Amir ElSaffar leads the six-piece Two Rivers ensemble and the 17-piece Rivers of Sound Orchestra, and recently founded a New Quartet featuring microtonal piano. He is also the santur player and musical director for vocalist Hamid Al-Saadi, one of the last living practitioners of the Iraqi Maqam.
ElSaffar is the founder and Artistic Director of Maqam Studio and Maqam Records, an initiative supported by the Mellon Foundation that aims to preserve and support innovation within the Maqam musical tradition of the Middle East. He is also composing an Arabic-language Maqam opera, which will have its concert premiere in 2027.
His compositional work includes music for jazz ensembles, string quartets, mixed chamber ensembles, and symphony orchestras. He has also led hybrid projects drawing from Raga, Flamenco, Stambeli (Tunisian Gnawa), and Sub-Saharan African trance music. In recent work, he has incorporated electronic elements, including analog modular synthesizers.
ElSaffar has premiered new works at venues and festivals including the Newport Jazz Festival, Berlin Jazz Festival, Dream City Festival (Tunisia), Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Festival d’Avignon (France), Flamenco Biennale (Netherlands), the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, and Pierre Boulez Saal.
ElSaffar’s new album Ashwaaq will be released on November 6, 2026 via Maqām Records. The album is his ninth studio release and his second on the label. The recording features an original seven-movement composition for string quartet, voice, and santur (Iraqi hammered dulcimer), pairing ElSaffar’s music with verses by thirteenth-century poet Ibn Arabi.
Alongside ElSaffar, Ashwaaq features Syrian vocalist Khaled AlHafez, known for traditional singing from Aleppo, and a string quartet with long-standing musical ties to the composer: Dena El Saffar on viola, Megan Gould on violin, Eylem Basaldi on violin, and cellist Naseem AlAtrash.
ElSaffar describes Ashwaaq as shaped by a transcultural perspective that draws on the shared experience of composing, listening, and responding to music, reflecting the sentiments of Ibn Arabi’s poetry. The work combines traditional Arabic singing with a string quartet to focus less on conventional structure and more on conveying the spirituality and emotion of the text.
To support this approach, ElSaffar works within maqam, a modal system practiced for centuries across North Africa, Western Asia, and Central Asia. Similar to Western scales but with microtones and greater melodic specificity, maqam modes help define the emotional and spiritual character of a piece.
“Rather than relying on Western harmony or counterpoint, two approaches that conflict with the maqam’s inherent logic,” ElSaffar says, “the harmonies of Ashwaaq emerge from sustained microtonal resonances inherent to the maqam, and heterophony — the simultaneous renderings of a single melodic phrase with variation.”
The new single “AlHubbu Dini (Love is My Religion) / الحُبُّ دِينِي وِإِيمَانِي” is out now.
Image, courtesy of Christina Jensen PR. Left to right: Eylem Basaldi, Naseem AlAtrash, Khaled AlHafez, Amir ElSaffar, Dena El Saffar, Megan Gould
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