Music From the Inside of the Sun

Last winter, Georg Friedrich Haas mentioned to me that the composer Arash Yazdani, a former student of his and a friend of mine, had given him a word he’d been looking for his entire career. That term is “plasmatic music.” I’ll let the two artists define the term in the correspondence below, which covers that idea but also their separate yet linked upbringings and common goals in composition. But I will say that this discussion transcends terminology: Both of their musics throb and ricochet with energy, and the idea of “plasmatic music” goes a long way toward explaining why. Haas’s entries have been translated from their original German. —Jeffrey Arlo Brown