Mohammad Reza Azadehfar

Mohammad Reza Azadehfar (Persian: محمدرضا آزاده‌فر‎‎), an ethnomusicologist and santūr performer, was born in 1969 in Isfahan, the Safavid capital of Iran. He started learning the Iranian traditional dulcimer (santūr) under the supervision of Sa’id Na’imimanesh in 1981 and spent some 4 years at the Conservatory of Isfahan. In 1988 he moved to Tehran and attended classes in the santūr given by Faramarz Payvar and Sa’id Sabet.

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Azadehfar is also interested in film studies. He studied cinema at the Iranian Youth Cinema Society in 1982 and in 1988 he entered the faculty of Cinema and Theater at Tehran University of Arts to take a BA in cinema. His special interest in cinema was film scoring and editing. Azadehfar won the prize for best film scoring in 1987 for a short film by Asghar Farhadi and a prize for best editing in 1993 at the National Festival of Youth Cinema.

Since 1993 Azadehfar has mainly focused on theoretical issues of Iranian music. He began his studies by attending an MA research program in Tehran working on the topic of “General Training in Iranian Music.” His dissertation was later published as a book in the Persian language and sold more than 5000 copies. Rhythm is especially interesting to Azadehfar. He learned the Iranian percussion instrument the tombak and moved to Sheffield in England to do a PhD program on “Rhythmic Structure in Iranian Music” in 1999. He finished his PhD program in 2003 and was admitted to a post-doctoral program in SOAS, University of London in the same year. He ended his fellowship in SOAS in 2005 and returned to Iran.

In 2005 Azadehfar was appointed to the Music Faculty in Tehran University of Art. In 2010 he was elected as a Dean of the Music Faculty, a post which he held until 2014. During this time he established the Ethnomusicology program in this faculty and spent some years teaching there. He is now an Associate Professor in this faculty.

In 2014 the Executive Board of ICTM (International Council for Traditional Music) appointed Azadehfar as ICTM Liaison Officer for Iran.