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Inspired by the ancient city illuminating the East and West, Constantinople was founded in 2001 in Montreal by its artistic director, Kiya Tabassian.
The ensemble has 19 albums to its credit on labels Analekta, Atma, World Village, Buda Musique, Ma Case, Dreyer Gaido and Glossa. Over the course of the decade, Constantinople has created nearly 50 works and travelled to more than 240 cities in 53 countries.
Life & Work
Bio:
Setar virtuoso and acclaimed composer, Kiya Tabassian has carved out a privileged place on the international music scene with his ensemble Constantinople and also as a soloist. Past master in cross-cultural musical encounters, he travels across the five continents for presenting his creations and his music on stages from all over the world.
At 14 years old, Kiya Tabassian emigrates with his family to Quebec, bringing with him a few years of training in Persian scholarly music and his budding career on the Iranian musical scene. Determined to become a musician, composer and, more broadly, a carrier of memory, he pursues his training in Persian music as an autodidact and through his recurrent meetings with Reza Gassemi and Kayhan Kalhor. In parallel, he studies musical composition at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal with Gilles Tremblay.
In 2001, he cofounds Constantinople with the idea of developing an ensemble of musical creations at the crossroads of multiple encounters; drawing from the heritage of the Middle-Ages and the Renaissance, from Europe to the Mediterranean and to the Middle-East. Since then, he has assumed artistic direction and has developed more than fifty programs with his ensemble.
As seasoned migrant, he never ceases to explore different trails: from medieval manuscripts to contemporary aesthetics, from Mediterranean Europe to the East or passing through the open spaces of the Baroque New World. Through the lens of research and creation, he collaborates with leading artists of the international scene such as singers Marco Beasley, Françoise Atlan, Savina Yannatou and Suzie Leblanc; the Mandigo griot Ablaye Cissoko; the Greek ensemble En Chordais, the Belgian duo Belem and the American group The Klezmatics; sarangi virtuoso Dhruba Ghosh, Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh and kamancheh grand master Kayhan Kalhor.
Regularly hosted in some of the most prestigious concert halls and festivals in the world such as the Salle Pleyel in Paris, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Festival of Sacred Music of Fez in Morocco, the Festival d’Aix in France, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Cervantino Festival in Mexico, the Carthage Festival in Tunisia, the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens and BOZAR in Brussels; Tabassian’s music is appreciated and recognized by the public as well as professionals and critics. So far, he has recorded more than 25 albums, including 20 with Constantinople, and has presented nearly 1,000 concerts in more than 240 cities across 54 countries.
He has contributed to many eclectic projects as a composer, performer and improviser. To cite a few, he regularly collaborated with the Société Radio-Canada since 1996 and actively participated in the international project MediMuses from 2002 to 2005. He was a member of a research group on the history and the repertoire of Mediterranean music and acted as contributor to several publishing and recording projects. He also intervened in the Atlas ensemble (Netherlands) since 2009 and contributed to the Atlas Academy as a tutor, a double project aimed at conjoining contemporary music and oral traditions together.
Numerous musical groups and institutions have called on his talents as a composer, including the Montreal Symphonic Orchestra, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Bradyworks and the European Union from Radio-Télévision. He has also composed the music of several documentary and fiction films such as Jabaroot and Voices of the Unheard. In 2017, as part of the 375th anniversary of Montreal, he composed the anthem “Mémoires d’Ahuntsic”, offered as a legacy to the city of Montreal. In 2020, he co-signs with poet Hélène Dorion, the musical and poetic suite “Le temps des forêts”, a poignant artistic work based on memories and lived stories collected from Montreal’s CHSLD residents.
Kiya was a member of the Conseil des arts de Montréal for seven years; including as active chairman of musical decision-making committee for three years. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Conseils des arts et des lettres du Québec. He was also mandated by the Conseil Québécois de la musique to assemble a study committee on the role of world music in the field of concert music.
His desire to establish a space for creation, meetings, exchanges and the transmission of knowledge between professional musicians and the Quebecois public, led him to cofound the Centre des musiciens du monde. Founded in Montreal 2017, he also acts as artistic director of the Centre. Since then, the Centre has granted more than 50 musicians to benefit from the residency programs and to create more than 20 concerts. Tabassian also directs the record collection with the ANALEKTA label, of which the latest releases have won several awards.
Since many years, the ensemble of his work is supported by the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
The Recôncavo is an almost invisible center-of-gravity. Circumscribing the Bay of All Saints, this region was landing for more enslaved human beings than any other such throughout all of human history. Not unrelated, it is also birthplace of some of the most physically & spiritually uplifting music ever made. —Sparrow
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers: Personal recording engineer for Prince, inc. "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"... Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory
I'm Pardal here in Brazil (that's "Sparrow" in English). The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay. They paid.
MATRIX MUSICAL
The Matrix was built below among some of the world's most powerfully moving music, some of it made by people barely known beyond village borders. Or in the case of Sodré, his anthem A MASSA — a paean to Brazil's poor ("our pain is the pain of a timid boy, a calf stepped on...") — having blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south, before he was silenced. (that's me left, with David Dye & Kim Junod for U.S. National Public Radio) ... The Matrix started with Sodré, with João do Boi, with Roberto Mendes, with Bule Bule, with Roque Ferreira... music rooted in the sugarcane plantations of Bahia. Hence our logo (a cane cutter).