Anahita Abbasi’s music (Iranian-born/world citizen) 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 the 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)
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” …
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 gestures 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”…
Anahita Abbasi’s works explore the „organic physicality of sound“ (Sound Barrier). Each of her works grows out of a fascination with a specific sound and its distinctive tonal color.
Abbasi’s music has been commissioned and performed worldwide by renowned musicians, including Mahan Esfahani, Steven Schick, Ilan Volkov, Vimbayi Kaziboni, Jack Adler, Sergej Tchirkov, Ensemble Modern, Lines Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Meitar Ensemble, Der gelbe Klang, EBU, Zaafran Ensemble, Contrechamps, Contemporary Chamber Orchestra Elbe, Broken Frames Syndicate, Kommas Ensemble, TAK Ensemble, Seattle Modern Orchestra, Ume Duo, Long Beach Opera, Quatuor Diotima, Mivos Quartet, Argonaut Quartet, Thin Edge, neuverBand, Omnibus Ensemble, Schallfeld Ensemble, and others.
Her works have been featured internationally at festivals such as Darmstädter Musiktage, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Acht Brücken Festival, Radialsystem, Beethovenfest Bonn, Podium Esslingen, Heroine festival, Tritonus Festival, Elbphilharmonie (Germany), IRCAM – Manifeste Academy, Festival Ensemble (France), Time of Music (Finland), BIFEM (Australia), Klangspuren Schwaz, Impuls Festival (Austria) Sound State Festival (Southbank Centre, London), Tectonics (Glasgow), Klang Festival (Copenhagen), Contempuls (Prague), Tongyeong International Music Festival (Korea), Musica Polonica Nova (Poland), Atlas Festival, Grachten Festival (Netherlands), Borealis Festival (Norway), Festival Archipel (Geneva), Gaia (Tel Aviv), Mostly Mozart Festival, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, The Kitchen, Roulette, National Sawdust, Time Spans (USA), and many others.
Ms. Abbasi has received numerous awards, including a work-scholarship from the Experimental studio of SWR, Freiburg (2014), a Morton Gould ASCAP Young Composers Award (2015), a nomination for „Composers of Our Time“ (2017), the Composition Prize of the Acht Brücken Festival (2020), the German Record Critics’ Prize 2020 (Mahan Esfahani’s album MUSIQUE?), and the New Music USA creator’s fund award (2025). In 2022, she was awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy, a Ucross Foundation Residency in Wyoming, and a three-year residency at the Fondation Singer-Polignac in Paris. She is also one of the recipients of the 2024 Music Prize from the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, recognized by Georges Aperghis. In 2025, she received the New Music USA’s creators‘ fund for her project “Thawing Tides”.
In addition to being a founding member of the Schallfeld Ensemble (Austria, 2013), she is also a founding member of the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA, USA, 2017). Anahita Abbasi studied composition with Beat Furrer and Pierluigi Billone at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz (KUG) in Austria and worked closely with Georges Aperghis, Franck Bedrossian, and Philippe Leroux. In 2014, she moved to the USA to pursue a PhD in composition with Rand Steiger at UC San Diego.
Currently, Anahita Abbasi lives in New York, Flensburg, and in Paris. Her recent projects include commissioned works for Ensemble Modern and Jack Adler, both premiered at the Darmstädter Musiktage in 2023. Her upcoming projects include a commission from the Présences festival (Radio France – Premiere February 2026) as well as a commission from the EBU for a flute concerto for Claire Chase and with Philharmonie de Radio France (2027-2028).