About
Asal Vaseghnia
Producer · Composer · Singer · Multi-Instrumentalist
Asal Vaseghnia is a composer, producer, singer and qanun player from Isfahan, Iran, now based in New York. Her music sets the qanun and her voice against electronic, ambient and fusion sound, and most of it begins with Persian poetry.
Iran
She grew up in a family that loved art and artists, and travelled widely in Iran and abroad. Hearing people from other cultures gave her a curiosity she still works through in her music. She started at nine on a children’s flute, then moved to tombak, cajón and other hand drums, studying tombak with Shahin Sheikh Bahai and piano with Ali Nouri. At thirteen she wrote her first compositions, for Iranian percussion ensembles, and decided music would be her life’s work.
She entered music school at fifteen. She loved the piano but wanted a sound of her own, and found it in the qanun, which she made her main instrument and studied with Amir Hossein Mokhtari. She began composing for it straight away.
France
At eighteen she moved to France, first to the south and then to Paris, where she studied ethnomusicology at Université Paris 8. There she worked with the composer and conductor Arash Fouladvand, composing and orchestrating for a philharmonic orchestra joined by a Middle Eastern ensemble. Writing for fifty musicians at once changed how she thinks about composition, and her performances with him in Paris and London remain her highlights.
United States
She is now completing a master’s in studio composition and music technology at Purchase College, State University of New York. She has performed in Isfahan, Tehran, Nice and the south of France, Paris and London.
How she writes
A song can start from a phrase, a melody, or the sound of two or more instruments together. Emotion and the relationships between people drive most of it, and so does poetry.
“Most often it comes from Persian words. When I read them, they go straight to my heart.”
Sheytanake Man
Her first single, Sheytanake Man, means “my little devil.” The lyrics are by her closest friend, a poet in Iran, whose words Asal heard as feelings she had always carried but never written down. The song turns to the old story of the angel who would not bow to humankind, out of a love for God too complete to bow to anyone else.
Resilience. Unity. Freedom.