…“Anahita Abbasi’s music has been described as a dizzyingly sophisticated reverie, colorful and energetic. It embodies tremendous timbral exploration and multilayered performance gestures”… (Classical Voice America and A Cunning plan). 

 

According to Guardian …”She takes even a more radical line with creating dense and pulsing textures”… “Her music has the capacity to immerse the hall into a dark multichannel throat and hissing” … (Bachtrack) 

 

Ernst. M Binder also writes: …“As it is also vivid from the titles of her works such as Dialogues, Situations, Distorted Attitudes, she investigates and gesticulate thoughts and emotions. It is manifestation/ observation of a scene or multiple scenes, which occur simultaneously. She has the tendency to take us with her music on a mystical, puzzling journey and leave us within our thoughts, to find out the “ending” ourselves”… 

 

About her piece for Mahan Esfahani Boulezian Blogspot writes: …”There was, without doubt, an extraordinarily inventive musical imagination at work, but it was never merely invention: it was a sonic and instrumental drama that seemed somehow to summarise, to extend, and quite properly to question many of the tendencies we had heard so far”…

 

Volkskrant describes … “the Iranian Anahita Abbasi, shows herself to be a composer with guts in the two-year-old Intertwined Distances Alienating whistling noises and furious fistfights with the keyboard, alternated with delicate strings, lead to a theatrical listening experience” ...

 

seen and heard international: … “Situation II/Dialoge, A sense of landscape was strong, at least to my ears and imagination: wind, or something like it, something like its effects, rustling through bunches of leaves shaken by two of the players; sounds from inside the piano; cello and double bass working together in crude (from the standpoint of a Mozart orchestra) sounds heard in more or less contrary motion. Sounds that were (relatively) more expected emerged out of that eerie calm before a storm, without the storm ever truly materialising. Unisons were achieved rather than a given, quickly lost, prior to a return to the aural world of the opening, chimes fading away a niente” …

 

Ivan Hewett writes in The Telegraph, in the CD review of Musique? by Mahan Esfahani, Released by Hyperion record,  … “More satisfying to me was the piece specially written for this record: Intertwined Distances by the Iranian female composer Anahita Abbasi. (Iran has produced several interesting female modernist composers in recent years – who would have thought it?) After a disconcertingly dry beginning, it develops into a fascinating dialogue between opposites that sometimes come to within a hair’s breadth of each other, only to part again” …

 

Jan de Kruijff writes in his Blog … “Under Esfahani’s hands (and fists in Abbasi’s work) the harpsichord is transformed into an elemental force, occasionally supported or threatened by a surprising arsenal of electronics” …

… “Esfahani’s compatriot Anahita Abbasi (1985) puts the instrument to the test with fierce punches and alienated buzzing sounds that are fortunately alternated with subtle moments” …

 

Anahita Abbasi (world citizen-1985) is an Iranian born, Paris and New York-based composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, a curator. and educator.

for the complete bio, click on Biography.

 

Her music has been featured in various worldwide festivals such as:

Mostly Mozart Festival (August 2019, USA)

Direct Current Festival (April 2019, USA)

Sound State Festival (Southbank Centre, January 2019, London)

Klang Festival (June 2019, Copenhagen)

Tectonics Festival (May 2019, Glasgow)

Turbulenzen – Festival für aktuelle interkulturelle Musik ( December 2017, Berlin, Germany)

Periferien festival ( November 2017, Oslo, Norway)

Shiraz Festival ( November 2017, Shiraz, Iran)

Klangspuren Festival ( September 2017, Schwaz, Austria)

Hot Air Festival (January 2020, USA)

BIFEM Festival ( September 2017, Bendigo, Australia)
Daegu International Contemporary Music Festival ( June 2017, Daegu, South Korea)
Mise-En Festival ( June 2017, New York)
SEMEC Festival 2017 ( April 2017, San Jose, San Diego, USA)
Tehran contemporary music Festival ( April 2017, Tehran, Iran)
The Essential Indexical – Bandcamp series ( April 2017, San Jose, USA)
Cairo Contemporary music festival ( March 2017, Cairo)
ICM Festival ( April 2016, San Diego, USA)
Vertixe Sonora Festival ( October 2016, Vigo, Spain)
Darmstadt Ferienkurse 2016 ( August 2016, Darmstadt, Germany)
Manifeste Academy IRCAM ( June 2016, Paris, France)
Tage Neuer Musik ( May 2016, Graz, Austria)
ICM Festival ( April 2016, San Diego, USA)
Archipel Festival (March 2015, Geneva, Switzerland)
Time of Music Festival ( June 2015, Viitasaari, Finnland)
Jeunesse Festival ( September 2015, Vienna, Austria)
Festival Carmelo Bernaola (November 2015, Spain)
CGAC, MUSIC AND ART. SONOROUS CORRESPONDENCES ( December 2015, Spain)
48th Dimitria Festival ( October 2013, Thessaloniki- Greece)
Matrix – Experimental studio des SWR ( 2012, 2013, Freiburg & Amsterdam)
Schoenberg center ( March 2013, Vienna, Austria)
Musik festivals and workshops (2012, 2013, 2014, Kazakhstan & Uzbekistan)
TIMF -Tongyeong International Music Festival ( 2012, South Korea)
Grachten festival (July 2012, Amsterdam , Netherlands)
Atlas festival ( August 20122, 2012, Amsterdam)
Impuls Festival (2009, 2011, Graz,Austria)

Her pieces have been performed  by diverse Ensembles all around the world, such as:

International Contemporary Ensemble -ICE (USA)

Ensemble Modern (UK and Germany)

San Francisco Symophony Youth Orchestra (USA)

La Jolla Symphony Orchestra (USA)

Hypercube Ensemble (USA)

Tak Ensemble (USA)

Ossia Ensemble (USA)

MSM Percussion Ensemble (USA)

Mivos Quartet (USA)
Offspring Ensemble (Australia)
Quatuor Diotima(Finland)
Umeduo (Basel, Iran, Norway)
Argonaut Quartet ( Australia)
Neuverband Ensemble ( Basel, Geneva)
Schallfeld Ensemble (Austria, Germany, Italy, USA )
Ensemble Reconsil( Vienna, Austria)
Calithumpian Consosrt ( San Diego, USA)
Vertixe Sonora ( Spain)
Mise-En ensemble (USA)
Platypus Ensemble (Vienna, Austria)
Atlas Ensemble (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Ensemble Omnibus (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, South Korea)
Ensemble Zeraffin (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Dou Verso & Dou Bilitis (Amsterdam, diverse cities in Netherlands)
dissonArt Ensemble (Thessaloniki, Switzerland)
Ecce Ensmeble  (Boston, USA)
Tamgram Trio (Spain)
Ensemble Black Pencil (Amsterdam, Netherlands)