Among her better known works are the chamber piece Gabil Sajahy (1979) for cello and piano, as well as the ballet Empty Cradle (1993); she has also written instrumental, vocal and film music.

[3] Franghiz Ali Aga Kïzï Ali-Zadeh was born on 28 May 1947 in Baku, then in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic of the USSR.

[4] Although her family was not particularly musical, her father—an oil engineer—occasionally played the tar, a traditional string instrument of Central Asia.

[1] Early in her childhood, Ali-Zadeh developed an interest in music and at age five her family bought a piano.

[3] Throughout the 1960s and 70s, she gave the Azerbaijani premieres of compositions by Russian-Soviet composers such as Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina and Alfred Schnittke, as well as Europeans such as Alban Berg, John Cage, George Crumb, Olivier Messiaen and Arnold Schoenberg.

[4] Ali-Zadeh has frequent music festivals of the former USSR and was elected as a member of the Schoenberg Institute of Los Angeles in 1988.