Our Stories

Musallam al-Kathiri is a music researcher, arts manager, performer, and composer from Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. He has made important contributions to the collection, documentation, preservation, and dissemination of Omani music.

Zulkifli and Bur’am, the ensemble Zulkifli created and directs, are revitalising community traditions of music making in Banda Aceh, the capital of the Indonesian province of Aceh.

Sain Zahoor, born in 1937 in Pakistan’s Punjab province, has devoted his long life to the performance of mystical Sufi poetry.

Seyyed Mohammad Mousavi founded the Mahoor Institute of Culture and Arts in 1987 to contribute to the development and dissemination of Iranian music and musicology.

Founded in Tehran at the beginning of 2020, the Golshan Ensemble brings together four young artists who had already achieved distinction in their own musical domains.

Zarsanga is a singer from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan who is known as the Queen of Pashtun Folklore for her career-long devotion to the orally transmitted musical traditions of the tribally-organised Pashtuns.

Yasamin Shahhosseini, a native of Tehran, has distinguished herself as a leading young master of the oud. Though the oud has deep roots in Iranian music history, it largely gave way to the tar and kamancha in the performance of the classical dastgah repertoire that was canonised in the …

Yahya Hussein Abdallah is a singer and composer of devotional songs and reciter of the Qur’an from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He credits his mother and father, who composed praise songs in Swahili, for transmitting their musical knowledge to him and teaching him how to shape his voice.

Soumik Datta was born in West Bengal, grew up in Mumbai, and moved to the UK at the age of 14. While studying for a master’s degree in composition at London’s Trinity College of Music, he studied sarod with Pandit Buddhadev Das Gupta during annual trips to Kolkata.

Peni Candra Rini is an Indonesian composer, improviser, vocalist, and educator. She was born into a family of traditional artists and musicians in East Java and studied gamelan music and performance practice (karawitan) at the Institut Seni Indonesia Surakarta, Central Java, where she …