NINA BARZEGAR
NASIM KHORASSANI
LEI LIANG
Nina Barzegar is an Iranian composer, pianist, and actress. She writes music in diverse styles and for various mediums, including concert music and music for film and theater. As an actress and film scorer, she has collaborated on many film projects screened at various film festivals worldwide. She has worked as a piano pedagogue for years and authored a twovolume piano training book. Since coming to the United States in 2020, Barzegar has collaborated with great performers and ensembles such as Yarn/Wire, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and Del Sol Quartet. Barzegar holds a bachelor’s degree in piano and a master’s in composition from the University of Tehran and is currently a DMA student at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Nasim Khorassani is an Iranian composer, visual artist, music educator, and founder of MMCiran. She is currently a PhD candidate in Music Composition working with Katharina Rosenberger, Marcos Balter, and Rand Steiger at the University of California San Diego. She studied her second master’s degree with Andrew Rindfleisch and Greg D’Alessio at Cleveland State University. The University of Tehran was where she gained her first master’s degree and studied composition with Mohammad Reza Tafazzoli, Kiawasch Sahebnassagh, and Sara Abazari. Mainly as a self-taught composer, Khorassani started composing at eight. However, her works did not receive any performance in Iran until 2016, when she moved to the United States. Since then, Khorassani’s works have been performed by No Exit New Music Ensemble, Del Sol String Quartet, Patchwork Duo, Zeitgeist, OCAZEnigma, Loadbang, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Silkroad.
Born in 1972 to parents who were both pioneering musicologists, Lei Liang came of age in Beijing after the Cultural Revolution and began playing piano and composing at an early age. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests, in which he took part, Lei Liang’s parents sent him to the U.S. to study at the New England Conservatory. He earned his doctorate at Harvard and is currently on the faculty at the University of California San Diego. Lei Liang’s prolific catalogue of more than 100 compositions includes works that engage with such issues as human trafficking, undocumented immigrants, gun-related violence, and environmental destruction. Describing his orchestral piece A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, which was inspired by a Chinese ink-brush landscape painting and won the 2021 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, Lei Liang remarks: “I always wanted to create music as if painting with a sonic brush.” In 2021, Lei Liang received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award.
During her life in Iran, she managed to create and organize a group of music students that became the first Iranian group to receive a DAAD Study Visit scholarship in 2009. In 2012, she met with Peter Ablinger and Klaus Lang in Tehran and performed their music. In 2013, Khorassani became among five selected sound artists from Iran for IranUK Sonics residency in London, where she joined various workshops by Keith Rowe and Chris Watson and had her first experimental improvisation with Veryan Weston at Queen Elizabeth Hall. The trip to Germany as her introduction to modern dance expanded throughout her life, influencing the style of music composition she follows today. Khorassani has founded a free online music academy, MMCiran, to support Persian students, which is now called and cofounded as MOAASER.
77TH OJAI MUSIC FESTIVAL
| JUNE 8-11, 2023 | 53