Hossein Omoumi

Hossein Omoumi was an Iranian-born master of the ney, the end-blown reed flute at the heart of Persian classical music, and a composer, scholar, and university teacher whose career linked Isfahan, Tehran, Florence, Paris, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Irvine. Born in Isfahan on 17 July 1944, he began singing with his father and at fourteen took up the ney. While studying architecture he was accepted as a tutorial student at the National Superior Conservatory of Music in Tehran, working with masters including Mahmud Karimi and Farhad Fakhreddini, and he traveled regularly to Isfahan to study with the renowned ney master Hassan Kassai. Through those teachers he absorbed the radif repertoires associated with Tehran and Isfahan and developed a style that treated the ney as closely allied to the expressive principles of Persian vocal music.

He graduated with honors from the Faculty of Architecture at the National University of Iran and later earned a doctorate in architecture from the University of Florence in 1972 on an Italian government scholarship. Returning to Iran, he pursued parallel careers in architecture and music, teaching at the National Conservatory, Tehran University, and the Center for Conservation and Diffusion of Music associated with Iranian National Television. In the 1970s and early 1980s he worked with musicians committed to preserving the artistic legacy of earlier masters. His training in architecture also informed research on the construction of traditional instruments. Among his innovations was the addition of a key and pad mechanism to the ney, making certain notes easier to produce, and he developed a tunable tombak that several prominent percussionists later adopted. He also worked with the frame drum daf.

After leaving Iran in 1984, Omoumi continued teaching and performing in France and then in the United States. He taught Persian music in Paris at the Center for Oriental Music Studies (CEMO) at Sorbonne University. Ethnomusicologist Lorraine Sakata invited him to the University of Washington in Seattle, and in 2001 he served as a visiting artist at UCLA. Five years later he joined the University of California, Irvine, as the Maseeh Professor in Persian Performing Arts in the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. There he devoted himself to performance, teaching, and the transmission of Persian classical music, and he arranged Pish-Radif, a graded series of lessons introducing students to the melodic patterns and principles of the tradition.

Omoumi performed at major festivals and halls in Europe and North America, including San Francisco's World Music Festival, UCLA's Schoenberg Hall and Wadsworth Theater, the Getty Center, the World Music Institute and Asia Society in New York, and Theatre de la Ville in Paris. He collaborated with distinguished musicians of his generation, among them Mohammad Reza Lotfi, Hossein Alizadeh, Sima Bina, Parissa, Pejman Hadadi, Majid Khalaj, and Mehrdad Arabi. In 1997 he played ney on the soundtrack of Atom Egoyan's film The Sweet Hereafter. His students included singers and composers such as Alireza Ghorbani and Hesam Abedini.

Hossein Omoumi died in Irvine, California, on 4 November 2026, aged 82, following a year-long battle with cancer, according to Encyclopaedia Iranica's memorial. English Wikipedia lists the death date as 5 November 2026. His recordings, instrument innovations, and the musicians he taught remain central to how Persian classical music is practiced and taught beyond Iran.