Gusto
(2012)14'
Sweden
Advanced
Orchestra
Farangis Nurulla-Khoja (born 1972) is a Tajik-Canadian composer, who explores timbre within her contemporary compositions of symphonic, chamber, vocal, and electro-acoustic music. Among her many honors is a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Composition in 2018.
Farangis Nurulla-Khoja currently resides in Montréal, Quebec, but was born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan and is related to the well-known Tajik composer, Ziyodullo Shahidi. She not only earned a Ph.D. of Fine Arts in Composition (2004) from University of Gothenburg, Sweden, but has also studied at the University of California in San Diego as well as at IRCAM in Paris. Her early education was in piano at the Ziyodullo Shahidi Special Music School (1979-1990). In addition, she was a researcher in ethnomusicology at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (1992-1993) where she studied both Tajik and Chinese music traditions. Nurulla-Khoja has studied with an international array of composers from Ole Lützow-Holm (b. 1954) to Roger Reynolds (b. 1934) and from Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943) to Philippe Leroux (b. 1953). She was composer in residence at Fondation Royaumont (2005–06), working on the project Maqam et Créations; at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation (2010) in Italy; and at the Experimental Studio (2010–11) in Freiburg, Germany.