Dr Saeid Kordmafi

Saeid Kordmafi is a musicologist, performer, and composer with a special interest in cross-cultural music studies and music-making in the Islamic world. His research focuses particularly on the history of music theory and its relationship to creative practice in classical traditions of the maqām realm, casting a wide net over music analysis and practice-based research. 

Kordmafi completed a BA in Classical Iranian Music and an MA in Art Studies (Music Studies) at the University of Tehran, and received his PhD from the Department of Music at SOAS University of London, where he was supported by a Felix Full Scholarship. He has received the BFE Fieldwork Grant (2015), the AAWM Rob Schultz Junior Scholar Award (2019), and the British Institute for Persian Studies Research Grant (2020). In 2021, he was recognised by the British Academy under its Global Talent scheme for his potential for academic leadership in UK higher education, alongside his research, teaching, and curriculum development roles. Saeid is currently Co-Investigator on the UKRI-funded research project "Maqām Beyond Nation" and Associate Editor of Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, an anthology forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. 

Kordmafi has worked in the Music Departments of the Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia, as a senior researcher, and Tehran University of Art, as a lecturer. He was also a member of the editorial board of Mahoor Music Quarterly in Iran for twelve years and served as an expert advisor on teaching resources for the Open University in the UK. He has published around thirty journal and encyclopaedia articles, book chapters, interviews, and research reports. 

Alongside his academic work, Kordmafi is a professional composer and soloist on the Iranian santur. He studied classical Iranian music with a number of distinguished musicians in Iran and has explored a range of performance and compositional approaches within the tradition. Saeid's creative practice is closely informed by his historical-analytical research. He is one of the leading musicians of a revival movement that seeks to revitalise the pre-modern aesthetic in Iranian music, an undertaking inspired by historical evidence as well as by neighbouring traditions that have partly preserved a previously shared musical heritage. 

Kordmafi has participated in performances, recordings, and workshops across the Middle East, Central Asia, Europe, and the United States, and has conducted collaborative music-making projects with acclaimed musicians from Central Asia and the Arab world. He co-founded Rahâ Ensemble in 2007, with which he won First Prize at the International Mugam Festival in Baku in 2013. He has released six CDs in Iran, both as a composer-performer and as a performer, and contributed to Phoenix of Persia, a collaborative compositional work accompanying an illustrated children's book based on an epic story from the Shāhnāmeh (published in the UK by Tiny Owl in 2019). 

More recently, as part of "Maqām Beyond Nation", Saeid led the Nasim-e Tarab Ensemble, which toured Europe and the UK in autumn 2024. The ensemble performed a suite of classical Iranian music composed and arranged by Saeid, and the project was recorded in London and Tehran for a forthcoming double-CD album. 

Saeid Kordmafi’s research focuses on music traditions across the Middle/Near East, Iran, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, with particular interests in the analysis of modal and rhythmic systems; the historical and contemporary interrelationships between music theory and creative practice; musical text cultures and transmission in the Islamic world; processes of musical modernisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and contemporary music revival movements. His research draws on the methodologies of historical musicology, ethnography, musical analysis, and artistic research. 

Saeid is currently working on his first monograph, which examines rhythmic organisation in the classical music of the Arab Mashriq. Based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2019, the study combines historical and analytical inquiry with participatory observation and ethnographic research. 

Over the past decade, Saeid has also pursued practice-related research, encompassing both practice-led and practice-based approaches. He has explored how different strands of practice-related research can converge within a single project, enriching both intellectual understanding of music and creative practice. 

For further information, visit Saeid Kordmafi's personal website.