TEHRAN -- Ahmad Pejman — the Iranian composer whose work blurred the boundaries between East and West, tradition and experimentation — died Friday night (August 30) in Los Angeles at age 90 after a long illness. 
With a career that spanned over six decades, Pejman leaves behind a legacy that challenged the architecture of classical composition while fiercely anchoring itself in Iranian identity.
Born in 1935 in the southern city of Larestan, Pejman’s early exposure to Persian folk music laid the groundwork for a lifetime of genre collisions. His classical training began in Tehran, but he soon took his sound global, studying in Vienna and later at Columbia University in New York. 
There, under the mentorship of avant-garde heavyweights like Vladimir Ussachevsky, he immersed himself in electronic music and modern compositional theory — knowledge he brought back into a distinctly Persian context.
If Pejman is often referred to as a “bridge” between Iranian music and Western classical forms, it’s because he didn’t just blend styles — he reimagined them. His orchestral works, like Poem Symphonique Nowruz and Oratorio Resurrection, live in a space that feels borderless: modal Iranian melodies suspended in modernist counterpoint, ancient rhythms thundering through the bones of a Western orchestra.
Pejman scored over two dozen films and numerous TV shows, including collaborations with directors like Bahman Farmanara (The Blue-Veiled) and Majid Majidi (Baran). 
His film work wasn’t just accompaniment — it was narrative, emotional architecture that often outlived the visuals it supported. He also dabbled in pop and jazz, composing more than 30 crossover songs in the 1970s, helping to reshape the sonic DNA of Iranian mainstream music.
In the wake of his passing, tributes have poured in from Iran’s musical community. Composer Houshang Kamkar called it “a national mourning,” and Hussein Alizadeh wrote, “With Pejman’s name, we learned love.” Kayhan Kalhor, Majid Entezami, and many more echoed that sense of loss — not just of a musician, but of a spiritual force within the culture.
What’s emerged in these days of remembrance is also a public plea: several of Pejman’s peers and students have called for the return of his body to Iran. For many, including composer Shervin Mohajer, Pejman’s final journey should end among the people and places he never stopped composing for, even from across an ocean.