Shahab Paranj, a 2013 graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) with a bachelor's degree in composition, is the recipient of the 2024 Hoefer Prize. Since graduating, his music has been performed around the world, establishing him as a distinctive voice in contemporary classical music. Shahab is an outstanding example of a composer who developed his artistic foundation at SFCM and went on to cultivate a unique and highly personal musical voice. As part of the

A teenage Iranian girl takes part in a robbery but the fun ends there in Pooya Badkoobeh’s moral drama 'Dressage,' which won a special mention in Berlin’s 14plus sidebar. ShahabParanj’s delicate score lends unobtrusive feeling to the scenes. Clear-cut, allegorical and unsettling, Dressage might be viewed as an updated Crime and Punishment in which a 16-year-old girl commits a crime, gets away with it, but then finds she’s lost her moral bearings in the self-centered, mate

This spring, composer and instrumentalist Shahab Paranj has joined The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music as Postdoctoral Scholar of Iranian music. He holds degrees from UCLA, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. A trio of events heralds his arrival—a concert of contemporary and classical Persian music on Sunday, May 21, a pre-concert discussion of the influence of Persian instruments on modern compositions on Friday, May 19, and a follow-u

Through a $5 million pledge by Haleh Emrani in honor of her late husband, Ahmad Gramian, UCLA will establish the Gramian-Emrani Center for Iranian Music in the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. The new center builds on the school of music’s Iranian Music Program, established after a 2018 gift from Farhang Foundation, a nonpolitical, nonreligious, not-for-profit community organization devoted to celebrating and promoting Iranian art and culture, which Gramian chaired. “I am ho