Pallett
During my time in Iran, Pallett was the most talked about band on the music scene. So it was much to my delight (and the envy of my friends) that I was invited to their concert on my final night in Tehran. The setting was magnificent: a concert hall hidden below the famous Azadi tower, itself positioned in the centre of ...
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Moshtagh-e Shiraz Group
A women-only concert is a strange experience - at once uplifting and tragic; exciting to see a stage filled with female performers and yet sad to relinquish all phones at the door for fear of photographing an unveiled woman in public. I experienced this paradox while watching the Moshtagh-e Shiraz Group perform at the ...
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Farrokhzad Layegh
A cardiologist by trade, Farokhzad Layegh somehow also finds time to write beautiful music. Below is the piece 'Tempus I' for string quartet from the acclaimed 2012 album Sus-Septed Tempus released on Hermes Records. [audio ...
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Orientalism, creativity and Iranian music
For some background on debates around Orientalism and creativity in relation to Iranian music, see here for an article written by me focusing on the film 'No-one Knows About Persian Cats' by Bahman ...
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Aida Khorsandi
Aida Khorsandi is a graduate from the Tehran University of Arts in piano. Starting her course in 2000, she was among the first year of Iranian students permitted to study Western classical performance without a traditional Iranian instrument. She has since gone onto complete an MA in Finland where she is researching the ...
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Peyman Yazdanian
Born before the revolution, Peyman Yazdanian has lived through the changing fortunes of music in Iran over the last 40 years. He studied classical piano privately from a young age and until 1979 when music was banned outright and a veritable silence fell over the country for some years. Slowly, classical music - ...
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