Shahrokh Yadegari sees the Western divide between nature and culture as the troubling heart of today’s environmental problems. This relationship, evolving from the Enlightenment philosophers who saw individuals as independent of their environment, is reflected in misled popular readings of Darwin, which insist on competition and historical progress as the driving forces of both natural change and human civilization. Yet today’s biologists are coming to understand that the line between an individual and the environment is profoundly blurry, a notion that Persian philosophers such as 10th-century mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam have discussed for centuries. “You read in Khayyam that we are nothing but the earth. ‘The clay cup you drink from,’” Yadegari paraphrases. “’When you are finished drinking the wine, be kind to this cup. You are holding your ancestors in your hand. Don’t break the cup. Soon, you will be a cup yourself.’” This perspective is echoed in the titles of the individual tracks on Green Memories, which draw on Sanskrit and Persian to express the oneness and cyclical nature of life. The interconnection and interweaving of our lives and our surroundings had a deep impact on Yadegari’s approach to composition on Green Memories. Instead of creating sheet music for Azam Ali and Nourai, he defined modes and forms, in the same way that traditional Persian music spells out a faza or space, a structured context allowing for freedom of expression within. Yadegari also defined the musical gestures, emotional content, melodic contours, ornamentation, intensity, specific figures for openings, climaxes, and cadences, as well as performance techniques for each section. “The music is not necessarily built with a compositional structure which defines all the actions of the performers. The musicians walk into a context, one I have worked on for many, many years. Lila creates a world for the musicians to be able to express themselves in a way that they wouldn’t normally.” By echoing and transforming the elegant, haunting lines invented by Azam Ali and Nourai, Yadegari forges a musical mirror of our interaction with the natural environment and the responsibility we bear in that relationship. Yadegari’s primary goal was to retain flexibility and freedom for the musicians while giving the pieces comprehensible contours and definition.