Saman Samadi is a Persian-American composer, musicologist, and philosopher based in Cambridge and currently a postdoctoral researcher in Musicology at KU Leuven. His work spans contemporary composition, philosophical musicology, and Iranian intellectual history. He holds a PhD in Music from the University of Cambridge and has developed a career of nearly two decades encompassing more than 130 acoustic, electroacoustic, and multimedia works, alongside research, 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, examined Persian musical thought through poststructuralist philosophy, music analysis, and composition, proposing a model of compositional thinking grounded in sonic differentiation, temporal multiplicity, and the materiality of language. At KU Leuven, his current research undertakes a historically grounded philosophical reconstruction of strands of Persian thought and Iranian intellectual history, examining their conceptual structures on their own historical terms. His recent work in this area includes research on Middle Persian wisdom literature and Sasanian intellectual history.

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 sociopolitical debates around cultural identity, tradition, and transformation. His article in Perspectives of New Music examines Stockhausen’s Klavierstück X through rhythmic complexity, pianistic form, and postwar modernist structure. His recent writing on Kartīr’s third-century Sasanian inscriptions addresses public authority, epigraphic self-representation, moral classification, and historical memory in early Sasanian Iran.

He has presented invited lectures and research papers internationally 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, the Janáček Academy in Brno, the 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.

His teaching experience includes serving as an Academic Supervisor for the Music in Contemporary Societies course at the University of Cambridge and teaching at Abbey College 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 undertook 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 Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.

“Dr Saman Samadi is an exceptional composer, performer, and academic researcher whose work demonstrates an extraordinary synthesis of creative imagination, philosophical inquiry, and rigorous artistic practice. His compositions reveal a distinctive voice that integrates Western modernist traditions with Persian musical, poetic, linguistic, and calligraphic cultures, articulated through a deep engagement with critical philosophical ideas drawn from post-structuralist and semiotic thought. Combining remarkable artistic leadership with exceptional organisational and practical abilities, he has established himself as a mature and original creative figure with wide-ranging knowledge, adaptability, and a genuine openness to new ideas and cross-cultural exchange. His continuing research and compositional projects are ambitious in scope, sophisticated in execution, and make a distinctive contribution to contemporary music and academia.” 

— Sam Hayden, Professor of Composition, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance

“His rich palette of colour, the exquisite extraction of sound, the admixture of meters, the articulated rhythmic power that can move one from the clutches of gravity to an upward expansion of an almost exalted levity; his exposure to two distinct musical traditions and his synchronic blending of Western and Persian modal music approach a nearly synergistic outcome. Saman Samadi is an extraordinarily gifted musician and composer whose work positions him among the most distinctive and influential composers of his generation.

Samadi explores the common terrain that underlies both Eastern and Western worldviews by meticulously tracing their contours, examining the roots of each tradition, and ultimately discovering a single tree with one trunk — a realization that these differentiated branches all connect.”

— Richard Campo, Writer and Researcher