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When she was a child, she wanted to be a rock star. At age four, she wanted to play the violin because she thought it was a guitar. By age six, Thea Farhadian was taking violin lessons from some of the top music teachers, including Gerard Svazlian, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Trained as a classical violinist, Thea defied her parents’ more practical expectations and became a professional violinist with the Berkeley Symphony under Conductor Kent Nagano, now conductor of the Orchestre Symphonique Montreal. “It was an honor to play under him,” Thea said.

Thea’s parents loved music, but expected that their oldest daughter would pursue something more practical as a career. She realized much later that her parents were children the Depression, which affected their views on the place music should play in one’s life. Though her father was an accomplished violist with a budding talent aborted by a World War II injury, her aunt a classical pianist, curtailed by lack of support, and her grandfather a kanun player, composing in the Armenian style, music was all around her, but never viewed as a viable profession. This made pursuing music in such a singular way a challenge for Thea at times.

If the clock were thirty hours instead of twenty-four, Farhadian would have remained with the Berkeley Symphony under Kent Nagano. She loved the orchestra and the contemporary classical music Nagano brought to the intellectual audiences in Berkeley. However, Thea was called to create, and after ten years as a classical freelancer, she found her composing interest and allied with two San Francisco Bay Area groups, Composers Cafeteria and Ovaryaction. They played and performed one another’s compositions. “I found my own voice through improvising and working with others,” she said.

A third-generation Armenian-American, Thea is the granddaughter of Valentine Babagian, who survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Her grandmother escaped Eastern Turkey and the Genocide as a nine-year-old stowaway on a ship to America. She accompanied her mother and sister after losing her father and brother in the genocide. The family only had money for two tickets. In spite of her trauma, which she spoke little about, Thea’s grandmother did say, “There were some good Turks. Many tried to help us.”

While Thea is several generations removed from the catastrophe, her Armenian roots propelled her to curate, along with Anahid Kassabian, the Armenian Film Festival, first launched at the Cantor Film Center on the New York University campus in 2002. Farhadian, Kassabian and Hrayr Eulmessekian co-curated the Armenian Film Festival in San Francisco in 2004 and 2006. Not wanting to deliver a genocide-only film festival, the three brought in contemporary Armenian films by and about Armenians, including biographies, features, documentaries, and shorts about everything from feminism to disability, from racism to gender bending. Their goal was to reach Armenian and general audiences and present the complexity in contemporary Armenian life from Armenia and the Diaspora.

Following a master’s degree in interdisciplinary arts at San Francisco State University, Farhadian taught violin in public schools for the next ten years. Drawn to other styles, she studied Arabic classical music in Cairo with Alfred Gamil, Georges Lamman in San Francisco, and Simon Shaheen in New York City. In 2007, she completed an MFA in Electronic Music at Mills College in Oakland, and was influenced by electronic and improvised music mavericks Maggi Payne, John Bishoff, Chris Brown, and Fred Frith, pioneers in electronic music and recording.

She’s performed solo electronics in Berkeley, Berlin, Italy, New York, and San Francisco, and sound art in Armenia, Scotland, Switzerland, and Yemen. With residencies in Amman, Jordan, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Farhadian expanded her sound composition repertoire. Given an artist-in-residency appointment at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, CA, Farhadian developed the work on her first solo electronic music composition release, Tectonic Shifts, from the Creative Sources Recordings label, launched at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival in 2016 to rave reviews. One reviewer, Gino Robair, in Electronic Musician, said, “Real-time computer processing and improvisation are a tricky combination, but violinist Thea Farhadian handles both with exceptional skill and musicality “Farhadian uses Max/MSP to extend her instrument’s timbral and rhythmic palette. “Simultaneously challenging and beautiful.” Textura calls Thea Farhadian “an innovative violinist, composer, improviser, label founder and educator with home bases in San Francisco and Berlin. She’s covered an incredible amount of ground in her life,” and Rebecca Wishnia of the San Francisco Classical Voice calls Farhadian’s sounds “lyrical and haunting.” Her 2015 recordings RedBlue (with guitarist Dean Santomieri) and eXcavations (with double bassist Klaus Kürvers), were issued by BlackCopper Editions, a label she founded dedicated to improvised and experimental music.

Listening to Farhadian’s violin with found objects, like rolled-up tinfoil processed through a synthesizer, at the annual New Music Bay Area Solstice Concert, Chapel of the Chimes Mausoleum and Columbarium (designed by Julia Morgan), reminds one of the bold sounds John Cage created in the 1960s. “Musicians attaching objects to instruments to create a different sound started in the 1960s and opens up and expands the vocabulary of contemporary music. It comes from a tradition of experimentation. I would characterize my music as primarily abstract, very sound-based material that integrates tonality and micro tonality,” Farhadian said.

Thea Farhadian on violin.

Photo by Charles Armirkhanian, Other Minds

Farhadian hasn’t always wanted to compose. Trained in classical music, she was taught to be a performer, and that performers and composers are really separate. The old view of composition—writing notes on a staff of music—did not resonate with Thea. As a composer/improviser, starting with the Mills College community, she “improvised and composed at the same time. In some sense, you embrace everything you know and abandon everything you know at the same time. This mode resonates for me. I enjoy working with colleagues who work this way,” she explained.

Not confined to the strict definition of music, Farhadian has explored the world of sound in her audio piece, Voices Behind the Veil, based on interviews with five Muslim women in Egypt—from unveiled to hijab-wearing, to full-veil-niqab-wearing fervent Muslims. Farhadian wanted to subvert the Western gaze and present Muslim women’s views of wearing the veil or not wearing the veil from their own points of view. Set against the soundscape of Cairo street noises and the voices of the Muslim women in Arabic and English, the piece is designed to explode Western myths of veiling.

Working in collaboration is one of the ways Farhadian transcends the solo nature of performance. In her duets, she is both composing and improvising on the fly. There’s a shared musical space. Farhadian, formerly a classical musician, and Santomieri, formerly a rock musician, work with both structured and free improvisations. With eXcavations, double bassist Klaus Kürvers and violinist Thea Farhadian integrate raw string sounds with a rusty character. The result sounds both old and new. A poetic archiving, in a way.

Thea Farhadian and Dean Santomieri.

Photo by Viola Wu

Farhadian’s music path has not come without obstacles. The hardest time in her personal history came when she was in a relationship with a female partner from another country. Most of her family did not accept Thea’s partner. Her father, ill with cancer at the time, was the most kind and accepting, and that meant a lot to Thea. Much later on, her mother came to respect Thea’s life choices. “In the end, I think having experienced being an outsider makes me much more empathetic to people regardless of their backgrounds or experiences,” she said.

First and foremost, Thea Farhadian is an artist. She’s paid the price and “wants to be seen for who I am and for my work to be heard and appreciated for what it is without my sexuality contextualizing it. That said, I do like the term queer as it is a word chosen by a younger generation and it takes what was originally a negative term and transforms it.”

Her advice to young queer artists and musicians: “Don’t give up!”

“I do like the term queer as it is a word chosen by a younger generation and it takes what was originally a negative term and transforms it.”

Her advice to young queer artists and musicians: “Don’t give up!”

Thea Farhadian