An Anthem for a New Dawn

It began, as many of my creative experiments do, with an entirely ridiculous idea. I wanted to compose a Soviet-style revolutionary anthem from the 1920s. Something enormous, militaristic, and almost comically self-important. A thousand men singing in unison, a thunderous brass orchestra, relentless percussion, and lyrics consisting entirely of invented words. The music was to be absolutely serious. The language, complete nonsense.

We called it Zhrakov! Zhrakov! and eventually introduced a few English proclamations about communal potatoes, government-issued spoons, and a Ministry of Agriculture that had somehow acquired ownership of the moon. From there, we travelled to postwar Japan. Another imaginary anthem, this time inspired by the orchestral arrangements and ceremonial optimism of the 1950s. Beautiful choirs, sentimental melodies, and absurd announcements about bridges built over nonexistent rivers.

It was musical satire, and an entertaining way to explore how music communicates authority, optimism, collective identity, and national pride. But somewhere along the way, the experiment became considerably more serious.

What Would a New Iranian National Anthem Sound Like?

I began wondering what kind of anthem might emerge if Iran were to enter a new chapter in its history. Not an anthem written to glorify a ruler, a political party, or a military victory. Something that could represent a civilization thousands of years old while speaking to the aspirations of people living in the present.

Iran has an extraordinary civilizational heritage spanning more than four millennia. Its identity cannot be reduced to any one government, dynasty, religion, or political movement. It exists in its languages, literature, music, architecture, landscapes, and, above all, its people. How could one piece of music carry even a fraction of that inheritance?

My initial instinct was to make the composition monumental. A large symphony orchestra, Persian classical instruments, a mixed choir, and a powerful melody. The first attempts were emotionally compelling, but they had a fundamental problem. They were too sad. There is certainly room for grief in music about Iran. But I wasn’t interested in composing another lament. I wanted something that acknowledged the past without remaining trapped in it. I wanted the music to look forward.

Eventually, the entire concept was reduced to one image: a new dawn.

Finding the Words

The working title became — Mobaréz, Bâ Man Biâ — roughly, Fighter, Come With Me. The first drafts were elaborate. They included references to ancient cities, mountains, historical endurance, sacrifice, and national unity. Individually, many of these ideas were appropriate. Together, they became overwhelming. I was trying to compress an entire civilization into a few verses, and the result was poetry that struggled to become music.

There was also a technical problem. Persian poetry depends heavily on rhythm, syllabic quantity, and the natural stresses of the language. A line can look perfectly reasonable on a page and become awkward the moment someone tries to sing it. I kept returning to the same criticism: the rhythm was wrong. Some lines were too long. Others were artificially compressed. The rhymes occasionally felt forced, and the language drifted between everyday conversation and ceremonial poetry. A national anthem cannot afford that kind of inconsistency.

We began stripping the lyrics down, shortening the verses, strengthening the rhymes, and moving toward a more consistent rhythmic structure. I also introduced Persian vowel marks to help the music-generation model interpret pronunciation more accurately. The process revealed an important limitation: an AI can propose a metrical structure, but that doesn’t mean the resulting Persian verse has been properly scanned or that its stresses will work naturally in performance. That still requires a human ear, careful editing, and ultimately a melody against which every line can be tested.

The most important creative decision, however, had nothing to do with meter. It was deciding what the song was actually about. Not the defeat of an enemy. Not the triumph of a political movement. The arrival of morning.

Composing Dignity

I used Suno to explore the musical direction, refining the instructions through successive attempts. Initially, the compositions were excessively cinematic. The orchestras were enormous, the percussion overwhelming, and every crescendo seemed determined to announce the end of the world. It sounded more like the trailer for a historical blockbuster than a national anthem.

So the musical brief changed. The composition needed dignity rather than spectacle. I began emphasizing the melodic character of Iranian classical music, particularly the brightness and ceremonial potential of Dastgah-e Mahur. The instrumentation included symphonic strings, brass, restrained percussion, and subtle references to instruments such as the kamancheh and daf. The vocal arrangement moved from a solitary baritone toward a disciplined mixed choir.

More importantly, the melody needed to be simple. A national anthem should not depend on expensive orchestration to communicate its identity. It should remain recognizable when sung by a single person, a school choir, or thousands of people without instrumental accompaniment. The orchestra can give an anthem grandeur, but only the melody can give it permanence.

The Lion and the Dawn

Once the musical direction had taken shape, I turned to its visual identity. I wanted a lion representing Iran. The first images were spectacular in precisely the wrong way. There were enormous stone monuments, blazing sunsets, exaggerated mountain landscapes, and a lion that looked as though it had just been cast in a fantasy film. Technically impressive. Conceptually predictable.

We kept removing things. The architecture became less prominent. The dramatic lighting softened. The colours became quieter. The lion no longer needed to roar or dominate the landscape through exaggerated scale. It simply needed to stand. I eventually refined the composition using principles associated with the rule of thirds and the Fibonacci spiral, positioning the lion as the primary focal point while allowing the distant mountain and the rising sun to establish a quieter visual relationship. These were compositional guides rather than claims of mathematical perfection.

The result was closer to what I wanted: a lion looking toward the horizon, with the suggestion of Mount Damavand in the distance. Not an animal conquering the landscape, but an enduring symbol witnessing the arrival of another morning.

The Creative Director Remains Responsible

What interested me most about this exercise wasn’t how quickly artificial intelligence could generate lyrics, music, or imagery. It was how frequently I had to reject what it produced. The lyrics were too sentimental. The rhythm was inconsistent. The orchestration was overly dramatic. The imagery was too decorative. Each rejection clarified the idea.

Artificial intelligence was extraordinarily useful as an instrument of exploration. I could develop different musical arrangements, experiment with lyrical structures, and examine visual compositions without assembling an orchestra or commissioning a complete production. But the tools had no independent understanding of what this particular work ought to mean to me.

They could produce grandeur, but they couldn’t reliably distinguish grandeur from exaggeration. They could produce Persian lyrics, but they couldn’t guarantee poetic discipline. They could produce a magnificent lion, but they couldn’t decide whether that lion represented dignity or merely looked impressive. Those were creative decisions, and creative decisions require judgment.

A Song for a Country That Endures

مُبارِز، با مَن بِیا remains a conceptual work, not an official anthem or a prediction of political events. It is an attempt to imagine how a nation might express renewal through music. The experiment is imperfect. The poetry can be refined further, the composition could benefit from professional musical arrangement, and the melody deserves to be tested by actual singers. But the underlying idea survived every revision.

A country with thousands of years of history doesn’t need to prove its greatness through noise. Its history already speaks. What I wanted to imagine was the sound of its future. Not a ruler addressing a nation, and not an army celebrating victory, but the first light arriving after a very long night, and a people singing together as the sun rises.