Seven Impressions (2017) 
for Voice and Percussion
Premiere: September 2017 in Klangspuren Festival in Schwaz! part of the "HOMMAGE À JOAN LA BARBARA"  
Performers:  Manuel Alcaraz Clemente (Percussion) &   Kaoko Amano (voice) 
Concept and curator: Claudia Cervenca

**** 
Program notes on seven impressions:
“ The only journey is the one within” by Rainer Maria Rilke
Seven Impressions is an observa=on of an inner pilgrimage. A journey of thoughts and various stages of emo=ons in search of oneself. Overcoming the obstacles from the internal and external world is not easy, but we are all seeking to find the truth of divine love and knowledge through a personal experience. As Rumi said: ...”it is a way to the heart of hearts, to the utmost direct intense experience of one’s sacred identity” ...
The 7 sec=ons/impressions in this piece are based on and inspired by Ritual ceremonies in Mithraism.

Seven Impressions(2017)

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) 

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 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”…

Anahita Abbasi’s music has been commissioned and performed by distinguished soloists and ensembles such as Mahan Esfahani, Steven Schick, Vimbayi Kaziboni, Rebekah Heller, Sergej Tchirkov, Artyom kim, Ensemble Modern, International Contemporary Ensemble, UmeDuo, Klangforum Wien musicians, Wavefiled Ensemble, San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, Disonart Ensemble, Platypus Ensemble, Quatuor Diotima, Mivos Quartet, Argonaut Quartet, Tak Ensemble, Schallfeld Ensemble, Zafraan Ensemble, Contemporaneous, Blaue Reiter, Off Spring Ensemble, and has been showcased at festivals all around the world among which: Mostly Mozart Festival, The Kitchen, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Niefnorf, Soundnow Festival- Bent Frequency, Roulette, National Sawdust, Mise -En festival (USA), Darmstadt Ferienkurse (Germany), IRCAM – Manifeste Academy (France), Matrix –Experimental studio des SWR, Alte Oper (Germany), BIFEM (Australia), Klangspuren Schwaz (Austria), Sound State festival (Southbank Centre, London), Tectonics (Glasgow), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), United Berlin, Klang Festival (Copenhagen), Tage Neuer Musik, Open music (Austria), Omnibus Ensemble (Uzbekistan), Contempuls (Prague), Tangram Trio (Switzerland), Tongyeong International Music Festival (Korea), neuverBand Ensemble (Switzerland), Ensemble Kollektive (Germany), Acht Brücken Festival (Cologne), Impuls Festival (Austria), Time of Music (Finland), Atlas Festival (Netherlands), Grachten Festival (Netherlands), duo Verso and Bilitis and many others.

Ms. Abbasi has received several awards, including a work-scholarship from the Experimentalstudio des SWR, Freiburg (2014), a Morton Gold ASCAP young composers award (2015), a nomination for “women composers of our time” (2017) as well as the composition prize of the Acht Brücken Festival (2020). In 2022 she has been awarded the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy and UCROSS Foundation residency in Wyoming. 

Aside from teaching composition, giving lectures and curating workshops on fundamentals of creation, and serving as a juror at composition competitions, she is also a founding member of Schallfeld Ensemble in Graz, Austria as well as IFCA (Iranian Female Composers Association) in the USA, New York..; where she is curating concerts, workshops, conferences, creating platforms and advocating for young composers and acts as their ambassadors in presenting their music to others. 

Anahita Abbasi (world citizen-1985) was born and raised in Iran. In 2005 she moved to Austria and pursued her undergrad at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, where she studied music theory with Clemens Gadenstätter and Christian Utz & composition with Beat Furrer and Pierluigi Billone; while working closely with Georges Aperghis, Franck Bedrossian, and Philippe Leroux. In 2014 she moved to the US to pursue her Ph.D. degree in Composition with Rand Steiger at UC San Diego.

Currently, Abbasi is residing in New York and in Paris, where she has been awarded a three-year-long residency with Fondation Singer Polignac and Ensemble Le Balcon (Paris, France). Her upcoming projects are commissions from ensemble “der gelbe Klang”, Kommas and New Babylon, Podium Esslingen, and Ensemble Modern for Darmstadt 2023.