Violinist and DMA student Negar Afazel hasn’t been home to Iran in six years, but the homecoming she created with her compositional debut, “Women, Life, Freedom,” on March 2, 2024, stretched across oceans and time. Titled after the slogan of recent women-led Iranian protests, Afazel’s 45-minute, multi-movement work includes her solo violin and spoken word performances with vocals by the all-female Peabody Camerata. Funding from the Presser Music Award and a Dean’s Incentive Grant enabled Afazel, who was born and raised in Tehran, to commission four female composers from around the world for new work based on poems by female Persian poets from the 18th to 21st centuries. This cross-disciplinary collaboration embraces all that matters artistically to Negar: the power of home, art, social justice, and female voices, and honoring their lived stories.
Was your first love music or poetry?
Probably painting, because I started painting before I could talk or write. I definitely am a lover of poetry. I had pieces published as a teenager and continue to write. I started playing violin when I was 6. I can’t forget seeing my mom moved by Mozart’s Requiem or [hearing] my grandma who had Alzheimer’s remember every song she sang when she was young. I chose a music career because of music’s magnificent power to heal. At Western Michigan University, I completed a one-year program in music therapy in addition to my master’s in violin performance.
When did your activism begin?
As teenagers, my parents were part of the resistance at the beginning of the Islamic Revolution. My dad was imprisoned a few times. He teaches physics, and both my mom and dad are writers and editors at the Encyclopedia for Young People, which is part of the NGO the Children’s Book Council of Iran; the current regime has been trying to shut it down for years but can’t. Together, my upbringing created my desire to use my art to speak out for the truth and to find ways through my work to resist peacefully. Realistically, my composition is not going to change the regime or bring back the dead, but I look at it as healing and a representative medium for my culture and people.
How did the idea for “Women, Life, Freedom” germinate?
I do improvisations with other musicians but never thought I would be a composer. When the [women-led] movement happened in Iran, I thought if I am not there, what can I do? I wanted to contribute and always wanted to create something new by adding to traditional work. Thanks to the mentorship and enormous support of LAUNCHPad at Peabody, I wrote grant proposals to the Presser Foundation and the Peabody Dean’s Incentive Grant. When I was funded, I realized that my bold idea was going to work.
We need collaboration and togetherness more than anything else to create something big and meaningful. For the premiere, I played different portions on a violin loaned by Violins of Hope, which is a wonderful collection of instruments [rescued from the Holocaust], mostly belonging to Jews. Asking for a violin was my teacher Vadim Gluzman’s idea. Since one of the poets I chose is a Persian Jew, and because of my Jewish roots, Professor Gluzman suggested more connections to make the piece more universal. During one of the movements, the choir, directed by Professor Beth Willer, is whispering the names of victims. The story starts with immigration and moves to the feelings of the women who are suppressed, wanting to be loved and free and knowing a better future is coming. I end with a line by Forough Farrokhzad, “I will greet the sun again.”