A Life in Music

Hormoz Farhat obituary: Gifted composer and much-loved teacher at TCD
The Irish Times, 9th October 2021

Hormoz Farhat, who has died aged 93, was a gifted and distinctive composer of contemporary classical music, and a much-loved and revered teacher during his tenure as Professor of Music at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), from 1982 until 1995. An expert on the ethnomusicology of his native Iran he gave up his post as Professor of Music at the University of Tehran and fled to the west in the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He was not to return until 2018.

Hormoz Farhat (1928-2021): A Personal Remembrance
Harry White, 2021

Professor Hormoz Farhat, who has died at the great age of 93, was a wellbeloved and distinguished member of the Irish community of musicians,
composers and scholars. He was also an erstwhile member of the SMI, and an exceptionally benign, considerate and thoughtful presence at recitals, concerts, scholarly meetings and book launches from his appointment to the Chair of Music at Trinity College Dublin from 1982 until late in 2019, when serious illness forced him to withdraw from the musical environment he had graced for almost forty years. Indeed, prior to his arrival in Dublin, he had occupied a senior research fellowship at Queen’s University Belfast, where he came in 1979 at the invitation of the late Professor John Blacking, following the turbulence and mortal danger in which he found himself during the Iranian Revolution.

Former Trinity Chair of Music, Composer Hormoz Farhat, honoured in homeland Iran
Trinity College Dublin

Trinity’s former Chair of Music, Professor Hormoz Farhat spoke at a ceremony organized by the Iranian Artists Forum in honour of the composer’s professional career.

Speed and Mideast Echoes Add to a Pianist’s Palette
Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 7th September 2011

At his recital on Tuesday evening at Merkin Concert Hall Mr. Nasseri focused mostly on the Romantics, but he opened with the premiere of Hormoz Farhat’s Sonata No. 2 (2011). Mr. Farhat, an Iranian composer, wrote to Mr. Nasseri’s strengths: the piece opens with a Lisztian flourish that quickly morphs into a theme with modal touches and graceful decoration that give it a vaguely Middle Eastern accent. East and West flirt throughout the piece. Structurally it is a classic sonata form, and in parts of its slow, expressive central movement, modal melodies give way to passages cast in a mildly angular, modernist style.