9 APRIL 2019

FLORENCE PRICE - USA  
BORN 9 APRIL

The discovery of dozens of scores in an Illinois attic in 2009 led to renewed interest in the music of Florence Price, performances and recordings, and critical acclaim. Her music combines a rich and romantic symphonic idiom with the melodic intimacy and emotional intensity of African-American spirituals. As Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker, her music "deserves to be widely heard." 

In 1932 her Sonata in E Minor for piano won First Prize in the Wanamaker music contest, with overall honors awarded to her first symphony. Frederick Stock, music director of the Chicago Symphony, became a supporter of her music and programmed the work. Price became the first African-American woman to have a work performed by a major U.S. orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed it in 1933. Though she composed hundreds of pieces, her catalogue did not enter the twentieth-century mainstream canon, and many of her works, including two violin concertos, could have vanished if not uncovered during the renovation of her abandoned home. 

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, Price received early training on the piano from her mother, a music teacher. She went on to attend the New England Conservatory, one of few higher musical institutions accepting African-American students. There, she studied composition and counterpoint with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, and graduated in 1906 with both an artistic diploma in organ and a teaching certificate. After years teaching music privately and serving as the head of the music department at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia, Price returned to Little Rock, then moved to Chicago, where she advanced her musical studies under Arthur Olaf Andersen, Carl Busch, Wesley LaViolette, and Leo Sowerby.

♫ LISTEN

Symphony No.1 in E Minor IV. Finale by Florence Price

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AFARIN MAZOURI   

BORN 9 APRIL

Afarin Mansouri is an award-winning composer whose works have been performed in Canada, the United States, England, Iran, and South America. She received Music Creation Grants from the Toronto Arts Council for her children’s operetta To whom shall I give my heart?, based on a Persian story by Nader Ebrahimi in 2014, and her multidisciplinary work Doors, in 2015. Afarin has also appeared as solo soprano, singing new music in Farsi language at Toronto Culture Days 2014, Tirgan Festival 2015 and ICOT’s The Thirtieth Act in 2016.

Currently Afarin is a PhD candidate at York University finishing her research on children’s opera while teaching undergrad courses in music. She has presented her research at the Institute of Musical Research, London, UK (2013), and the 25th annual conference Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association, Baltimore (2014).

Afarin is very active in her community as musician and entrepreneur. She is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Iranian-Canadian Composers of Toronto (ICOT), and has curated many seasonal concerts with them since 2011. She is also founder and director of MUSIC NEST, an organization dedicated to educating and inspiring families through musical programs. She is an Associate Composer of the Canadian Music Centre and board member of North York Arts.

♫ LISTEN

Baa too Boodan by Afarin Manzouri 

► AFARIN MANZOURI'S WEBSITE 

31 MARCH 2019

KONSTANTIA GOURZI - GREECE  

BORN 31 MARCH

Konstantia Gourzi spans bridges between cultures and epochs across time and space. She does this as a composer, where she finds her voice in unifying elements that seem to have nothing in common. She also does it as a conductor and teacher, where in consonance with others she constructs a new world of equal opportunities, between male and female, the strange and the familiar.

A Greek now living in Germany, Konstantia Gourzi was born in Athens in 1962. She knows that finding artistic authenticity today is a particular challenge. Even more so since technical progress offers composers almost unlimited access to the musical creations of all times and places. The more one is affected by different stimuli and the more one has to process them, the greater the challenge in finding a clear, yet individual artistic voice. However, the greater also the spectrum for inspiration.

As a composer, Konstantia Gourzi explores musical and sonic phenomena in her inexhaustible and constantly expanding range. Above all, she is interested in the intuitive, irrational parts of the human psyche. Her music is never purely intellectual or conceptual; her experiments are, at the core, based on a profoundly sensed experience. That means that intuition and sensual experience always play a vital role in her creative processes. In her music, she seeks to go beyond the limits of the rational, the definable, allowing the music to take its own shape from the forces within itself – where the distinction between fixed contours and improvisatory freedom is often transcended.

♫ LISTEN

Nine Fragments of an Eternity by Konstantia Gourzi

► KONSTANTIA GOURZI'S WEBSITE 

PARISA SABET  - IRAN 

BORN 31 MARCH

Iranian-Canadian composer, Parisa Sabet, creates a sonic world that is rich, layered, lyrical, and accessible to listeners. She draws from both the drama and the commonplace in her personal experiences to integrate unique elements of Eastern and Western musical languages, incorporating varied timbral and instrumental effects. Her repertory ranges from solo pieces to orchestral works, as well as sound design and original film scores. Since 2015, she divides her time between full-time freelance composer at night, and full-time mother by day—a new lifestyle that informs the gift of breakthrough in her compositions.

Professionally, her compositions have won various competitions and have been performed in different venues in North America. Sabet’s solo alto flute piece, Nay Nava, won the 2011 Timothy Munro (eighth blackbird’s flutist) Solo Flute Competition in conjunction with the CCPA composition program. In addition, Nawruz for wind ensemble was selected for the 2011 Chicago College of Performing Art’s Wind Ensemble Composition Contest and has been broadcast several times on Chicago's Classical and Folk Music Radio (98.7 WFMT). Her choral composition, Universal Brotherhood, was selected by MacMillan Singers to be performed at their Contemporary Showcase Concert in 2014. Her recent song cycle, Dance in Your Blood, based on three Rumi poems won the Top Prize place at the Violet Archer Composer’s Prize 2014 and is published in the Plangere Canadian Composers Series.

She has scored several documentaries centered on stories of Iranians who have been persecuted, exiled and migrated due to their beliefs including From Baku to Belmont and Layegheh directed by Rashin Fahandej. The most recent, Dust-Flower-Flame, about the Iranian poet Tahirih Qurratul-Ayn, a female poet in 19th century Iran, has been screened all around the world, including at Stanford University, University of Maryland, The Regent Street Cinema, UCLA, SVA Theatre New York, Toronto, Yale University, Concordia University, Le Nouvel Odéon, Laemmle Music Hall.

♫ LISTEN

Geyrani for Violin solo by Parisa Sabet 

► PARISA SABET'S WEBSITE