Farya Faraji
Farya Faraji is an Iranian composer, musician and editor living in Canada. He takes an interest in non-Western and historical musical traditions. He began uploading music in 2019 and has been consistently prolific since then, composing over 300 pieces.
His stated aim in his YouTube bio to make music which is as authentic as possible to the tradition each piece is inspired by, doing extensive research to get the tuning, instrumentation, ornamentation, texture and other details correct. The balance between accuracy to the tradition versus creative license varies from piece to piece - in the YouTube descriptions of his pieces he usually specifies how accurate or mot they are.
Inspirations
Musical traditions he has based pieces upon include Albanian, Altai, Armenian (ancient & modern), Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Byzantine, Celtic (inc. Breton, Gaulish, Ancient Irish, Ancient Welsh), Chinese (ancient, medieval & modern), Croatian, Greek (ancient & modern), Iranian (ancient, medieval & modern), Jewish (Sephardic), Kurdish, Levantine Arabic, Montenegrin, Moroccan, Nogai, Old Norse, Ancient Roman, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish (Andalusian, flamenco), Turkic, Turkish (inc. Ottoman), Ukrainian, Renaissance Western European, Medieval Western European.
He has also written Indian-inspired music which is much looser and less close in its inspiration than his other music (i.e. unlike his other music, it’s not specifically based on a specific place or time, like “carnatic music” or anything like that).
Official pages
- YouTube channel: Features both his musical compositions, and educational essays about misrepresentation of musical traditions in media
- Bandcamp discography
- Soundcloud discography
- Spotify discography
- LinkedIn profile