Darioush Madani

Darioush Madani is a multi-instrumentalist, teacher, and dedicated scholar of the Persian musical tradition. Born in Tehran and long resident in Italy, he has devoted his career to the percussion and string instruments of Persian classical music — above all the tombak and the daf — while also performing and teaching the lutes of the same lineage: the setar, tanbur, and tar. Since 1996 he has appeared at national and international festivals, building a reputation as an attentive interpreter of the radif, the modal repertoire at the heart of Persian art music.

His path has been shaped by collaboration. He performs in the trio Shargh Uldusù alongside Ermanno Librasi and Fakhraddin Gafarov, with whom he recorded the album Sarevan in 2004, and in the Pantheon Ensemble, whose self-titled record followed in 2005. He founded the Lulian Ensemble, a group drawing together musicians of varied backgrounds united by the Persian tradition, and more recently formed the Anouar Ensemble with Amal Oursana, a whirling dervish dancer — a form created in the thirteenth century by the mystic Persian poet Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi.

Madani has performed in some of Italy’s most respected halls, among them the Teatro Comunale in Modena, the Teatro Regio in Turin, the Teatro dell’Argine, the Vivaldi Conservatory in Alessandria, the Boito Conservatory in Parma, the Cà Foscari University in Venice, and the Centre of Computational Sonology at the University of Padua. He has accompanied numerous staged readings and theatrical productions with music of the Persian tradition and of his own composition, rooted in the radif. He is currently engaged in a new project around the dramatic monologue Mi chiamo Christine de Pizan, une femme italienne by Stefania De Salvador, for which he composes and performs music drawn from the medieval Persian tradition — particularly that of Abd al-Qadir Maraghi (1353–1435), the foremost composer and music theorist of Persia.

At the Tapadum Music Academy, Darioush Madani teaches the tombak and daf, as well as the setar, tanbur, and tar, online, for every level from beginner to advanced. Long experienced in seminars and courses on Persian music, he introduces students to the refined finger techniques of the tombak, the deep rhythmic voice of the daf, and the modal language of the radif that unites Persia’s percussion and string traditions.