Farya Faraji is a multilingual Iranian singer, composer and musician who lives in Quebec, Canada. He is known for his arrangements and resulting performances of extensively researched historical music, from different time periods and cultures. He also composes and performs folk music and historically inspired original music.

Farya was born in Iran to a musical Mazanderani family; his mother plays santour, which she learned to play from her father, an astrophysicist and music teacher who taught both violin and santour. Farya’s uncle studied traditional Iranian music at the Honarestan Mooseghi in Tehran and plays both setar and oud.

Farya spent some of his childhood living in the south of France, before moving with his family to Quebec. He currently lives in Laval, just outside Montreal. Farya’s native language is Mazanderani; he also speaks French, English, and Farsi (Persian). He performs songs in an array of languages, such as: Polish, Turkish, Welsh, Arabic, Portuguese, Armenian, Serbian, and many others.

Farya plays a variety of instruments, including the santour, bağlama, kopuz, Kurdish tanbur, cura, Ancient Greek lyre, Mesopotamian lyre and Germanic lyre. He takes an interest in the diversity of modern and historical Eurasian musical traditions. His stated aim is to make music which is as authentic as possible to the tradition each piece is inspired by, doing extensive research to get the tuning, instrumentation, ornamentation, texture and other details correct.

In his work, Farya both recreates historical music as accurately as possible and creates historically themed music with some creative license. He also composes modern folk songs in specific music traditions utilizing extensive research into those traditions. The balance between accuracy to the tradition versus creative license varies from piece to piece - in the descriptions of his pieces he usually specifies how accurate or not they are.

Musical traditions he has based pieces upon include Albanian, Altai, Armenian (ancient, medieval & modern), Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Celtic (inc. Breton, Gaulish, Ancient Irish, Ancient Welsh), Chinese (ancient, medieval & modern), Croatian (inc. Istrian scale), Greek (ancient, Byzantine & modern), Iranian (ancient, medieval & modern), Jewish (Sephardic), Kurdish, Levantine Arabic, Montenegrin, Moroccan, Nogai, Old Norse, Ancient Roman, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish (Andalusian, flamenco), Turkic, Turkish (inc. Ottoman), Ukrainian and historical Western European (medieval, renaissance & early modern).

Farya has also written Indian-inspired music which is much looser and less close in its inspiration than his other music (i.e. unlike his other music, it’s not specifically based on a specific place or time, like “carnatic music” or anything like that).

While a large selection of his music is available on streaming services, a more comprehensive catalog of his music is hosted on YouTube. His YouTube channel also features educational video essays about misrepresentations of musical traditions in media and music history. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.