Bahar Movahed is a 21st-first century renaissance artist.
She’s a cartoonist, a classical Persian singer and a full-time practicing orthodontist.
Movahed said she never felt she had to choose between art and dentistry.
“I grew up in an art and science loving family, where my mother is a visual artist and my father is a surgeon,” she said. ”I’ve seen both science and structure and creativity in the house.”
From an early age, Movahed started to play traditional Iranian music instruments, including the tanbur, tar and setar. She also learned to draw and paint.
“I became a cartoonist when I was a teenager, and I found my way into dentistry, which is a combination of art and science, and I could use both my hand skills and artistic vision,” she said. “And I think orthodontics even took that further for me, because it’s a science that is all about balance and harmony.”
Movahed started singing when she was 18. Then she listened to a cassette of the renown classical Persian singer Parisa in concert at the 1977 Shiraz Festival.
“That was so mesmerizing for me. That was a song that disconnected me from the Earth, I would say, in that moment that I was listening to it,” Movahed said. “And I kept listening, and every time still that I listen to that music, it feels the same, and I feel disconnected with the world, and it’s, it’s so soulful and spiritual.”
Movahed found out Parisa was teaching classical Persian singing. She signed up for a class, not knowing if Parisa would accept a beginner.
“But I played a tanbur for her and sang a Kurdish song and I think she liked it,” she said, “and she started being my very first mentor, and I feel very fortunate for that.”
She went on to take lessons from other masters of Persian classical music, including Shahram Nazeri and Hamid Reza Nourbakhsh. While pursuing her artistic career, Movahed earned a degree in dentistry in 2003 and started her practice in Tehran. But as a singer, she had limited options. Since 1979, female singers in Iran have been forbidden to sing publicly or record solo albums.
Los Angeles-based radio host and former concert programmer Yatrika Shah-Rais said women can sing in a choir, but they cannot sing in a solo format.
“But what is truly exemplary is that women have defied the laws of the hijab. They have gone out and they have unveiled themselves. They have taken off their scarves publicly and they have sung and they have continued to do that,” Shah-Rais said. “There were very, very strict rules for clothing, and they have not stopped defying these rules and there is a tremendous resilience, and they just don’t give up.”
In 2010, Movahed moved to the U.S. to continue advancing her career as a dentist, earning a second degree in dentistry and a specialty in orthodontics. Then, she released her debut album of Kurdish songs, in collaboration with tanbur master Ali Akbar Moradi.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Movahed started working on her next album with a young composer based in Iran, Navid Dehghan. Communicating by WhatsApp, they began sharing ideas, creating melodies, and getting to know each other’s musical language.
“One day, Navid sang me a few early lines of a piece that was not even fully formed yet. And I remember I immediately felt overwhelmed with emotion. I started crying and I told him: ‘This is it. This is the heart of the album.’ That piece became ‘Together, Yet Alone,’” Movahed said. “And from that point on, the whole album grew around that feeling. And the theme of this album is love beyond proximity. It’s about distance and longing, resilience and continuity, and diaspora and duality, which is the story of many of us.”
The album title “Together, Yet Alone” explores a contradiction: how one can feel deeply connected while staying separated, far away from home but carrying it inside. It’s a sentiment many Iranians feel in the current U.S. war against Iran.
Movahed says she sees the impact of the war in the empty chairs at family tables, the quiet grief that settles into homes.
“When lives are lost, I think something human is lost for all of us. Those people, they all had a life to live. They all had stories to tell,” Movahed said. “And this is scary and heartbreaking. And I feel devastated for the people of my country and how this has affected their lives.”
Movahed said there’s still hope that the light will return after long seasons of darkness. She recited a poem in Farsi by Saadi Shirazi, a poet from the 13th century, and translates it into English: “Still, despite all my pain, I hope for the longest night to come to an end.”
Today, Movahed’s new album is being released in complicated circumstances. People in Iran have limited access to the internet.
“My audience is in Iran, my roots are Iran, the source of this music is in Iran,” she said. “And it is very sad that I can’t present it in a place that gave this music its language and poetry and soul.”
Still, Movahed hopes to perform the songs from her new album in Iran, someday.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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