Sahba Aminikia Among the Winners the Aga Khan Music Award
The Aga Khan Music Awards were established by His Late Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan IV in 2018. The Awards recognise and support exceptional creativity, promise, and enterprise in music performance, creation, education, preservation and revitalisation in societies across the world in which Muslims have a significant presence.
SFCM Grad Named TED Fellow in Recognition for Work with Refugees
The 2013 alumnus was named a TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Fellow in the influential organization’s 2024 class for his work with the Flying Carpet Festival, which also led him to give one of the group’s popular TED Talks this year.
The greatest show on Earth — for kids who need it most
TED Fellow and composer Sahba Aminikia brings the healing power of dance, storytelling, music and performance to some of the most dangerous places on Earth. By celebrating children and their communities with beauty and joy, he shows how to cultivate hope, connection and love — even in conflict zones. "The ultimate power is in unity," Aminikia says.
San Francisco Comes Together in Sahba Aminikia's The Language of the Birds
In the 12th-century Persian poem The Language of the Birds (also known as The Conference of the Birds), the parallels between birds and humans are obvious, says composer Sahba Aminikia, who has been in residency at the North Beach nonprofit arts organization 836M for the past five months, working on a multimedia adaptation of the poem. Now, Aminikia’s piece is set for its world premiere, May 31 – June 1 at 836M. (Both performances are currently listed as sold out.)
Rumi’s favorite 12th century epic comes to musical life in ‘The Language of the Birds’
When nonprofit arts organization 836M announced Sahba Aminikia as its first composer-in-residence last December, a centuries-spanning collaboration began to take shape. The Iranian-born composer brought with him The Language of the Birds (May 31 and June 1), a project inspired by the 12th century poem bearing the same title by Farid ud-din Attar, a Persian mystic revered by the 13th century poet Rumi and many others.
After hundreds of years and with the support of 836M, which was co-founded by Julie & Sébastien Lépinard and Agnès Faure and named for its gallery at 836 Montgomery Street. A remarkable lineage, extending from Attar to Rumi to Aminikia to 2024 audiences, will give birth to a new work of art.
BBC Persian Coverage of Qaqnus (Phoenix) World Premiere in Seattle (in Farsi)
"Iranian women experience discrimination through law and custom that profoundly impacts their lives, especially concerning marriage, divorce, and child custody. Since the 1979 revolution, laws forcing women to wear Islamic hijab restrict every moment of their lives in public, and also stand symbolically for a much larger realm of inequality.
In September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman died in hospital while under the custody of Iranian “morality police” who had arrested her for not wearing proper hijab. Her death sparked widespread public protests across Iran and further arrests, including that of 16-year-old Nika Shakarami. Ten days after Nika disappeared, her family was informed of her death, under suspicious circumstances believed to involve violence by security forces. The protests continued for months. After harshly repressive measures, they have ended, for now, but the issues remain alive.
“Children have more imagination than we do”
Circus and theatre for refugee children in the middle of a conflict-torn area? The Flying Carpet Festival on the Turkish-Syrian border makes the impossible possible
Interview with Sahba Aminikia 06/01/2023
Verdigris Ensemble, Dallas’ innovative choir, bringing medieval Persian poetry to life
Verdigris Ensemble, Dallas’ innovative choir, is at it again.
Now in its sixth season, the choir has previously created and sold a choral NFT for $375,000 and given performances with themes ranging from the Big Bang to the Dust Bowl to the lives of Dallas residents. Its next project is a new kind of collaboration.
Love Unites Music, Poetry and Art in Verdigris Ensemble's ‘SHAMS'
What can a modern audience learn about love from a 13th-century mystic? Verdigris Ensemble answers that question with SHAMS, a performance art experience about the transformative power of love.
After three years of collaboration with the Crow Museum of Asian Art, San Francisco-based Iranian composer Sahba Aminikia and New York-based Syrian artist Kevork Mourad, Verdigris Ensemble will premiere SHAMS April 14-16 at the Moody Performance Hall in the Dallas Arts District. The work incorporates the choral ensemble’s 16 voices, a string quartet, prerecorded sounds, visual projections and staging.
Akron Symphony delights with “Global Circus”
Sometimes it can be easy to forget just how much classical music is loved worldwide. Thousands of miles away from the classical music strongholds in Europe and North America, musicians of all backgrounds compose and perform with passion — even at times in the face of difficult circumstances. But as Akron Symphony music director Christopher Wilkins reminded his audience on Saturday, this love is often unrequited, leaving works from places like the Middle East underrepresented on American stages.
Interview on KALW Revolutions Per Minute
Last Sunday, January 15th, 2023, I had the honor of being on Revolutions Per Minute on KALW San Francisco, 91.7 FM, Sundays 6 to 8 pm with dear Sarah Cahill and we dedicated the program to women’s voices from Iran including the music of Haydeh, Googosh, Ghamar-ol-molook Vaziri , Pari Zangeneh, Mahsa Vahdat, Delkash, Evlin Baghtcheban, Afsaneh Rasai and Homa Niknam. You can listen to it here:
Sahba Aminikia On Art Restart
Host Pier Carlo Talenti interviews artists who are shaking up the status quo to learn how they are reinventing their fields and building a new landscape for the arts.
Iranian American composer Sahba Aminikia on music as an 'organic response' to pain
When Iranian American composer Sahba Aminikia was 19, he left Iran for Russia to study at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory under Boris Ivanovich Tishchenko, a former student of the famous classical music composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
Aminikia says he admires Shostakovich so much that he was inspired to go into classical music.
Artists Wow Children In Turkey With Lively Shows
In its third edition, the Flying Carpet Festival drew smiles on the faces of children from impoverished communities in southeast Turkey. The festival is a visual and musical spectacle performed by artists from around the world.
S.F. Composer Revives Festival Bringing Music and Circus Arts to Displaced Children in Turkey
The brainchild of San Francisco composer Sahba Aminikia, the festival brings music and circus arts to a southeastern region of Turkey crowded with families displaced by war and repression in nearby Syria, Iraq and Turkey’s decades-long campaign against its own Kurdish separatists. While COVID-19 forced Aminikia to cancel last year’s activities, Flying Carpet is set for liftoff again Friday, Oct. 1, as a slimmed-down movable production presenting workshops, classes and performances through Oct. 10, in cities and villages around the Mardin region.
Sahba Aminikia Tells Timeless Stories Through Music
The music of Iranian-American composer Sahba Aminikia is analogous to water. Variably complex or simple, it flows in gentle, naturally syncopated rhythms and structures reminiscent of light rain falling amid sunshine on a rooftop in one work, while another piece’s metronomic regularity is like a steadily dripping faucet. A third piece arrives fully orchestrated with the torrential swoosh of a downpour.
Bearing the imprint of his classical music training and vastly diverse source material — Persian poetry and traditional music, European and Western classical music, jazz, the music of Pink Floyd, Beatles, Queen, and many other contemporary and world music ensembles — overall the San Francisco-based musician’s work serves up a baseline elixir infused with multiple flavors. Lately, his compositional output includes works featuring crowd-sourced human voices obtained through social media. These works transform the sound of young voices reproducing bird calls or the (forbidden) singing of Iranian women or the chanting of the name of a political prisoner into nearly overwhelming tsunamis of pain and wave-like declarations of liberation and beauty.
Aminikia’s music has been widely performed and he has had a long and productive relationship with the Kronos Quartet. During a conversation about composing, the talk turns to the Flying Carpet Children Music Festival of which he is founder/director. In a comment that might surprise his followers, he says, “I can see myself giving up music one day, but I can’t see myself giving up the children I work with. My life energy is inspired by the energy of those children. It keeps me going. It’s such powerful emotion and force that children carry.”
5 Questions to Sahba Aminikia (Founder, Flying Carpet Festival)
Sahba Aminikia is an Iranian-American composer, pianist, and educator born in post-revolutionary wartime in Iran. Aminikia first explored immersive, visceral music in a successful performance career before pivoting to artistic direction of Flying Carpet Festival, an international music festival serving refugee children in Turkey. At time of writing, Aminikia’s birth country Iran is experiencing significant and violent upheaval. ICIYL offers particular thanks to Sahba for his generous work and shares hope for peace and restoration in Iran, Turkey, and its neighboring region.
Sahba Aminikia’s Flying Carpet Children Festival
Two years ago, 38-year old Iranian-born composer Sahba Aminikia ’13 decided to leave a secure teaching job in San Francisco and, by kismet or intention, join the circus. He has not looked back on his decision to become artistic director of the Flying Carpet Children Festival in war-torn Mardin, Turkey, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey that is currently home to some 5,000 child refugees.
The festival brings together distinguished international performers and composers, including several of Aminikia’s teachers and fellow students from SFCM, circus artists, multi-media producers, trance dancers, as well as traditional Kurdish musicians as part of an effort started by Sirkhane (Circus House), a Turkish non-profit offering free music classes and social circus workshops to children in schools and refugee camps. Founded in 2012 by visual artist and social worker Pinar Demiral, Sirkhane’s mission is “to serve as a catalyst for positive change in the lives of vulnerable children.”
Sahba Aminikia's Flying Carpet Festival Brings Music to Refugee Children in Turkey
Sahba Aminikia hadn’t planned on dancing when he stopped by Club Deluxe in the Haight to unwind and hear a little jazz three years ago. But the band was swinging, and before long, he found himself boogieing with a young Italian woman. The Iranian-born composer was in a very good place in his career, teaching at the Academy of Art University while writing music performed by top-flight ensembles around the world, including Kronos Quartet.
Review: ZOFOMOMA, Melbourne Recital Centre
It is fun to watch Eva-Maria Zimmermann and Keisuke Nakagoshi play the piano. The duo, based in San Francisco, share the one instrument on an otherwise empty stage. They call themselves ‘ZOFO’, a ‘twenty-finger orchestra’, and move together with fluid precision and exceptional co-ordination. Both are charismatic performers who deploy flourishes of foot stomping and vocalisation in crescendos of tension, occasionally manipulating the internal strings of the piano to various effect. It’s a creative and jubilant spectacle to behold.