Finally, a stage for female composers from Iran

Growing up in Iran, composer Niloufar Nourbakhsh was surrounded by the sounds of traditional Persian instruments like the santour and tar. She found herself, however, drawn to the piano.

But one element remained consistent across traditions: Virtually all the music was composed by men.

“If there was a woman present in a concert, she was a performer,” Nourbakhsh, 28, recalled in a recent interview.

Together with her fellow Iranian composers Anahita Abbasi, 35, and Aida Shirazi, 33, Nourbakhsh set out to change that. In 2017, they founded the Iranian Female Composers Association, known as IFCA, which is dedicated to supporting female composers from Iran through programming, commissioning and mentorship.

The organisation grew from Nourbakhsh’s idea to organise a concert featuring music by Iranian female composers. She thought it would be difficult to come up with names, and invited Abbasi and Shirazi, whom she had met through social media, to help her brainstorm. To their surprise, they quickly listed more than two dozen.

“We would have never thought there were so many,” Abbasi said in an interview. “So we decided to do something more than just the concert.”

Since their first event at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, New York, in April 2018, where the founders met in person for the first time, IFCA’s roster has nearly doubled to include younger voices like Kimia Yazdi as well as specialists in traditional Persian instruments, like kamancheh player Niloufar Shiri. The membership stretches across North America, Europe and parts of Asia, encompassing a sizable diaspora; for cultural and political reasons, working as a composer inside Iran is challenging at best, even more so for women.

Only in the last few years has a contemporary music scene of sorts begun to take root in Iran, with the formation of the ambitious Tehran International Music Festival in 2016 and the addition of undergraduate composition degrees at that city’s two major universities. Traditionally, Iranian composers have pursued music studies abroad.

Abbasi, Nourbakhsh and Shirazi did the same, though they took different paths. Nourbakhsh travelled to the United States and went to Goucher College; Abbasi studied in Austria, and Shirazi in Turkey.

Abbasi, who grew up in Shiraz and whose knowledge of contemporary music had effectively ended with Schoenberg before she left Iran, recalled a new-music concert she attended the night before her entrance exam in Graz. “Since I have perfect pitch, it was like my brain was melting,” she said. “I was so shocked that I got lost wandering the city that night.”

Nourbakhsh — who had some experience with post-World War II, avant-garde trends — found the music of Missy Mazzoli, an American composer born in 1980, transformative. “I noticed that triads are acceptable,” she said wryly.

The three women are now completing doctoral degrees in composition in the United States and have found considerable success, with a steady flow of commissions and performances. Last year, Nourbakhsh received a grant from the trade organisation Opera America for her work in progress “We the Innumerable,” which dramatises the wake of the contested 2009 Iranian presidential election.

The styles of the IFCA founders are decidedly different, reflecting the organization’s aesthetic diversity. Where Shirazi’s “The Shadow of a Leaf in Water,” composed for Ensemble Dal Niente, unfolds with deliberation, speaking in a musical language that whispers and sighs, Abbasi’s “Intertwined Distances,” commissioned by harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, utilises electronic manipulation and spatialisation to transform the delicate sounds of his instrument into swirling masses of surprising ferocity.

“They all write with extremely distinctive styles, and their association seems to me a way for them to amplify each other’s voices,” said Ross Karre, a percussionist and an artistic director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, known as ICE, with whom IFCA has developed an ongoing collaboration.

“These composers have taken the initiative to make platforms for themselves,” Karre said. “We’re not so much the sparks as we are just trying to add fuel to the fire.”

Last August, ICE performed music by IFCA members for an enthusiastic Lincoln Center audience as part of the ensemble’s residency at the Mostly Mozart Festival. In the same concert, they presented short video portraits of IFCA’s founders; eventually, Karre said, they plan to expand this documentary series to include other composers. A planned concert by the two groups this month was cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic, so on May 22 the ensemble will stream the Mostly Mozart concert on its YouTube channel.

IFCA also partnered last year with Hypercube — a saxophone, guitar, piano and percussion quartet — to give a pair of concerts with music inspired by the poetry of Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, first as part of the Kennedy Center’s Direct Current Festival, and later at Roulette in Brooklyn. The concerts featured IFCA’s first commissions, from the composers Farzia Fallah, Mahdis Golzar Kashani and Nilufar Habibian.

“It was a mutually beneficial experience for this collective to go out of their way and help us program,” said Erin Rogers, Hypercube’s saxophonist. “And these pieces continue to live in our repertoire.” Hypercube is now working with Fallah to develop an expanded version of “In the Empty Echo,” which they premiered last year.

IFCA’s founders hope to develop a more formal mentorship program in the future, along the lines of Mazzoli and Ellen Reid’s Luna Composition Lab, with summer workshops and master classes with younger female composers in Iran. These educational opportunities are vital. Reading about Western music as a teenager, Shirazi said, “it never occurred to me that composition is something that I can do,” adding, “There were no composers around me.”

For now, these plans are on permanent hold because of the Trump administration’s 2017 travel ban. Nevertheless, Abbasi, Nourbakhsh and Shirazi mentor however they can, sharing performance opportunities and offering career advice through social media to aspiring composers in Iran, and arranging to have some young composers’ music recorded.

“We have so much access to amazing musicians here,” Nourbakhsh said. “It’s important for us to be able to connect that to people who don’t have that access.”

c.2020 The New York Times Company