Hossein Omoumi

Hossein Omoumi was born in 1944 in Isfahan, Iran, and began his musical education singing with his father. At age 14, he started studying the ney, the traditional reed flute of Iran. While studying architecture, he was accepted as a tutorial student at the National Superior Conservatory of Music in Tehran and worked with masters Mahmud Karimi and Farhâd Fakhreddini. He then studied with the renowned ney master Hassan Kassâei.

Omoumi’s performance career has included appearances at major festivals and concert halls in Europe and the United States, including San Francisco’s World Music Festival, UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall and Wadsworth Theater, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the World Music Institute and Asia Society in New York, and Théâtre de la Ville in Paris.

A noted scholar and teacher of Persian music, Omoumi has served on the faculty of the National Conservatory, Tehran University, and the Center for Conservation and Diffusion of Music (Iran National Television) in Tehran; the Center for Oriental Music Studies (CEMO) at Sorbonne University in Paris; and the ethnomusicology departments of UCLA and the University of Washington. He is currently the Maseeh Professor in Persian Performing Arts at the University of California, Irvine.

Omoumi has arranged and composed Pish Radif, a series of 11 lessons to teach the principles of classical Persian music. His research on the making of the ney and Iranian percussion instruments has opened new possibilities and introduced innovations to the ney, tombak and daf.

He graduated with honors from the Faculty of Architecture at the National University of Iran and taught there for 10 years after receiving his doctorate degree from the University of Florence, Italy, on a scholarship awarded by the Italian government.