Toronto, December 7, 2020 – Parisa Sabet is the recipient of this year’s $7,000 Kathleen McMorrow Music Award. The award recognizes the composition and presentation of contemporary classical music by Ontario composers. This award is in support of Sabet’s new opera Vanishing Point, in collaboration with Nika Khanjani and commissioned through the Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes program.
About Parisa Sabet
Award-winning composer Parisa Sabet writes music that is commissioned and performed internationally. Her distinctive musical language springs from her Iranian roots, Western education, and passion for socially engaged arts. Interweaving sounds both recognizable and new, her compositions evoke emotions, conjure images, and relate stories, often about pressing social issues.
Recent premieres of her music have taken place in her adopted home of Toronto as well as in Seattle, Sydney and Chicago. In 2019, her production The Dawn Initiative presented world premieres of music by an international lineup of composers, including Sabet, who crafted pieces to inspire social unity. Previously, as co-artistic director of the Israeli-Iranian Musical Initiative, she produced new-music concerts that featured compositions by herself and two Israeli composers.
Sabet earned the Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Music degrees in composition from the University of Toronto, where her honors included the Mirkopoulos and Miller/Khoshkish fellowships and the Tecumesh Sherman Rogers Graduating Award given to a musician on the cusp of making important contributions to the field. She completed her Bachelor of Music degree with honors at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
About the Award
The Kathleen McMorrow Music Award was established in 2015. Kathleen McMorrow headed the Music Library at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Music from 1974 to 2013. She established the award to recognize and encourage the composition and presentation of Canadian contemporary classical music.
The Ontario Arts Foundation manages the endowment that funds the award. The Ontario Arts Council is responsible for the selection process. The award recipient is selected from the applicants to the Ontario Arts Council Music Creation Projects program deadlines.
Previous award winners include Jordan Pal (2019), Chan Ka Nin (2018) and Frank Horvat (2017).
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For more information, please contact:
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Alan Walker |
Established in 1991, the Ontario Arts Foundation (OAF) is passionately committed to building long-term support for the arts in Ontario. In 2019-2020, the OAF paid over $4.25 million in endowment income and $270,000 in awards and scholarships.
For more than 55 years, the Ontario Arts Council (OAC) has played a vital role in promoting and assisting the development of the arts for the enjoyment and benefit of Ontarians. In 2019-2020 the Ontario Arts Council invested $51.9 million in 197 communities across Ontario through 1,965 grants to individual artists and 1,152 grants to organizations.
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