Kiya Tabassian and Sandeep Bhagwati are co-directors of Sound of Montréal. Both are experienced composers and have worked with inter-traditional ensembles for many years.
Directors
Sandeep Bhagwati
Sandeep Bhagwati is a multiple awardwinning composer, theatre director and media artist. He studied at Mozarteum Salzburg (Austria), Institut de Coordination Acoustique/Musique IRCAM Paris (France) and graduated with a Diplom in Composition from Hochschule für Musik und Theater München (Germany) His compositions and comprovisations in all genres (including 6 operas) have been performed by leading performers at leading venues and festivals worldwide. He has directed international music festivals and intercultural exchange projects with Indian and Chinese musicians and leading new music ensembles. He was a Professor of Composition at Karlsruhe Music University, and Composer-in-Residence at the IRCAM Paris, ZKM Center for Arts and Media Karlsruhe, Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, Institute for Electronic Music Graz, CalArts Los Angeles, Heidelberg University and Tchaikovsky Conservatory Moscow. He also was a guest professor at Heidelberg University in 2009 and has been invited as a visiting research fellow to the University of Arts Berlin in 2013/14.
As Canada Research Chair for Inter-X Arts at Concordia University Montréal since 2006 he currently directs matralab, a research/creation center for intercultural and interdisciplinary arts. His current work centers on comprovisation, intertraditional aesthetics, the aesthetics of interdisciplinarity, gestural theatre, sonic theatre and interactive visual and nonvisual scores. From 2008 to 2011, he also was the director of Hexagram Concordia, a centre for research-creation in media arts with a faculty of 45 artist-researchers and extensive state-of-the-art facilities. Since 2013, he also is the artistic director and conductor of Ensemble Extrakte Berlin.
Kiya Tabassian
Kiya Tabassian was born in 1976, in Tehran, Iran, immigrating to Montreal in 1990. He trained in Persian music under Reza Ghasemi and Kayhan Kalhor and studied musical composition at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal with Gilles Tremblay.
In 1998, he co-founded Constantinople, a Montreal based ensemble, which has earned an international reputation for its unique juxtaposition of early musical sources and the living traditions of the Middle East. He has recorded 11 CDs for the Atma and Analekta labels and has created with Constantinople over 35 original programs performing them at some of the most prestigious festivals and venues such as Salle Pleyel (Paris), Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (France), Festival de Musiques Sacrées de Fès (Morocco), Festival d’Ile de France (Paris), Festival Stimmen (Germany), Festival de Mexico en el Centro historico (Mexico), Schwetzinger SWR Festival (Germany) and Orford Music Festival (Canada). Over the past decade, he has staged nearly 400 concerts in 95 cities in 20 different countries.