Elmir Mirzoev's short biography.

 Elmir MIRZOEV was born in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1970. He entered the Baku State Music Academy in 1989 studying compostion with Faraj Karaev, the son of Kara Karaev who is considered to be the Father of the Modern Azeri school of composition.In 1994, he participated in an international composition course, led by James Dillon and Ole Lützhow-Holm at the University of Gothenburg. After completing his studies, in 1995, he was named Artistic Director of the Initiative Center of Contemporary Music - Ensemble SoNoR, perhaps the most important promoting center of new music and collective ensemble for New Music in Azerbaijan.



Mirzoev's participation in the "Musik aus Aserbaidschan" Festival in Winterthur/Switzerland during 1995 lead to three commissions from the Swiss Pro Helvetica Cultural Foundation, (for TaG ensemble (7 musicians), for Jacquiline Ott, percussion & piano and for Christoph Jäggin, guitarist) and a series of invitation at International New Music Festivals, including the GIFT International Festival of Arts, Tbilisi/Georgia, the 5th International Young Composers Meeting, led by Louis Andriessen, Michael Smetanin and Ensemble de ereprijs in Apeldoorn/Holland, the "Asian Music Week" in Yogyakarta/Indonesia, the "Musica Nova" Festival of Contemporary Music in Sofia/Bulgaria, and the "New Music Marathon" with an hour-long concert and workshop in Prague/Czech Republic. Since 1998, he has served as Professor of Composition at the Baku State Music Academy. His works continue to be programmed in festivals such as the "Ilkhom XX" Contemporary Music Festival in Tashkent/Uzbekistan, "november music" Contemporary Music Festival in Germany, Holland and Belgium, the "Asian Music Week" in Yokohama/Japan, the "Silk Sound Road" Festival in Basel/Switzerland, the "2 day and 2 nights" Contemporary Art Festival in Odessa/Ukraine, III European Composers Informal Meeting in Baku/Azerbaijan and IV European Composers Informal Meeting in Krakow/Poland, the "Young. Euro. Classic." Festival in Berlin/Germany and the "Roaring Hoofs" Contemporary Music Festival in Mongolia. Peter Keuschnig and Roland Freisitzer (Austria), Dragomir Yossifov (Bulgaria), Einar Nielsen (Denmark), Bernhard Wulff (Germany), Wim Boerman (Holland), Fritz Voeglin (Switzerland), Volodymyr Runchak (Ukraine), among others, have conducted his music.


His works have been performed by SoNoR Ensemble of Baku, the Ensemble Musica Nova (Bulgaria), the TaG ensemble (Switzerland), Guitarist Christoph Jäggin, Percussionist Jacqueline Ott, Saxophonist Paul Wehage, the Ensemble De Ereprijs (Holland), the Sinfonieorchester Basel (Switzerland), the Trio Obscura (Sweden), the ALEA Ensemble (Macedonia), and the Göteborg University Ensemble (Sweden). and Freiburg Percussion Ensemble (Germany).

Эльмир Мирзоев, 

Elmir Mirzəyev

"cancion de cuna" (2001) Ensemble SoNoR, дирижер Володимир Рунчак, солистка Фарида Мамедова. Запись из Кonzerthaus, Berlin, 11.08.01 

Baku International Jazz Festival 2009, 21st - 27th of October

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Azerbaijani Republic has released the schedule for a long-awaited Jazz Festival

This will be the 7th in a line of festivals which have included concerts in Baku by such world famous stars as Al Jarreau, Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Toots Thielemans, Maynard Ferguson, Billy Cobham and many others.

This year’s upcoming festival will be no exception, arriving in Baku will be such jazz favourites as Richard Bona and Branford Marsalis.

The Israeli group “Hard Jazz Knights” bring to the festival their successful project, ‘Jazzing the Beatles’, in which the sounds of the jazz imagination are applied to the well-known compositions of the Liverpool foursome…

For further information, please go to http://www.jazz.az/

Union of Young Musicians of Azerbaijan

Let's review what we have done, what we are to do, and where we are now...

Union of Young Musicians of Azerbaijan is founded in the beginning of December 2008. I can not put the exact date because there was no idea when it should be decided to create a union or executive non-profit group to spread academical music in Azerbaijan, but there are names who contributed in realization by hard attempts to make a concert happen with a modest repertoir which consisted of quite young and inexperienced composers who are Ayaz Gambarli (24), Said Ganiyev (25), Firudin Allahverdi (28), Tahir Ibishov (22), Turker Gasimzadeh (21), and Mohammed Ansari.

Naturally, it has become a belief of the local people that the youth is not capable of bringing variety in activity of society because of the lack of the USSR educational system which left no chance to show the youth’s capability of creativeness and basic role in establishment of strong culture since 1990s. It was not the first attempt to bring the world music to Azerbaijan. Well, I do not want to write down all the history of classical music, then romantic, modern, post-modern and eventually, contemporary music taught, composed, and performed in Azerbaijan since 1930s. There were many proffessional arts organizations which significantly arranged educational renovation in local music that as usually ended with collapse of these organizations. I do not want to question why this process happens this way. Anyways, this group of youth also tried their hard, but this time under the name of “my own sake”.

The first concert was very naïve, and the right one, to see what could the youth do if they had a chance. Hence, the first concert was named - “What is the youth doing?”

We heard many critisizing approach to this event. An effective way to explain to critisizing individuals about non-profitness of this event was, to organize another concert.

Concert Clarinetissimo: Dedicated to a professor of Baku Musical Academy Rasul RASULOV

This was the second attempt to involve crowd in adopting the fact that there is a layer of youth that is not interested in anything else, but migration into World Culture. In another hand, it could be accepted as a new call for a master by whom the students Anar Mamedov, Veli Budagov (both clarinet players) would love to study further, and not stop in the middle of their way to a bigger scene to play W. A. Mozart's Clarinet concert in A major with a proffesional Orchestra.

Unfortunately, the most probable goal of invited honorable and special guests was to check what again the youth was doing without a permission of older proffesionals (according to local custom). The youth was trying to imply the proffesionals to take a look at the hall where they could meet familiar faces only. It said itself about the problem of local Culture in Azerbaijan - the gate of East-West trade and culture, the country of the first eastern Opera, where classical and other academic music became a sort of unwillingly imported article.

Discovering for another time, a trouble in cultural adaptation by local people the goal of UYMA became to influence the people in recognition of World Culture where culture speaks in at least 270 different languages.

A lookahead now is another Azeri-Ukrainian co-operational project which will try to be organized in Baku.

to be continued...

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