Seta Hagopian

Seta Hagopian was born in Basra, Iraq, to an Assyrian Syriac Christian family of Armenian origin. Her father was a singer and a well-known oud player who started to teach her the oud when she was around six years old. She enrolled in the Iraqi Music Institute in 1968, where she learned oud and violin. She also started her singing career in the same year, working with prominent composers such as Tariq al-Shibli, Farouk Hilal Khammash, Elias Rahbani and Ahmed Qasim. She was one of the first singers to renew Iraqi songs by introducing Western instruments and singing contemporary pop music. She performed and recorded many traditional Iraqi maqams, as well as her own compositions. She was known as the "Warm voice of Iraq" and was dubbed as Iraq's Fairouz. She held concerts across the Arab world and Europe, and was popular among different ethnic and religious groups in Iraq. She left Iraq to settle in Qatar in 1997, and then moved to Canada in 2003. She died of cancer in Toronto on February 12, 2018. She is considered one of the most influential singers in the history of Iraqi music.