First published in Tonality Magazine no. 7, 2022.
The music of Iran boasts an incredible richness of style: an eclectic yet contemplative classical tradition, an extraordinary variety of folk forms, a superb tradition of popular music and plenty of hybrid styles born from national and transnational musical encounters. Of these, Iranian art music – also known as Persian classical music – is the most well-known in the West, with the tradition’s most renowned masters regularly performing in Europe and North America. The sounds of this style are beautiful, elaborate and mesmeric, but with unique characteristics that can mystify foreign audiences, for whom the music’s subtlest majesty remains obscure. By gaining an understanding and familiarity with its core elements, a listener can better appreciate this fine art.
Building blocks: Gushes, Dastgāhs and Radifs
The splendour of Iranian music is found in the delicate balance between the simplicity of its skeletal melodies and the precise craftsmanship of its intricate ornamentation. Glissandos, trills, accents and near-imperceptible manipulations of pitch are masterfully combined with variation in dynamics, tempo and intensity to bring great variety even to the most basic of melodies. Together with an iconic use of quarter-tones, the expert embellishments give the music its distinctive character. These individual moments are encapsulated within layers of structure from which is built a repertoire that can be developed in so many ways as to be essentially infiniteThe smallest structures are the gushes. A gushe is a prototypical melody or a melodic fragment that has developed from oral traditions of folk and court music, and there are over 300 recognised gushes within the classical canon. In performance, the melodies act as the starting point for extensive improvisation and reinterpretation, expanding as the musician explores each fragment further. When chained together, gushes encompass and modulate between various modes and scales, creating a larger, flowing melodic shape that builds to a climax.
The gushes are grouped into larger structures called dastgāhs. Dastgāhs are often compared to Western modes or Arabic maqams, and while this is partially true, the system of dastgāh is far more complex. They are built from the modular melodic fragments of the gushes; the mode of a dastgāh changes as it progresses, as certain gushes may be based on entirely different modes. Each dastgāh has a principle gushe – a darāmad – that is seen to define or embody that dastgāh. A live performance usually features a single dastgāh, within which gushes can be placed in various arrangements or even omitted entirely, although the darāmad remains the first performed. In modern times, there are generally considered to be twelve principle dastgāhs.
On top of dastgāhs are composed radifs. A radif is a model repertoire, a large collection of gushes that span many, or even all, dastgāhs, usually composed with a particular instrument in mind. Radifs have been collected and composed since the late 19th century and transmitted through scholarly tradition. Although the overall structure of a radif is composed, its performance is by no means fixed. While some musicians may favour a performance that adheres closely to the material as it has been passed down, radifs (much like gushes) are more often improvised upon to create something unique to each performer, and each performance.
Poetry and pieces
Within these structures lies an essential part of Persian classical music: poetry. From the gushes and dastgāhs can flourish pieces based on classical poetry; in vocal music these poems are sung in Farsi, and in instrumental performance, melodies are played that evoke specific poems. The most important of this type of piece is the avāz. The avāz does not feature a regular beat or pulse, but this absence grants the performer freedom to interpret and embellish the melody and to improvise around the mode. The choice of poem within a performance affects the significance and emotional charge of the piece, and impacts its rhythmic structure: the notes of the melody have proportional lengths that are related to metre in Persian prosody. While artistic performers are expected to avoid following the prosodic metre precisely, the rhythms that flow forth still describe the poetic Farsi syllables of the original text. There are many different poems that can be drawn upon when performing avāz, from the works of the great classical poets such as Rumi and Hafez, to contemporary works written for the purpose of musical performance.Though avāz is arguably the most important piece in a classical concert, metric pieces are also performed within a suite. The concert usually begins with a pishdarāmad, a composed rhythmic piece intended to be played by an ensemble. Vocal compositions are called tasnif and are typically performed in a slow tempo. Chahārmezrābs are composed pieces for solo performance, often in a 6/8 metre. These showcase the technical proficiency of the musicians and are therefore played as fast as possible, further emphasising their rhythmic qualities in contrast with the freedom of avāz. The concert often ends with a reng, a fast-paced dance piece, also in 6/8.
A history of turmoil
While the grand tradition of Persian classical music is built upon many centuries of modal music, the concepts of dastgāh and radif are more modern. The oldest radifs still played today are by brothers Mirza Abdollah and Mirza Hossein-Qoli, who composed and collected them in the second half of the 19th century. The radifs are believed to have been arranged as pedagogical tools, overarching canons to aid both in the teaching of aspiring musicians and the promotion of the art form in a time when it seemed to be foundering. Radif first started to emerge within Iran at a critical time in the country’s musical evolution.At that time, French musicians were invited to Iran to teach European theories of harmony and orchestral arrangement, with a particular focus on music for military formations. The introduction of these new, foreign styles was met with enthusiasm by local musicians and the middle class, and a fashion for large orchestras and rich harmony incentivised many composers to create hybrid styles of music combining Persian and Western elements. This aesthetic shift towards Western music brought with it the opening of dedicated music schools, and threatened the continuation of Iran’s own endemic musical culture.
It was at this point that Ali-Naqi Vaziri began his fundamental work in the development of traditional music. He founded the what would become the Tehran Conservatory of Music in 1923, wrote books on Persian music theory and published the first collection of Persian music transcribed in Western notation. However, despite Vaziri’s pioneering work, the traditional classical style almost disappeared in the 1950s due to the rising popularity of musighi-e pap (Western influenced pop music) and the on-going Westernisation of the country as a whole. Many credit the preservation of Persian classical music to the efforts of Dariush Safvat and Nur-Ali Borumand in their creation of the Centre for Preservation and Propagation of Iranian Music in 1968. Borumand, in particular, stressed the importance of radif in classical performance, becoming known for his strict, note-for-note performances of many famous radifs. Borumand also directly taught many of the current masters of classical music as well as many Western scholars, ensuring that his own techniques and musical philosophies have become mainstream.
Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 saw all music banned throughout the country. Restrictions eased two years later, with Iranian classical music allowed to re-emerge partly due to the religious nature of its poetry. In recent years musicians are rethinking their approach to the style and experimenting with the radif in ways never before seen. Nevertheless, amid this renaissance, a total ban on public performance for solo female singers remains to this day, stifling the musical creativity, innovation and public voice of a huge portion of the population.
Musicians and their tools
With so much of the magic of Persian classical music arising from improvisation, it is the musicians themselves that provide the true genius spark to the music. As sung poetry holds such an important place within the tradition, it is understandable that the voice is considered one of the most important instruments, and brings with it techniques that set singers apart from other musicians. The vocal vibrato known as tahrir stands out: it is performed by cracking one’s voice to embellish notes of a melody line with the grace note above, similar to a very subtle yodel. The technique is very distinctive, extremely difficult to perform, and enhances the emotional resonance of the singer’s repertoire. Notable classical singers include Mohammad Reza Shajarian and his son Homayoun, Shahram Nazeri, Alireza Ghorbani, Parisā and Qamar.Vocal music is usually accompanied by a small ensemble, and many instrumentalists perform as soloists themselves, translating the flows of classical music and poetry through their instruments. Perhaps the most emblematic musical instrument is the tār, a plucked, hourglass-shaped lute with five strings set in three courses. Many of the most revered musicians in Persian classical music perform on tār, including the Mirza brothers, Darvish Khan, Morteza Neidavoud, Darious Tala’I and Hossein Alizādeh. Many tār players also play the setār, a smaller pear-shaped lute closely related to long-necked lutes of the Central Asia, whose players include Abdollah Saba, Ahmad Ebadi and Mohammad Reza Lotfi. There is also the barbat, a short-necked lute similar to the Arabic oud that has gained significant popularity in recent years with performers such as Negar Bouban and Yasamin Shahhosseini
Despite the prevalence of free-metred avāz in classical performance, percussion is vital to Iranian musical life. The main percussion is the tombak, a goblet-shaped drum played by many instrumentalists and singers. Percussionists have historically held a lower status among musicians, but in recent years many players have taken the tombak to a whole new level. Work by the Chemirani Trio (Jamshid Chemirani and his sons Keyvan and Bijan) and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi have staked a claim for the tombak as a solo instrument in its own right, alongside the daf frame drum.
Looking wider and to the future
After rescuing a living classical tradition from many years of turmoil, Iranian musicians are once again beginning to look outside the country for inspiration and collaboration. Kayhan Kalhor is perhaps the most prolific of these, his graceful kamancheh enlightening music of many foreign spheres: Western classical music with ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet and Brooklyn Rider; Hindustani classical music with sitarist Shujaat Khan in their ensemble Ghazal; pan-Asian music with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble; Turkish music with Erdal Erzincan; and an intriguing mix of jazz, European baroque and Persian music with the Rembrandt Trio. Hossein Alizadeh has also collaborated with the Rembrandt Trio, as well as with Armenian duduk player Djivan Gasparyan. Influence has also flowed the other way, with composers in the Western classical idiom, such as Golfam Khayam, introducing Persian stylistic features in their compositions, reframing and reclaiming the dialogue between East and West from the Orientalist composers of the past.Persian classical music exists in a lineage that can be traced back many centuries, but its structure of gushes, dastgāhs and radifs – and its many pieces based on poetry and other themes – allows the flexibility to improvise and reinterpret the music to an endless degree. And so the classical tradition today is as exciting and modern as it always has been, and its musicians are always looking forward and sideways to enhance this music and their craft in ways that embody its ancient and revered values. Within its complexity lies beauty, and there has never been a better time to experience this wonderful, entrancing and intricate music.
Images, from top: An Iranian musicial group from the Qajar era, by Kamal-ol-Molk (1886); an unidentified painting including Iranian musicians; Kayhan Kalhor, by Mohammad Delkesh (cropped); used under licence CC BY 4.0.