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 links between music and emotion, with a particular focus on nostalgia and Iranian immigrants.

We met in a cafe in Mirdamad and had a fascinating discussion about women in music. It seems that the Iranian music scene in many ways echoes its British counterpart in that roles concerning interpretation and technology continue to be dominated by men. Thus, men tend to dominate the posts of composer and conductor and often produce many more recordings than women musicians. Moreover, the key role of solo singing – which serves a key interpretive function in Iranian classical music  – is legally only occupied by men in Iran. As a one-time opera student, Aida thus experienced the paradox of training for a skill she cannot legally perform to a mixed gender public. This double-bind produces a complex moral landscape in which female singers like Aida police their own interests, struggling with whether it is a shallow desire to sing in public.

She has now completed her studies and returned to Iran for the forseeable future. Her experience of moving between countries means she has often represented her Iranian identity abroad, noting how it is regularly considered as something from which she should be looking to escape. This is an experience echoed by many foreign-educated Iranians with whom I have spoken, as well as something I have experienced as a British-Iranian living in the UK.