length of the neck) were done by Mehdi. Even now, I can hardly imagine what the finished instrument will sound like. I think that if I continue studying instrument-making in the future, I’ll be able to approach it more thoughtfully, with a clearer understanding of what I’m doing and why.
There were many moments when the fragile system I had spent days building could have broken from the slightest careless movement, but somehow, almost miraculously, everything always worked out. At times, the process reminded me of a surgical operation. Mehdi advised me remotely, and it was sometimes difficult to understand from a distance how to do things correctly, so I often had to redo parts. In September, I came to the workshop almost every day and stayed until late. Much of what I did would not have been possible without the help of Arian and Ilya who run the wood workshop together with Mehdi. Unfortunately, after I moved to Yerevan, I was only able to visit Tumanyan rarely, and the work slowed down.
Now I am back in Tumanyan and intend to finish the instrument by the beginning of summer, but that will only be the beginning, because I still have to learn how to play it.
Now I am back in Tumanyan and intend to finish the instrument by the beginning of summer, but that will only be the beginning, because I still have to learn how to play it.
