Growing up in Tehran, Iran, Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi couldn’t imagine being anything but a musician. At age 12, she persuaded her parents to let her audition for a conservatory. The odds were stacked against her. “There’s only one music school for girls in Tehran,” she says. Not to mention she studied the most competitive instrument. “Everybody plays the piano,” she says. “But I got in.”
All schools in Iran, including conservatories, are gender segregated. Female artists must abide by modesty laws and a ban on women singing solo in public. Due in part to such restrictions, when it came time to apply for college, Koochakzadeh-Yazdi was determined to leave the country. She applied to a piano performance program in Vancouver, B.C.—and was rejected. So she pivoted, applying to a music composition program despite never having written a score. She’s been composing ever since.
Now Koochakzadeh-Yazdi is a doctoral student in composition at Stanford, combining traditional Persian music with experimental electronic sounds and scoring everything from art exhibits to dance performances to theater and fashion shows. Recently, she collaborated with female artists from Tehran to create the album Dožam, composing each track in a different Persian mode—used to evoke different moods—and blending classical strings with modern electroacoustic sounds.
She also designs new and hybrid instruments, including the alloy resonator, a breastplate-style piece of sonic “armor” inspired by Iranian modesty taboos concerning the female body. The resonator, which she created with her sister, Kayla, is covered with strings and contact microphones that pick up vibrations conducted by the metal, allowing Koochakzadeh-Yazdi to caress, strike, bow, and tap her chest to produce a panoply of sounds in her live performances. She designed the armor to turn her body into her instrument, exposing and protecting her at the same time.
FORM AND FUNCTION: Koochakzadeh-Yazdi’s music reaches across cultures, time periods, and genres. She considers her alloy resonator (bottom) to be sonic “armor.” (Photo, bottom: Cindi Wicklund; top, Toni Bird)
“One of the reasons I made [the resonator] is because the female body exists as a taboo. [As a performer] you put your body on the stage as an expressive force, and everyone is looking at you and your body, but now there’s an armor that’s protecting you.
♦
“The special part of [making Dožam] was working with performers who are based in Iran. They’re all women. Two of them are my best friends. I went to school with them. They are very hardcore, badass performers. The singer got arrested a few weeks ago for singing in public. So, part of [making the album] was trying to showcase their strength.
♦
“I have this collective with my sister, Kayla, called Fashion x Electronics. We focus on embedding fashion as a functional art with electronic music. Our first show was making wearable instruments for dancers and choreographers. There were sensors on the [performers], and sound was modified through their movements and their touch.
♦
“I listened to Persian music for the first 19 years of my life. It’s been in my ear for a very long time. But I learned composition and electronic music here, with rules and techniques and methods that are more commonly used in Western contemporary music.
♦
“What happens when you merge these two different worlds together? There are words we have in Farsi that don’t exist here. There are musical gestures, notations that exist in Persian music that don’t exist in Western classical music.
♦
“I’ve started to love the stage. It’s funny—when I perform electronic music, I don’t get that stage fright that I used to get when playing piano. [Now] I love that adrenaline, and I love that I’m there. I’m in control. I am playing music. I don’t know, I just love it.”
Sarah Lewis, ’24, is a former editorial intern at Stanford. Email her at stanford.magazine@stanford.edu.
