Bio
Award-winning composer Parisa Sabet writes music that is commissioned and performed internationally. Her distinctive musical language springs from her Iranian roots, Western education, and passion for socially engaged arts. Interweaving sounds both recognizable and new, her compositions evoke emotions, conjure images, and relate stories, often about pressing social issues. A Cup of Sin, for instance, scored for soprano and electric guitar quartet, examines violence against women. The Seville Orange Tree, for flute and piano, depicts a sacred site in Shiraz, Iran where a treasured tree would scent the breeze.
Recent premieres of her music have taken place in her adopted home of Toronto as well as in Seattle, Sydney and Chicago. Among her recognition in 2020, Sabet was recipient of the Kathleen McMorrow Music Award and was selected by the Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes to compose an opera in collaboration with librettist, Nika Khanjani; productions are planned for 2021 in Canada. In 2015, she was awarded the Ann H. Atkinson prize for her poignant piece, Visiting Grandpa. Her song cycle, Dance in Your Blood, with text by 13th-century Persian poet Rumi, won the 2014 Violet Archer Composer’s Prize and is published by Plangere Editions.
Sabet earned the Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Music degrees in composition from the University of Toronto, where her honors included the Mirkopoulos and Miller/Khoshkish fellowships and the Tecumesh Sherman Rogers Graduating Award given to a musician on the cusp of making important contributions to the field. She completed her Bachelor of Music degree with honors at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Among her teachers are Christos Hatzis, Keith Tedman, Kyong Mee Choi, Ka Nin Chan, and Stacy Garrop. Her adventure with music began at age 9 with piano lessons in Shiraz.
**Learn more about Parisa Sabet and listen to her music at her website:**
www.ParisaSabet.comProgramme Notes
Reflecting on silence as a response in the face of discrimination and oppression, the chamber quartet Charsu is collaborating with composer Parisa Sabet and visual artist Rah Eleh in a new media-music-performance workshop project. Featuring vocal contemporary music and dancing with digital imagery inspired by the poem Wind-Up Doll by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad (1934 – 1967), a controversial modernist and iconoclast.
The poem is generally interpreted as an icon of feminist poetry by Iranians. Now, more than ever, we need to stand in solidarity with the women and people of Iran who want a fair and just future with freedom of choice. We must not remain silent in the face of oppression and challenge the status quo.
Charsu (translated as "Four Directions" in Farsi) is a quartet of classical contemporary that has a focus on the developments of new works, and the support of existing works by living composers, especially Iranian composers composing in diaspora.