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 ...
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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, ...
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Azan in Esfahan
A video of our wonderful guide, Majid, singing the Azan inside the Imam mosque in Esfahan. This vast and beautiful structure was designed specifically in order to amplify the voice of the Imam during prayer and thus Majid is amplified only by the acoustic properties of the ...
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Kiawasch Saheb-Nassagh
I had the pleasure of meeting Kiawasch at the private music school 'Zang o Rang' he will soon be opening in Tehran. Kiawasch undertook much of his music education in Austria and has a particular desire to improve the standard of music education in Iran which he sees as still not able to compete on ...
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Hooshyar Khayam
Hooshyar Khayam is a pianist and composer whose 2007 album Tatari was the first classical piano CD released in Iran since the 1979 revolution. He is part of a new generation of Iranian composers who problematise the link between tradition and identity in Iranian music, rejecting the idea that in ...
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The beating heart of the city
On embarking on this trip to Tehran I was fully prepared for my daily life to be very different from that in London. I was prepared for the weather (topping 45 degrees so far), the food (endless delicious meals but each with more rice than I would normally eat in a week) and the religious holidays ...
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Hermes Records: the vanguard of contemporary music in Iran
Ramin Sadighi is the founder of Hermes Records, a Tehran-based label founded in 1999 with the aim of producing and promoting the work of Iranian musicians and composers. Their artists draw on both Iranian and Western classical influences, producing work that encompasses the genres of contemporary ...
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