As a junior at the University of Oregon, Táhirih Motazedian ’04 walked into a planetary science class and found her future. Her academic ascent was meteoric. Less than a year into her studies, Motazedian skyrocketed to international attention with a startling theory about how the movement of water beneath the dusty surface of Mars may account for dark streaks and stains upon its slopes, an idea that set the scientific world abuzz. And it seemed that everyone—from the BBC to Astronomy magazine to the European space community—came calling to hear more about it.
All the while, Motazedian quietly dreamed of traveling on the first manned mission to Mars, determined to pursue a career to help unravel its distant mysteries. Her research eventually led to work with NASA and a dream job at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory downloading breathtaking new images of the Red Planet from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But throughout her success, Motazedian was haunted. Something else was always jostling for her attention—nudging, gnawing, invading her very dreams. At night, she would lie awake, questioning herself. Until finally, at the top of her game, Motazedian had to face her own doubts: What if the dazzling calling she had found wasn’t the one she really wanted?
I Overture
The passion arose from music—a strange duet of thundering Beethoven symphonies and the lyrical jangle of African rhythms woven into life in a remote corner of southwestern Zimbabwe. But it was the commanding strains of classical music that could not be ignored. They seeped into her skin and throbbed through her veins and made her fingers ache to create them herself.
“We didn’t have any radio living out in the bush, but I remember listening to this music—cassette tapes of Beethoven’s nine symphonies—and it just overwhelmed me with emotions I had never felt before,” recalls Motazedian, from her home in Tucson, Arizona. At twenty-eight, she still remembers the impact of those symphonies, filtered through a child’s memory. The music deeply moved her, creating images in her head that she yearned to sketch out with crayons.
Born in Corvallis, Motazedian, her brother, Vahid, and her Iranian-born parents had moved to Africa after her father, Iraj Motazedian, assistant professor of crop and soil science at Oregon State University, signed on to promote sustainable agriculture through the Matopos Research Station.
For a child, there was great freedom growing up in bush country. “We were in the middle of nowhere—no constraints, no neighbors. We could do whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted, and really, wild animals were the only concern,” Motazedian says. Yet, it could be a lonely existence. So when the wife of one of her father’s colleagues offered to teach Motazedian to play the piano, it was a welcome diversion.
The family took a day trip into South Africa to purchase an electric keyboard for her. The salesman raved about the “concert grand piano” sound that could be coaxed from a tiny instrument with only twenty-five keys—a scant offering compared to the eighty-eight keys on a standard piano.
“It was about the size of a TV dinner,” Motazedian says, chuckling. She could not have cared less. She was utterly in love. Motazedian threw herself into learning to play from mimeographed pages of ancient John Thompson method books, with their British “minims and crochets”—quarter and half-notes. She practiced constantly. “[The keyboard] was everything to me. As soon as I got it, it was all I wanted to do,” she says. “When my parents needed to punish me, they would hide the power cord.” She would play the silent keyboard anyhow, “to show that my spirit wasn’t broken,” Motazedian now laughs. “Yes, I was willful, even then.”
Motazedian accepted that her parents didn’t share the same fire within that she felt. No one else in her family played music. But Iraj and Nourieh Motazedian supported her, nonetheless. “The focus was always on being the best possible version of yourself, contributing as much to the world as you have within you to contribute,” Motazedian says. “My parents believe strongly that it’s everyone’s duty to help out—that was the purpose of everything.”
II Etude
Her fingers didn’t grow accustomed to a real piano until her family returned to Corvallis. For a nine-year-old girl whose closest companion had become an electronic keyboard, reentry into American life wasn’t easy. “I did not like it,” Motazedian recalls. “I definitely didn’t want to leave [Africa]. That was my home, what I knew . . . I was suddenly an animal who had been allowed to roam in the wild, put into a cage.”
Music was her freedom. Catching a ride on the back of her brother’s bicycle each week, Motazedian would skirt across town to her piano lessons.
“My musical world opened up,” she remembers. “Music was my best friend. At school, I would just daydream of coming home and practicing.” At her lessons, Motazedian could stretch her fingers across the smooth landscape of a real keyboard. It was thrilling, hands suddenly unbound: “Honestly, it was like an entirely different instrument. I can’t explain it. Like being kept in a goldfish bowl and being dumped into an ocean. It opened up so much possibility, nuance, depth. There was a richness to be coaxed out of a piano that just didn’t exist on my flat little keyboard.”
At home, Motazedian taped cardboard extensions on either end of her little electric keyboard to fill in the missing keys. By sixth grade she had changed teachers, graduating to more challenging pieces. She plodded along with her cardboard-enhanced keyboard until the day she walked home from school to find a truck parked conspicuously in front of her house. “Just thinking about it still leaves me a little breathless,” she recalls. Inside, workers were already positioning the honey-colored spinet piano in the living room. To this day, it remains a bit of a mystery exactly how it was that her parents, who had politely supported her music as a nice hobby, were moved to invest in a piano.
“My parents definitely never expected that I would take to it the way I did,” Motazedian laughs. “As Iranians, I think they hoped I would pursue science, engineering, maybe medical fields—something solid to fall back on. Never in their darkest nightmares did they think I would want to professionally pursue music.”
III Presto
By the age of ten, Motazedian had expanded her repertoire to include the violin. It was her mother’s idea. “She bullied me into it,” Motazedian jokes. “When she was growing up, her brother had really wanted to play the violin, but her family was poor and couldn’t afford it. I guess she always wanted to give her children that opportunity.” Motazedian balked, then grudgingly signed up for sixth-grade orchestra. She knew nothing about the violin. The conductor had other students take Motazedian aside to teach her basic technique.
Within months, she was elevated to concertmaster and she was hooked: “The violin offered so many things—it was so responsive, easily manipulated to do wildly different things than a piano. There was much more potential for an individual sound—a very excitable, volatile instrument. It became exciting to explore it.”
By the ninth grade, she got a huge break. While practicing the Prelude in G Minor by Rachmaninoff on the piano during a youth orchestra rehearsal break, Motazedian was overheard by award-winning pianist Daniel Epstein, a guest soloist from New York. He invited her to perform for a master class at Oregon State University the next night. Motazedian had no idea what that meant, but went anyway.
Her nervous energy translated into a fiery Rachmaninoff performance. Epstein encouraged her to take lessons with OSU music professor Rachelle McCabe, an acclaimed concert pianist. Motazedian sought her out. McCabe declined, saying she didn’t work with high school students. Motazedian begged for an audition. McCabe finally relented, heard her, and accepted a new student.
“She was determined to study piano with me, and I enjoyed her exuberant and contagious love of music,” recalls McCabe, who is still at OSU. “Her burning desire to play the piano was inspiring, motivating to the entire class.” Motazedian felt her skills exploding.
Now, both piano and violin consumed her. She performed with the Corvallis Youth Symphony and the Corvallis Camerata and helped start a youth string quartet. It never occurred to her to choose one instrument over the other. “Decide which one of your kids you wanted to give up for an adoption,” she says. “An impossible idea. Both of them gave me something I didn’t get anywhere else in my life and couldn’t do without.” By her senior year, she began studying violin at the University of Oregon with Associate Professor Kathryn Lucktenberg, who “transformed my technique.”
Her life was immersed in music. When she won a full scholarship to OSU, her parents applied their college savings towards a Samick upright grand piano, which she still plays. When she found her “soul-mate violin”—with a breathtaking price tag—Motazedian went to a local credit union and took out a loan, cobbling together part-time jobs and “eating a lot of tofu” to make the payments.
She began playing with the Corvallis–OSU Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of conductor Marlan Carlson, chairman of the OSU Department or Music, who remembers her as a standout student with a feverish intensity: “She was always a very unusual person in the breadth of her ambition. Unconventional in many ways, with a tremendous curiosity, always very passionate about what was most interesting to her.
“And she was someone who enjoyed pushing the boundaries of everything, which I view as a tremendous asset,” he says.
After two years at OSU, Motazedian elected to transfer to the University of Oregon, drawn by its strong School of Music and the talents of faculty members such as Lucktenberg and Victor Steinhardt, professor emeritus of piano. She knew her parents still held out hope that their daughter was using music scholarships to underwrite a more practical career, but Motazedian had other ideas.
IV Battaglia
The life of a music major can be a lot like boot camp—she knew that going in. Studying both piano and violin meant seven or eight hours of daily practice. Motazedian also played in the UO Symphony.
“Being a music major is pretty much like this kind of gas—it expands to whatever volume is available. If you have five hours of free time, that’s five hours of practice time. You always feel the need for more practice,” she explains.
One afternoon, during her junior year, Motazedian was getting ready for orchestra rehearsal when she began brushing her long, black hair. “My left wrist just literally snapped,” she says. “It made this horrible snapping sound and I couldn’t move, it was frozen in a locked position.”
The wrist would not release. A trip to the emergency room and a cortisone shot returned some mobility. But the wrist remained uselessly weak and excruciatingly painful. Her right wrist wasn’t much better, putting both hands effectively out of commission. When Motazedian had experienced periodic pain in her hands and wrists late in high school, she’d simply cut back. But she’d never found a good diagnosis or adequate treatment. For the most part, she had ignored it.
But now Motazedian was devastated. She couldn’t lift a book or open a door without searing pain. Any time she felt slight improvement, she dove back into her music to make up for lost time, only to suffer another setback. “It was like removing a dam and the water was bursting out, and I would just go too far,” she says. “It was pretty much the worst experience of my life.”
She tried ultrasound, physical therapy, and medication. No improvement. Two years shy of her degree, the doorway to music slammed firmly shut.
“I think my body just said, ‘Enough. If you can’t stop, we’ll just shut down,’” she says. “After a month of not playing, I assumed I would get better. Once I realized that wasn’t going to happen, I started taking stock of my life.”
Motazedian was depressed, mourning the loss of her music and going through the motions. Short one science credit, she signed up for a two-week summer school astronomy course, taught by UO physics professor Robert Zimmerman. “I really had zero interest in science at that point,” says Motazedian, who hadn’t even bought the book for class. Minutes into the lecture, something happened. To recount it, Motazedian’s voice lightens, speeds up.
“My life opened up to me again,” she says. “[Zimmerman] was an incredible teacher, so charismatic, with a grand way of speaking about the amazements of space. It made me feel excited again.” The minute class was over, she “literally ran to the bookstore, bought the textbook, and read the whole thing from cover to cover,” she says, laughing. “I knew nothing of space or astronomy, so it was all dramatic and completely new.”
Zimmerman was a little worried about the intense young woman. Yes, she came to class every day. And her attention was unwavering. But once he broached the mysteries of Mars and the search for life there, “she was bound and determined to go to Mars,” he recalls. Zimmerman tried to talk her out of it. “Anyone who wants to be an astronaut is half crazy,” he chuckles. “The chances of coming back [from Mars] are quite small, and her timing wasn’t quite right—I think our next generation may actually get there.”
But Motazedian wouldn’t give up. “She’s very persistent, very aggressive—in a nice way,” he says. “It’s why she’s a success in whatever she does.” Links between science and music have been studied from the time of Pythagoras. But it’s one thing to muse about theoretical connections, another to switch from art to science altogether. It was an uphill struggle—trading majors halfway through her undergraduate program, she had to make up four years of math and science classes.
V Allegro
If Earth had a distant cousin, it might well be the planet Mars. Like Earth, it is pocked and peaked with valleys and volcanoes, deserts and polar ice caps. It hosts the highest mountain in the solar system and crevasses that far surpass the Grand Canyon.
And once, it appears, there was water. Lots of water. Which leaves scientists wondering where it went. Some believe that the Martian oceans retreated to its polar ice caps and eventually sank back into the planet’s rusty soil, where the water now remains as permafrost. A primary mission for the Phoenix Mars lander, now completing three months of research of the Martian surface, is to investigate the history of water on the Red Planet.
“Mars is very intriguing, because if we’re going to find life elsewhere in the solar system, it will be there,” Zimmerman explains. “It won’t be as developed as what we have here on Earth. But to a person with vision, it has great implications.”
Motazedian was captivated: “At one point, it was really a wet planet. Definitely a lot of liquid sloshing around.
“There is so much mystery there. Where did all that water go? Such a delicious thought. It’s just that we don’t know, and humans can’t stand not to know. To have something out there so vast that we don’t understand is unbearable,” she says.
Motazedian decided to major in geophysics, with an emphasis on planetary geology. Her family was delighted.
So was their daughter. If she couldn’t have music, studying the planets was a great consolation prize. And she was a natural. In 2002, less than a year after she had first stepped into Zimmerman’s introductory astronomy class, Motazedian snagged a summer research internship, “even though I had very little science background and experience,” she acknowledges.
At the Arkansas–Oklahoma Center for Space and Planetary Sciences, she was given an office; her only direction was to “look through journal articles to see what interests you.” “Mars kept sticking out in my mind,” she recalls. “The whole water issue was just very sexy.”
Left to study pictures of the surface of Mars, she cranked up a classical music CD, Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome. It was the perfect soundtrack to a discovery. While looking at surface features, she stumbled across an image with long, dark streaks. “The moment I saw them, I said out loud, ‘Oh my god, that’s water . . .”
Leading theories suggested those surface streaks were the result of dust flows. But studying satellite images taken at different times led her to believe that new streaks were forming all the time, sometimes within a matter of months. Motazedian theorized that they were evidence of water on Mars, suggesting that thermal activity around the extinct volcano Olympus Mons was melting subsurface ice, releasing brine that dissolved surrounding minerals. With a high salt content, the water would freeze at a lower temperature and take longer to evaporate, giving it time to flow downhill, leaving long, jagged streaks.
The notion that substantial underground ice deposits could melt and flow across the surface of the Red Planet sent a big ripple through the astronomical community. Not everyone agreed, but many were intrigued. She published her findings in the journal Lunar and Planetary Science and received an invitation to present her work to the world’s largest gathering of planetary scientists. There were interviews and press conferences; online chat rooms were ablaze with the news. When a reporter from the BBC e-mailed to request an interview, Motazedian didn’t even open it at first, convinced that it was spam. In time, the European Space Agency came calling, asking her to suggest sites to be photographed by their Mars Express spacecraft.
“I just felt really, really happy to do something that was stimulating to me. I enjoy doing things well—don’t have any use for the mediocre. And it was the only thing that got me through not being able to play my instruments,” she says.
VI Interlude
The day after graduating from the UO, Motazedian was on her way to Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas, for a coveted NASA internship and one step closer to her dream: to work as a crew member on the first manned expedition to Mars. “Space is the last frontier, this great unknown,” she says. “We’ve really barely scratched the surface of knowledge about space, which makes you kind of feel like a cowboy. Everything in space is new; there’s so much to discover.”
Her internship turned into a full-time job. But after a year at NASA, she was drawn to the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Tucson. “I came for Mars,” she says. “I knew there was a mission in the making and I wanted to jump aboard.” In August 2005, the lab planned to launch HIRISE, a High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, which was being sent up to study the history of water on Mars.
“It was like giving the scientific world contact lenses,” Motazedian says. “Before, the best we could see was like trying to read a newspaper with your eyes squinted shut. The HIRISE camera is so sharp and clear that it’s kind of disorienting. You think it must be Earth.”
She came aboard the program about a month before the launch, hired to download images from the spacecraft, process them, and monitor the instrument’s health and safety. As the first images arrived, Motazedian was blasting the Mars movement of Holst’s The Planets over the loudspeakers. Operations manager Eric Eliason recalls the excitement. “Táhirih led the group that did the downlink operations,” he says. “I remember we all looked at this data and tears came to her eyes—one of those great moments. Hey! We’re orbiting Mars and bringing back pictures!”
The mission brought a flood of data (to view images, visit hirise.lpl.arizona.edu). Eliason suspects that, in her three years of work, Motazedian has downloaded and processed more data from Mars—literally, tens of thousands of high-resolution images—than all other planetary exploration programs combined.
VII Brillante
If Táhirih Motazedian isn’t the first woman to step foot onto Mars, her eyes were among the first to closely scrutinize the rippled, dusty surface of the planet. The images she processed gave the scientific community its clearest view ever of the Martian landscape. It was work that mattered, and she felt happy in it.
But the music had never gone away. She knew that, too.
It took about six years for her hands to properly recover, and more self-discipline than she’s ever known to slowly return to practicing. “I was always attempting to play, like a pathetic prisoner trying to find some new way to escape, digging my way out with spoons,” she acknowledges. The music pulsed within, fighting to get out.
“I was always trying to push it away, because I couldn’t have it. But every time I saw someone walking with a violin case, it hurt my heart to think ‘That’s not me, I can’t do that.’ It was like watching someone else walk away with my life,” she explains.
Leaving music had bruised her, creating a well of regret. And she didn’t want to live with regret. “This is my life, the only one I have,” Motazedian says. “I want to feel completely satisfied in the end.”
At first, she tried the piano. Her fingers moved tentatively through some Bach chorales, simple church hymns that had been given to her by Rachelle McCabe back at OSU. It wasn’t long before she picked up her violin. Then, the hunger was roaring.
She contacted Thomas Cockrell, conductor of the Arizona Symphony Orchestra at the University of Arizona School of Music. Her first rehearsal felt like a homecoming: “I was incredibly ecstatic—I felt like myself again, suddenly awake, alive.”
For months she proceeded with a foot in both worlds—science at work, music with the symphony. It should have been perfect. And yet, it wasn’t.
“I had been thinking about what was lacking in my life,” she says. “I had achieved the exact job that I wanted with a live Mars mission. But still . . .”
Motazedian would lie awake at night, mulling it over. Then, one day she was talking with her husband, UA architecture student Karl Hansen, about a couple who had won the lottery. Hansen casually asked her what she would do if she won the lottery.
“The first thing I blurted out was that I would quit my job and go back to music,” Motazedian says. “As soon as I said it, I was kind of shocked. But I immediately realized that it was what I wanted.”
To Motazedian, it made sense: “Science was like this passionate, fiery love affair of my youth. It filled me with excitement and adventure. But music has always been the love of my life, almost like my oxygen. I really don’t know how to live without it.”
In May, she resigned her dream job, with plans to pursue an M.A. and Ph.D. in music theory.
Eliason, her supervisor, was disappointed, but not shocked. He had watched Motazedian drifting back toward music. “That’s what happens when you follow your dream,” he says chuckling. “I think when she finally made the decision, she was a changed person, much happier. As if she really discovered what she wanted to be doing in life.”
In leaving her job, there is uncertainty. When Motazedian told her parents about quitting the financial security of a science career, they were concerned. What about the risk of career-ending injuries? Could they return?
To a woman who once dreamed of walking on Mars, fear is an abstract concept—and not particularly useful. She is deeply content in her decision.
Risks? She’s okay with that. “I really have no regrets leaving science behind as a profession. My goal was to work on a live Mars mission. It was amazing and exciting, a perfect ending to that chapter of my life, a great detour.
“I’m so happy that everything turned out the way that it did. If I’d never had problems with my hands, I would have missed out on this tremendous part of my life, of history. I was so honored to be a part of it. And I just love music all the more for having to fight so hard to get back to it.”
For now, her life is an unfinished symphony, the ink on the page still wet with a tune that is now being written. Like science, it is filled with mysteries. This time, she’s comfortable not having all the answers.
Kimber Williams, M.S. ’95, makes her home near Atlanta, Georgia. Her last piece for Oregon Quarterly was “Ally’s Way,” Spring 2008.
