Parisa Sabat

Praised by the Chicago Live Music Examiner as “a 21st century composer on the rise”, Iranian-Canadian composer, Parisa Sabet, creates a sonic world that is all at once rich, layered, lyrical, and accessible. She draws from both the drama and the commonplace in her personal experiences to integrate unique elements of Eastern and Western musical languages, incorporating varied timbral and instrumental effects

Parisa is a two-time recipient of the Theodoros Mirkopoulos Fellowship in Composition, as well as Ontario Arts Council Project Grant, 2016 Irene R. Miller and Anoush Khoshkish Fellowship in Music, the 2015 Ann H Atkinson Prize in Composition, the 2014-2015 Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the John Weinzweig Graduating Scholarship. She was also a recipient of a 2013-2014 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship, focusing her research on the indigenous music by women in her native Iran, and wrote an original composition related to this theme. In addition, she was the 2018 K.M. Hunter Artist Award finalist. Parisa was recipient of the 2019 Tecumesh Sherman Rogers Graduating Award given to a graduating student deemed by the University to have the greatest potential for making an important contribution to the field of music.

Professionally, her compositions have won various competitions and have been performed in different venues in North America. Sabet’s solo alto flute piece, Nay Nava, won the 2011 Timothy Munro (eighth blackbird’s flutist) Solo Flute Competition in conjunction with the CCPA composition program. In addition, Nawruz for wind ensemble was selected for the 2011 Chicago College of Performing Art’s Wind Ensemble Composition Contest and has been broadcast several times on Chicago’s Classical and Folk Music Radio (98.7 WFMT).  Her choral composition, Universal Brotherhood, was selected by MacMillan Singers to be performed at their Contemporary Showcase Concert in 2014.  Her recent song cycle, Dance in Your Blood, based on three Rumi poems won the Top Prize place at the Violet Archer Composer’s Prize 2014 and is published in the Plangere Canadian Composers Series.