This is the official website of Farya Faraji, a Canadian-Iranian musicologist, documentary filmmaker and public educator dedicated to fostering a deeper appreciation for the authentic traditional sounds of the world’s musical cultures.
Much of the public imagination surrounding other cultures’ music is shaped less by the traditions themselves than by the soundtrack tropes of modern media. Film and video game scores, through their immense cultural reach, often determine what audiences perceive as “Greek,” “Middle Eastern,” or even “medieval” music. Yet these familiar sounds can stand at a considerable distance from the real musical languages of those cultures, reflecting cinematic convention more than living tradition.
This work seeks to de-center the dominance of film-soundtrack aesthetics in the public perception of world music. Its purpose is to engage in research-based, culturally grounded musical work that moves beyond cinematic tropes and returns attention to the traditions themselves.
Collaboration stands at the heart of every project. Each work is developed alongside traditional musicians, musicologists, historians, linguists, and other culture-specific experts from the regions being explored. The goal is not the expression of a personal artistic vision, but a collaborative enterprise in which authorship takes second place to authenticity, cultural specificity, and tradition.
This mission has resonated with a wide global audience, and many of the musical projects created by Farya Faraji and his collaborators have reached millions. Their success stands not as a testament to any single authorial voice, but to the enduring power and beauty of allowing traditional music to speak on its own terms.
Overview of the main projects
Songs of the World
Songs of the World forms the foundation of Farya Faraji’s work. He is especially known for his collaborations with traditional musicians from across the globe, through which folk and traditional songs are performed with deep respect for their authentic cultural context and living traditions.
These collaborations lie at the heart of the project’s methodology: allowing each culture’s music to emerge through the voices, instruments, languages, and performance practices of the musicians who specialise in them.
Collaborators have included July Vitraniuk, Vigneshwari V.S, Ido Romano, Paul Johnson, Anna Vasylchenko, Dimitrios Dallas, Michael Burnyeat, Marina Koleva, Ali Farbodnia, and many others, each bringing deep musical expertise rooted in the regions and traditions they represent.
Most foundational to the project is the desire to bring people of different cultures together. By performing songs of diverse cultures alongside its practitioners, Faraji wishes to show the universality of music, and how it connects us all.
The Epic Music Series
The Epic Music Series stands as a clear expression of the philosophy at the heart of Faraji’s work: that traditional music, when approached with authenticity and cultural grounding, possesses more than enough power to captivate global audiences without cinematic stylisation.
The series draws on the living traditions of diverse cultures to explore their epic and narrative repertoires, allowing each musical language to speak through its own instruments, textures, vocal styles, and inherited aesthetics, without cinematic or film-scoring stylisations.
By employing the term “Epic Music,” the project directly challenges the widespread assumption that the word must refer to large-scale orchestral soundtracks, film-score intensity, or modern cinematic tropes. Instead, it restores the term to its deeper ethnomusicological meaning: the music of heroic narrative, oral tradition, warriors, legends, and mythic memory, told through traditional music.
By specifically rejecting cinematic film-soundtrack sonorities, Faraji’s “Epic Music” work introduces broad mainstream audiences to traditional music through a term they may initially associate with cinematic spectacle, gradually expanding public understanding of what epic music can truly mean.
Epic Byzantine Series
The Epic Byzantine series is a project that uses the sounds of the current, living heritage of Greek traditional music to explore the themes, myths, and folklore that originated in the medieval Eastern Roman (Byzantine) period. These works are not reconstructions of medieval Greek music, but a project that reflects the living tradition of Greek music as it exists today.
The repertoire of Greek traditional music is a direct continuation of the narrative traditions that crystallised in the Byzantine period, including the Akritic songs and other local legends. Likewise, Greek traditional music continues the modal and monophonic musical language of medieval Greece, preserved in forms such as Byzantine chant, called so specifically for its monophonic nature rooted in Byzantium’s music.
The Epic Byzantine series therefore explores Byzantine-era epic narratives through today's Greek traditional music, understood as a direct continuation of that earlier cultural and musical world.
Frequent collaborators include Dimitrios Dallas, Stefanos Krasopoulis, Dimitris Kap, Dimitris Alexandros Athanasopoulos, and many others.
Epic Roman Series
This series is one of Farya Faraji’s clearest efforts to reshape public perceptions of how Ancient Rome is imagined sonically. Deeply embedded in the modern collective imagination, Rome is often associated with the sound of grand orchestral fanfares, cinematic brass, and large-scale soundtrack aesthetics. The Epic Roman Series instead seeks to introduce audiences to a more culturally and historically grounded soundscape: harsh reed timbres, aulos-like sonorities, bagpipes, percussion, and modal scales that can sound strikingly unfamiliar to modern ears.
While Faraji also maintains a separate series dedicated to historically informed approximations of Roman music, The Epic Roman Series approaches the question through ethnomusicological rather than historical methodology. In terms of timbre, rhythm, instrumental texture, and melodic logic, several living traditions of the modern Balkans preserve sound worlds closer to what we can plausibly imagine for ancient Roman music than the cinematic conventions of film soundtracks.
Through this approach, the unavoidable gaps in our limited knowledge of Roman music are explored through living musical practices preserved in the Balkans. This allows the sounds of their instruments and modal languages to be heard in a culturally realistic way, while remaining distinct from modern cinematic soundscapes.