About Saeideh

Saeideh Rajabzadeh (she/her) is a mezzo-soprano, musicologist, music director, educator, and community builder with a passion to serve and to meaningfully contribute to the conversations of diversity and inclusion through her research and performance work. Over the past few years, she has performed and led public choral programming that included music by BIPOC, women, and Canadian composers in over ten languages.

Rajabzadeh holds a Master’s of Arts in Musicology, a Graduate Diploma, and a Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from the University of Ottawa. Between 2019-2021, she produced and authored a thesis research project entitled “‘Haply I may remember, And haply may forget’: The Doubled Nature of Intertextual Genre Relationships in Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Six Sorrow Songs, Op. 57”. In her thesis, Rajabzadeh explicitly connects the title and content of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Six Sorrow Songs, Op. 57 to the genre of Sorrow Songs (slave songs, spirituals) for the first time in musicological discourse as she discusses the cross-genre borrowings between classical art song and slave songs in the cycle to offer a multifaceted framework for the analysis of this work. This inter-disciplinary work also offers an in-depth poetic analysis of the songs to uncover new layers of meaning when these poems are set to music and performed. Other research work by Rajabzadeh includes the online exhibit Matching Wavelengths: The National Arts Centre’s Navigation through the Covid-19 Pandemic (2021) and her role as the Music Exhibition Acquisition and Research Support at the Canadian Museum of History (2022).

In line with her regular solo performances, Rajabzadeh was invited to perform at the Canadian War Museum in 2021 for the opening event of Homage – The Art of Elaine Goble commemorating WWII veterans. Rajabzadeh also performed at the Canadian Opera Company’s Asian Heritage Month Showcase Series (2022) where she performed a Persian Art song (“Unattainable Love” by Afarin Mansouri). This was the very first time the Farsi language was heard in performance at the opera company. Rajabzadeh has also worked with pianists Julien Leblanc, Maxime Dubé-Malenfant, Tim Cheung, and Piérre-Andre Doucet in her solo performances, and has performed in masterclasses of renowned singers Kimberly Barber, Anamaria Popescu, and Nina Yoshida Nelsen.

Throughout her studies, Rajabzadeh was awarded entrance scholarships (Master’s of Arts [MA] in 2019 and Bachelor of Music in 2014), as well as the second prize in the Noon Hour Competition in 2016 at the University of Ottawa. She has also been offered entrance to Opera NUOVA’s 6-week program with two roles and a scholarship (2019).

Several opportunities allowed Rajabzadeh to explore her love of choral music. Rajabzadeh has extensive choral performance experience singing with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra, and the Ottawa Music Company under the baton of renowned conductors such as Pinchas Zukerman, Alexander Shelley, and Alain Trudel. She received the Ottawa Choral Society Development Bursary (2015-2017), and St. Barnabas Church Scholarship (2015) to further her knowledge of choral music. Rajabzadeh appeared as a chorister at the National Arts Centre in Harry Somers’ Louis Riel Opera with the cast of the Canadian Opera Company and the NAC Orchestra in 2017. Other opera productions that Rajabzadeh has performed in include the University of Ottawa’s Opera productions of Carmen (2017) and Marriage of Figaro (2018).

Photographer: Kelly McDonald

As a music director, Rajabzadeh brings her musicological research into her performance work by proposing and leading public choral programming that includes diverse music. This has included music in over ten languages with a focus on marginalized composers and underperformed works. Her leadership role for the Great Canadian Theatre Company Virtual Choir project in winter 2021 allowed her to develop and execute an educational music project for those who have been excluded from experiencing the vocal arts. The project grew out of her interest to explore the extent to which online music instruction tactics were attainable on a large scale. The choir opened up new pathways for choristers with a variety of needs to engage with art while having different skillsets in music and technology. Bringing her expertise and love of music to many musicians and music lovers, Rajabzadeh has directed several choirs in the Ottawa area, including Musica Ebraȉca and Kol Miriam choirs.

Rajabzadeh is deeply passionate about bringing quality music education to marginalized communities in an accessible way through collaborations between artists, teachers, and communities. Her teaching experience includes working at Bluesfest School of Music, City of Ottawa, and Lotus Centre for Special Music Education, just to name a few. She currently has her own private studio. Rajabzadeh’s love of teaching led her to participate in High Five Training (2018) and Orkidstra’s Teaching Artist Training program (2019). Her work with the Canadian Opera Company as the Coordinator of Community Partnerships & Programs was in line with her passion for bringing accessible music programs to underserved communities through creativity and collaboration.

During that time, she performed as part of the Asian Heritage Month Showcase Series at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre where she performed an art song in Farsi by Dr. Afarin Mansouri (2022). In 2023, Rajabzadeh enjoyed working with the Against the Grain Theatre and Opera InReach as their Education & Engagement Consultant to curate an educational offering called the Interactive Discovery Experience Exhibit focused on Bluebeard’s Castle Opera and its important theme, dementia.

She has also done volunteer work in the music community by serving as a student guide (2016) as well as the Vice-President (VP) Social and Volunteer Supervisor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate Music Student Association (2019-2021). For her volunteer work as the Vice-President (VP) Social, she received the prize of Volunteer of the Year from the Student Association of Faculty of Arts (2020). Rajabzadeh is now working with the Willow Youth Network, Ottawa as the Equity and Inclusion Leader to advise the directors on community partnerships and to assist in educational, youth, and family programming. Rajabzadeh is also leading initiatives that address EDI (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion). Some examples include her execution and curation of a book spotlight for Black History Month and an online exhibit focused on Persian New Year and art forms in 2022. In line with her advocacy work, Rajabzadeh wrote an article for the University of Toronto entitled “Bringing Persian to the West: Keeping Culture Alive in Opera” in the fall of 2022.

Through the University of Ottawa, Rajabzadeh has also enjoyed business training, including Career Bootcamp, Business Modelling, Business Registration and Structure, Personal Branding and Selling, Entrepreneurial and Digital Marketing, and Business Management to advance her knowledge of business and marketing practices. She continues to take online courses in a variety of subjects such as French, spreadsheets and models, and museology.