The voice of women singers in Iran will never be muted, their strong voices will be heard in the world! We will go on with our music! Hope for peace and freedom for all humans in any part of this planet!
Inner Unity Ensemble is a new music project founded and curated by Ethnomusicologist, YALDA YAZDANI and MAHAN MIRARAB Musical director and Guitar player in beginning of 2023 proudly with presence of one of the most talented female singers of Iran, SAMIN GHORBANI.
Through the last decade, Europe-based non-European musicians, from different diasporas could get chances to raise their voices and show the creativity and the complexity of their classical/ traditional & folklore music. In Europe, there are many musicians from all around the world. There are musicians who have been studying here as well as musicians who came here with their cultural assets which were classical or folklore music from their own regions. One of the most devastating terms that we have been challenged with during all these years was the genre “World Music”. When we put all the cultures which are not rooted in European & United States, in just one category, we will deny the complexity, dignity, and diversity inside the rest of the world. So in this project for us it is is very important to be aware of this fact and try to have equality between art and culture from Europe and the rest of the world.
Mahan Mirarab, the musical director of the ensemble, has lived in Austria since 2009 and has worked as a freelance musician since 2010.(as instrumentalist, composer, arranger, and musical director), Yalda Yazdani, the curator of Inner Unity Ensemble ensemble is an ethnomusicologist who curated different music festivals in Germany (Female Voice of Iran and Afghanistan in collaboration with Contemporary Opera Berlin) by focusing on the female voices in Middle-East.
In February 2023 in the Duisburg Philharmonie We came together for the first performance from different musical backgrounds and created a repertoire that contains our individual musical languages. We try to find a sound by using the modal & microtonal concepts in Iranian Radif or Arabic/Turkish Maqams accompany it with different harmonic concepts in European classical music and jazz. Since Rhythm and dance define a big part of each culture, we want to have awareness about the rhythmic accents which we can use in our arrangements.
In our ensemble, we have a diverse collection of sounds and melodies which is a good example of practicing diversity in music. Samin Ghorbani is an Iranian singer with Azerbaijani roots. With the quality of her singing, she shows how the a human voice can touch people, no matter in which language or dialect the words are. Uygur Vural is a unique cello player from Turkey and he has his special way of playing Turkish Maqams on his cello. By his great sense of rhythm, he can change his role as a cello player, bassist, or percussion player in the ensemble. Valentina Bellanova is one of the rare European musicians who were so enthusiastic about Arabic & Turkish Maqam music, that she started going deep into them and learning a new musical language. She plays different wind instruments and she has the ability to bring a lot of colors and melodies to our music. Kimia Bani plays percussion. Her main instrument is Persian Daf, but she also plays different percussion instruments. Shabnam Parvaresh is a clarinet player, composer. She connects the elements of Iranian classical music and Jazz in a very creative way in her performances.
