The University of Alabama
The program, the studio, and the Contemporary Music Ensemble.
Amir Zaheri is Associate Professor and Head of Music Composition at The University of Alabama, where he directs a studio of undergraduate and graduate composers and serves as Artistic Director of the Contemporary Music Ensemble.
His teaching joins rigor and warmth, a curriculum grounded in counterpoint, orchestration, and analysis, held together by a maxim from his own first composition teacher, one he still passes on: "Write what you know and write what you want to hear." He is open to any style, asks only that students write what they want to write and write it well, and guides each composer toward a language of their own.
Teaching
For Zaheri, counterpoint is not a historical artifact but a living architecture of musical thought, a compositional worldview that balances intuition and intention, motion and memory. He teaches eighteenth-century contrapuntal principles, especially motivic development, as enduring frameworks that clarify structure and foster coherence across styles and mediums, from choral and orchestral writing to electronic and spatial music.
Whether composing, performing, or mentoring, he treats counterpoint as a method of deep listening, of constructing meaning through contrast, return, transformation, and resonance.
"Counterpoint is not simply a technique to be preserved, but a way of composing attentively, thinking relationally, and hearing more fully."
The studio & the ensemble
Zaheri leads a dynamic studio of undergraduate and graduate composers and directs the Contemporary Music Ensemble, devoted to the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His students pursue concert music, popular music, and multimedia work at the highest levels, earning prizes and performances by acclaimed artists, and going on to film scoring, video game composition, and studio work; to careers as full-time composers; and to esteemed graduate programs and faculty posts across the country.
The curriculum runs from applied composition and seminar to counterpoint, orchestration, and a rotating set of analysis seminars, a grounding in craft meant to free, rather than constrain, each composer's voice.
Current work
Where the composing and the thinking meet.
A compositional system of five fixed works whose realizations arise through their coordinated activation within defined temporal bounds, bounded, never improvised. A manuscript-in-progress defines its scope, constraints, and conditions of structural validity.
Manuscript in progress · since 2024An archival composition-research cycle that treats the architect Richard Neutra's papers, held at UCLA, not as program but as compositional stimulus, translating documents and proportions into structural constraints for a new body of work.
In development · Richard Neutra / UCLAA portable, cross-genre approach to composition pedagogy, treating motivic development as a transferable workflow (Copy, Shift, Splice, Scale) for keeping a motive recognizable as its function changes.
Pedagogy · workshop in developmentAt the podium
"I have never met anyone who cares about students as much as he does."— University of Alabama student
In students' words
"Dr. Zaheri strikes an excellent balance of encouraging hard work while allowing for freedom of exploration."
University of Alabama student"The best teacher I had here. A compositional and pedagogical genius, and kind and respectful to his students."
University of Alabama student"It is an incredible privilege to study with such an illustrious composer."
University of Alabama studentProspective composers and collaborators are warmly welcomed. Reach out, or explore the School of Music.