NASIM KHORASSANI

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.

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.

Lei Liang

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.

This concert is made possible with the generous support of Margaret Bates and Scott Johnson and with the special support from the Barbara Barnard Smith Fund for World Musics, Ventura County Community Foundation

The concert appearance of Wu Man is made possible by the generous support of Ruth Eliel and Bill Cooney

There is no intermission during the concert

Friday, June 9, 2023 | 3:30pm

Greenberg Center, Ojai Valley School (lower campus)

Ghost Opera

Wu Man pipa | Attacca Quartet: Amy Schroeder and Domenic Salerni violins

Nathan Schram viola Andrew Yee cello | PeiJu Chien-Pott dancer/choreographer

Jon Reimer director | Nicholas Houfek lighting designer

TAN Dun Ghost Opera

Act I

Bach, Monks, and Shakespeare Meet in Water

Act II

Earth Dance

Act III

Dialogue with “Little Cabbage”

Act IV

Metal and Stone

Act V

Song of Paper

GREENBERG CENTER, OJAI VALLEY SCHOOL (LOWER CAMPUS)

723 EL PASEO ROAD, OJAI