Supported Canada’s celebrated Iranian-Canadian Orchestra with fund development for multiple large-scale projects: performances, national tours, and professional recordings, securing foundational grants.
For several decades during the mid-twentieth century, Radio Tehran’s Golha Program brought a new style of Iranian music to listeners across the country. Employing its now-iconic Golha Radio Orchestra, composers such as Rouhollah Khaleghi developed a new musical language that masterfully integrated the modal and melodic aspects of Iranian Dastgah music with Western classical music’s harmony and orchestration, and featured traditional Iranian instruments such as tar and tonbak alongside orchestral strings and woodwinds. Due to various sociopolitical events, chief among them the 1979 revolution, the music of the Golha orchestra fell out of practice.
Inspired by the iconic Golha Radio Orchestra of 1950s-1970s in Iran, the Canadian Golha Orchestra unites Iranian and Canadian musicians, scholars, and enthusiasts to open new possibilities for not only performing masterpieces of the Golha era, but also generating new conversations about the life and significance of Iranian music and culture in contemporary society.
