Her first composition teacher had said: “As an artist you have a lot of responsibility. Your political, social, ecological attitude - everything condenses in your music. ”That was still in Tehran, where Farzia Fallah was born in 1980 as the daughter of a teacher and the poet Karim Radjabsadeh. The composer, who lives in Cologne, is currently in Frankfurt as “Composer in Residence”, with a working grant that has now been awarded for the fifth time by the “Archive Woman and Music” in cooperation with the Institute for Contemporary Music (IzM) at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing arts (HfMDK) is awarded to women composing. She composes a new workworks with students of the HfMDK and develops together with the double bass player Nicola Vock in a "response" school project with a sixth grade of the Frankfurt Adorno-Gymnasium an answer to their music.
At the welcome brunch, the composer Hannes Seidl reported on the work of the jury.
Its members also included the composer Annesley Black, who teaches at the HfMDK, the cellist Katharina Deserno, Karin Dietrich as director of the IzM, Stefan Fricke as editor for contemporary music at Hessischer Rundfunk and the conductor Melissa Panlasigui.
A kick for your career
Due to the corona, the announcement was limited to female composers who live in Germany: "We didn't want the work stay with its possibilities for composing, networking, research and concerts to fail due to entry restrictions," said Dietrich. According to Seidel, the award should be “a real kick for a career”. Therefore, the jury also sorted out all applicants who are already established. After that, everyone agreed: Farzia Fallah convinced “with her own distinctive style, her wealth of ideas and her poetic compositions”.
“Persian” is easy to think when listening to a piece by her without bias, for example the rich, iridescent sound in the first movement of “Lalavi”, which was heard at a “New Music Night” organized by the HfMDK. But Fallah is just as reluctant to be fixated on her Iranian origins as on her “role as a composer”. She feels that she belongs equally to Iran and Germany, "without either of the two something is missing".
It emphasizes the different ways of thinking and training of the musicians in both cultures. Instead of world music stew, she wants an “encounter between different worlds and the search in between”. In her composition “in six directions” for the accordion and the long-necked lute tanbur she banishes the sounds of the tanbur in a feed through loudspeakers in order to clearly separate the two spheres. Poetry arises in the imagination of performers and listeners, in their mental and emotional activity in mediating between impressions, which can be interpreted in many ways.
Fallah was familiar with classical Persian music from an early age. But she enjoyed playing the piano more. After graduating from high school, she first completed an engineering degree, but at the same time privately studied piano with Farmiah Ghavam-Sadri and composition with Alireza Mashayekhi. Both teachers founded the Tehran group for new music in 1993. Fallah joined them but wanted more. In 2007 she went to Bremen to join Younghi Pagh-Paan and Jörg Birkenkötter. Seven years later she moved to Johannes Schöllhorn in Cologne and followed him to Freiburg in 2016, where she passed her exam in 2018. Since then she has been a freelance composer and keeps in touch with her family in Iran under increasingly difficult conditions.
Inspired by her father, she deals a lot with contemporary literature. With her music she would like to bring the aura of this poetry to life. She makes special demands on her performers: She does not give them the exact sounds, but rather formulates framework conditions within which the players, who ultimately know their instrument best, should look for the fragile, widely spreading sounds. Depending on factors such as room acoustics or humidity, the sounds may not respond or tip over. But that's exactly what Fallah wants in order to achieve a special intensity. Clairaudience is the political goal of their art. With fine, multi-layered sounds, as trembling as human souls. And so fragile too.
PORTRAIT CONCERT with the world premiere of Farzia Fallah's new work on Friday, December 3rd, 7.30 p.m. at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, Eschersheimer Landstrasse 29.