Farzia Fallah

In the music of the Iranian-German composer Farzia Fallah, everything centres on sound. It is the core and the shell of every acoustic process, its beginning and its end. From this consistent approach she develops varied, mostly filigree structures and forms. This portrait CD gathers five works, from a violin solo to a nonet, with a sixth piece available online.

Fallah was born in Tehran on 12 March 1980. She first studied electronics and signal processing at the Sharif University of Technology from 1998 to 2003, taking lessons at the same time with the composers Alireza Mashayekhi and Farimah Ghavamsadri. From 2007 to 2014 she studied composition at the University of the Arts Bremen, with Younghi Pagh-Paan and then Jörg Birkenkötter, and electroacoustic composition with Kilian Schwoon and Joachim Heintz. From 2014 to 2016 she continued with Johannes Schöllhorn at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne.

The album opens with the violinist Benedikt Bindewald and widens its forces from track to track. The guitarists Henrik Dewes and Tobias Klich play as a duo, followed by the Sonar Quartett, the six-piece Ensemble DEHIO conducted by Rie Watanabe, and Ensemble Aventure as a nonet. A trio from Ensemble S201 plays the online piece, Ausgedehnter Augenblick. … und dann befreit …?, for solo violin, is built on Bindewald's many-layered playing. täglicher Blick auf den Alborz (daily view of the Alborz, the mountain range north of Tehran) is written for two guitars, and Holz-Haar-Atem-Licht (wood, hair, breath, light) for string quartet. im selben Augenblick brings together soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, trombone, harp, drums and double bass. Unter Bewunderung der Farben (admiring the colours), for ensemble, closes the disc.

Fallah thinks of music as something that speaks through sound but resists being put into words. In the booklet she explains that for her art is a kind of reflection, but it is hard to speak literally about its content. Language, she says, can only approach that content by analysing and describing it, and a distance always remains. The disc was nominated for the Quarterly Critics' Choice 3/2024 of the German Record Critics' Award.

CD, Wergo WER 6443 2, released in 2024 in the German Music Council's Edition Zeitgenössische Musik, running 72 minutes.