Classical Iranian Music
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Classical Iranian Music by Ella Zonis
Iran, country of desert and mountain, rugs and oil, what does it have in the
world of music? If you were placed down suddenly in Tehran, the capital,
what music would you have heard before the recent revolution? You would have
thought you were in a Western city because most of what you immediately saw
and heard was Western-a singer accompanied by a Western-style orchestra, a
ballet, an opera, even Western symphonies. But if you stayed longer in
Persia' you would discover five types of Iranian, not Western, music.
First would be folk music, found mostly outside of Tehran. In Iran there are
many different tribes and numbers of non-Moslem peoples, each of whom have
their own folk music and dances. Next would be Persianized popular music,
which is still Iranian, using Iranian scales and language, but Westernized
in the choice of instruments and rhythms. The music you hear only in Iran,
or mainly here, would be a third group: the Zur Khaneh (House of Strength
where gymnastics are performed), music heard in the House where the gymnasts
perform, and the nagharah khanah, Persian tower music. Fourth would be
classical music, the subject of this essay, and -fifth is the music chanted
in the mosques.
Religion is a difficult subject to discuss when dealing with Persian
classical music, for Mohammed, the founder of Islam, was against wine,
woman, and song" (Omar Khayam). Actually he was only opposed to the
licentiousness of the three and really had little to say about classical
music. But strict Mohammedans, following the tradition dating from the
seventh century, do not drink, the women wear veils, and there is
practically no music among them. The rise and fall of a voice chanting the
Koran (the book of prayer) is not considered music.
But the classical Persian music (from the seventh century to the present),
dastgah (melody type) music, the art music, is religious. It is also grave
and mournful. Classical music was considered the music of the court and of
certain mystic orders (Sufi), to whom art music itself was religious. The
music of Iran did not have, however, the patronage of the church which one
can trace through the Western history of music. The art music of Iran is
truly serious and sad. There are at least three reasons for this: the
religion; the desolate mystique of the country, which is mostly desert and
mountain; and Iran's history.
HISTORY
Persian history is important to its music for one specific reason: to
explain its sadness. Foreign occupations not only influenced the theory and
practice of the music itself as well as the musical instruments but also did
much to mold the character and the attitudes of the people who create this
music. The basic character of the Persian is, like his music, melancholy.
The music has its happier moments, but it is not in general gay and
unconcerned.
A helpful guide for Persian history is the following outline (Zonis
1973:20). In this table only four dynasties are Persian-those in italics.
The rest (notice how long the periods lasted) are foreign.
ANCIENT PERIOD
Achaemenid Empire 6th to 4th c. B.C.
Greek conquest and 4th c. B.C. to 2d C. A.D.
Cultural influence
Sassanian Empire 3rd to 7th c.
MEDIEVAL
Arab conquest and cultural influence 7th -10th c.
Turkish and Mongolian conquests 11th -15th c.
RENAISSANCE
Safavid Kingdom 16th-18th c.
MODERN
Western political and cultural influence 19th c. to present
Pahlavi Empire 1925-1979(?)
Of major importance in the history of Persian music is the long political
and cultural contact between Persia and ancient Greece, which lasted from
the fifth century B.c. well into the third century of the Christian era. The
Persian expeditions into Greece were followed by Alexander the Great's
decisive conquest of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BC, a century of Greek
rule in Persia, and four centuries of continued Hellenic influence. During
this time it is not unlikely that a significant musical interchange
occurred. To the present day, Persian art music, composed by melody types,
is still monophonic and organized in tetrachords. Further, Persian music
theory is Greek in origin. The treatises of the medieval Islamic theorists
were modeled after those of Euclid, Aristoxenos, Ptolemy, and others, which
were translated into Arabic at Baghdad during the ninth century.
The earliest descriptions of Persian music appear in the writings of Greek
historians, Herodotus and Xenophon among them. For the Sassanid period (A.D.
226-642) there are sources giving the names of musicians and their
compositions, and players of instruments are included in the numerous
bas-reliefs and engraved metal plates that survive from this artistic time.
With the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, there was such a
blending of Persian and Arab music, instruments, and terminology that the
question of which music more influenced the other is still debated. Many
scientific treatises on music appeared as part of the extensive
philosophical writings produced at Baghdad, an intellectual capital of the
early medieval world. Of the great music theorists, two were Persian: Ibn
Sina (Avicenna, 980- 1037), and Safi al-Din (d. 1294). Side by side with
great activity in theory, however, was the Islamic disapproval of the
practice of music that tended to discourage progress in both Persian and
Arab music for at least a millennium.
During the Mongol and Timurid periods (1221-1501) the Persians discarded
many aspects of Arab culture, and the musical treatises of Shirazi (d. 1310)
and Ghaibi (d. 1435) were written in the Persian language. Although the next
dynasty, the Safavid (1501-1736), brought forth a rebirth of Persian
culture, the renewed religious fervor occasioned by adoption of the Shi'a
sect of Islam as the state religion again discouraged the practice of music.
This anti-musical atmosphere lasted until about 1900, when public concerts
gradually became sanctioned and musicians were no longer considered socially
inferior.
CLASSICAL IRANIAN MUSIC
The Ambience
Iranian classical music has its own very individual performance practice. In
the past, and sometimes even now, the musician and his friends gathered in
someone's living room or in the corner of the garden where they could play
but where the neighbors would not hear. It was a music played only for
friends and away from the public. In this setting the musician starts to
play. The group also participates; upon verbal suggestions or glances from
them, the musician will play in a certain Way and develop certain ideas as
they come to him. This is the kind of improvisation one finds in the
classical art music of Iran, and Iranian music should be improvisatory.
So you are now very far from the Western music you first heard in Tehran.
You are in someone's living room and a musician, or several musicians, has
just entered. He chooses a dastgah, one of the twelve modes, and begins to
play. Whenever the musician does something special, his friends will say
something or look at him in a particular way that makes him happy. The
player can go on for thirty to forty-five minutes in a single dastgah.
Perhaps there may be a singer who will sing verses (beyt) from one of the
great mystics. Now more musicians join in and a real musical evening takes
place. All that was needed was a quiet place and some people.
That was dastgah music in its traditional setting. What happens when the
performers are asked to play for radio or television, or to play for
recordings? Well, the performer is told he has five or ten minutes to play.
With that time limit, a player's incentive is partially gone. He has no time
to warm up. Surprises do not come to him. And if he is playing for a large
audience, or playing before a silent microphone, the subtleties of glances
between the player and a small audience are lost. This is what has happened
in the last twenty-five years in Iran.
Let us now turn back to an examination of the old classical music.
Theory
Persian music is presently organized into twelve systems called dastgah.
Dastgah is a general word meaning apparatus, mechanism, scheme, or
framework. Thus there are dastgah for weaving carpets, for conducting
government operations, and for making music. When a musician performs, he
plays in a certain dastgah for the length of the performance, which may last
from five minutes to an hour. The dastgah in classical Persian music are
also twelve in number. Transposed to start on C they are:
Mahur, Rast Panjgah C D E F G A B C
Shur, Dashti, C Dk Eb F G Ab Bb C
Abu Ata, Nava Bayat-e TorkC D E F G A Bk C
Afshari C D(k) E F G Ak Bb C
Homayun C Dk E F G A Bb C
Esfahan C D Eb F G Ak B C
Sehgah' C D Ek F G Ak Bb C
Chahargah C Dk E F G Ak B C
The dastgah is a collection of smaller units called gusheh in Persian and
maqam in Arabic. A number of gusheh-ha, usually from three to fifteen,
comprise a dastgah, the exact number depending on the performer's knowledge
of the repertory and the length of time he wishes to play. Within each
dastgah are several notes of special importance. One is the note where the
dastgah stops, the ist. The second is the shahed, the note on which the
melody centers. Third is the noteghayer, to be discussed later.
Diagram 15-1 illustrates the structure of the dastgah. The bottom line
represents the note that functions as a tonic, the upper line is the upper
octave. Each rectangle is a gusheh. An important characteristic of this
system is that each gusheh occupies a definite part of the octave. As in
Indian music, the performance rises to the upper part of the range and then
descends, ending where it began.
The dastgah, as a framework or an apparatus for making music, is relatively
easy to understand: it is a collection of gusheh-ha. Each collection is
unified in the following ways: all the gusheh-ha in a dastgah use the same
scale degrees (or pitch collection) with, perhaps, the addition of one or
two accidentals toward the middle of the performance. A dastgah performance
usually begins and ends in the same tetrachord. Furthermore, the gusheh
played at the opening is usually played at the end.
Yet another device for unifying a dastgah is a specific cadence pattern
characteristic of each dastgah. This is called forud, meaning descent, and
it may be played between gusheh-ha, especially if the performance is quite
long. (The for- ud is indicated by dotted lines on the diagram.)
#3 DIAGRAM 15-1. Dastgah as a collection of gushch-ha.
DIAGRAM 15-2. Gushch-ha as a collection of small pieces.
The musician begins to play the daramad, the first section of the dastgah.
After playing this section of the dastgah for a while (the while can be half
an hour!), there is a slight pause in the music, and then something sounds
different. The musician has changed gusheh. He has gone from the daramad
into something else. This is called the "maqam principle." The gusheh has,
like the dastgah, an ist, usually different from the ist of the daramad, and
it has a very different shahed. The gusheh may be further up the tetrachord,
using, let us say, the fourth through the eighth notes of the scale. It
always sounds different, be it in the melody, a rhythmic figure, or just the
use of notes that differentiate that gusheh from any other. All gusheh-ha
played by Iranian musicians are not the same, however; they are selected by
each musician either beforehand or while he is playing.
So the musician has gone to a different gusheh and everyone knows where he
has gone, for each gusheh contains a note called the moteghayer, which is
not in the parent dastgah. Say, for example, the scale of the dastgah is the
same as the Western melodic minor: C, D, E@ P G Ab B@ C. This particular
gusheh has A@ as the moteghayer. So whenever you hear it, and the musician
makes sure you do hear it, you know that this note is the moteghayer and you
know he has gone to another gusheh. When he leaves this gusheh you will know
the difference because you will once again hear A@, not A4, the moteghayer
of the preceding gusheh.
Each gusheh has a title and tracing it can be fun. Some mean large, bozorg,
or small, kouckek. Some are the names of towns, Zabol and Ravandi; and some
are names of people: Homayoun, Leyli, and Majnoun.
The total of all the gushehs in all twelve dastgahs is called the radif.
There are several people who have notated their own radifs. The government
of Iran printed the radif of Moussa Mal rufli'' which is now used in the
National Conservatory, as a guide for learning the radif.
Rhythm
Rhythm in Persian music, unlike Arab and Indian music, is no longer
systematized into the rhythmic modes (iqa'at) described by medieval Persian
theorists. Most traditional art music is, in fact, unmeasured and performed
in a free rubato manner. The strongest rhythmic factor in music of the radif
comes from poetry, for, like the music of ancient Greece, Persian music is
closely allied with poetry. Generally one couplet of classical verse is set
to a single gusheh, with long melismatic sections and instrumental
rhapsodizing between the various gusheh-ha. Thus the meter of the poetry
imparts a kind of recurrent rhythmic structure to the otherwise unmeasured
composition.
Although much of the classical music of Persia is in free rhythm, the
performer may also play pieces that have a definite beat: the ch'ahar-mezrab
(four beats), kereshmeh where the rhythm goes 11|110|111010|110110|1110 È ,
or just a zarbi (measured). The progression to other gushehs can be compared
to movements in a symphony, and they are quite like these.
Improvisation
A two-stage model may be constructed as an aid to exploring the process of
improvisation. This can be stated as two questions: (1) What is the pattern
or schema upon which improvisation is based? (2) How does the player
transform this schema into an improvised composition? Our emphasis on
defining the schema reminds me of an analogy made by the British
musicologist Gerald Abraham, to the effect that "all music needs a framework
as roses need a trellis" (1938: 38). Although one does not want to take this
analogy too literally, the need for a framework for improvised music is even
greater than for the composed music referred to by Abraham. In a music
created more or less extemporaneously, where the composer-performer cannot
go back and correct what he has just played, one is almost certain to find
some kind of schema guiding his performance.
The schema used in Persian music bears no resemblance to the jazz model, for
it is neither harmonic nor measured. It does, however, come quite close to
an Indian raga. The Persian schema is not one fixed entity but falls along a
melodic continuum that extends from an undefined melody, a mode, on one end
to a definite melody on the other.
The part of the dastgah that forms the scherna for improvisation in Persian
music is the gusheh, the Persian version of a melody type. The Harvard
Dictionary defines melody types as the repertory of traditional melodies,
melodic formulae, stereotyped figures, tonal progressions, ornamentations,
rhythmic patterns, and so on, that serve as a model for the creation of new
melodies" (Apel 1969:519; see May bibliography). This definition reminds me
of a pot filled with musical materials that a musician can dip into, taking
what he will to create an improvised performance. I prefer to take the music
(see part 2 or refer to the main article in music of Many cultures by
Elizabeth May)
1. Iran is the true name of the country in Farsi, the national language;
Persia is the Greek word. They may be used interchangeably.
2. This (@) is a koron, a three-quarter tone or one-quarter tone less than a
whole step. There is also a microtone called sori (4-). These are not truly
quarter tones, but it is easiest to think of them in this way. Thus in
Persian music there are three possible divisions in a whole tone-for
example, between C and D, in addition to our one, CO or D @, these two: C C
3@ C 0 or D b D @ D. So the Persian musician will select a scale having
seven notes out of seventeen tones instead of twelve. For example, if he is
playing Shur, he will select D@P rather than D@. This @- is a grace note,
one note above (half or whole step depending on the context).
3. The tonic of Sehgah is not the lowest note, C, but the third, E @.
4. The "Big Book," as the Ma'ruffi radif has come to be called, is an
enormous collection of pieces in all the twelve dastgah. Musicians today
will play from that collection rather than playing their own compositions.
Glossary
Abu Ata one of the 12 melody types or modes, also one of the 5 secondary
modes = C D Eb F G Ak Bb C; related to Shur.
Afshari another one of the 12 modes, also one of the 5 secondary systems = C
D Ek F G A(k) Bb C in G; also related to Shur, but is most independent of
its parent mode.
avaz general term to indicate an unmeasured (non-metered, non-rhythmic)
piece; vocal piece with classical poetry.
Bayat -e Tork another secondary system from the total of 12 modes = C D E F
G A Bk C in C.
beyt a couplet in classical Persian poetry; each line of the pair ends with
the same rhyme.
Chahargah one of the 7 main modes of contemporary Persian music = C Dk E F G
Ak B C in C; made up of 2 identical tetrachords.
chahar-mezrab meaning "four beats." One of the several measured virtuoso
pieces, characterized by a rapid tempo, a recurring ostinato, and a pedal
tone. It refers to a style of playing and not a form.
daramad prelude to a performance of a piece of music in any of the modes.
dastgah (pl. dastgah-ha) melody type or mode. There are 5 auxiliary ones and
7 main ones, altogether making 12. A musical scheme which
composer-performers use as a basis for improvisation; has its own scale,
hierarchy of scale degrees, and repertory of traditional melodies.
Dashti – Dashty, one of the 5 subsidiary modes or melody types related to
Shur, one of the 7 main ones: C D E P G A Bb C. Often found in folk music of
Persia.
Esfehan one of the 5 subsidiary modes related to Homayun, one of the seven
main ones = C D Eb F G Ak B C, a harmonic minor scale with the 6th raised a
quarter tone.
forud meaning "descent," a short melody frequently played at the conclusion
of a melodic formula to connect it to a parent mode and reinforce the tonic.
gusheh (pl. gusheh-ha) melodic formula used when a performer improvises.
These short pieces have the range of a tetrachord or a penta-chord. The
gusheh is a melodic type, a traditional repertory of melodies, melodic
formulae, tonal progressions, ornamentations, and rhythmic patterns that
serve as a model for the creation of new melodies.
Homayun another main mode or melody type = C D E(k) F G Ak B C in G.
Igha’at rhythmic mode; there are eight.
ist the note of stopping, one of the important notes in a mode.
kamancheh spiked fiddle (bowed). Has four strings, no frets, and is about
the size of a viola. It is played resting upright on player's lap.
kereshmeh an important measured piece found in many modes or melody types;
always a strong hemiola effect throughout. Uses rhythmic pattern.
koron (k) indicates a microtone (quarter tone) below a note.
Mahur one of the seven main modes or melody types = C D E F G A B C. Is
distinct from the others in its happy ethos. One of the more popular modes
today. Dominant and supertonic are important scale degrees.
maqam an Arabian musical system or mode. Moteghayer "changeable"; comparable
to an accidental in Western music, a note outside of the scale or mode.
Nava one of the seven principal modes or melody types related to Shur = C D
Eb F G Ak Bb C. One of the less popular and least performed modes.
nay Persian vertical flute; simplest and oldest instrument here. Made of
cane with metal mouthpiece; six finger holes in front and one at the back.
Has two different mouth positions. Important folk instrument.
radif entire collection of melodies in all the 12 modes or melody types.
Rast Panjgah "fifth place"-similar to Western major scale; one of the seven
main modes or melody types = C D E F G A B C.
santur trapezoidal, struck dulcimer, popular in Iran. Has seventy-two
strings arranged in groups of four. Strings are strung from left to right.
Today it is tuned so that there is only one group of strings for each of the
seven notes of the octave.
Segah - one of the seven main modes or melody types = C D Ek F G Ak Bb C in
Ek.
sehtar (setar) long-necked, four-stringed lute with pear-shaped wooden body.
Has frets like the tar no plectrum is used. Used as solo instrument.
shahed the note of stress or emphasis in the hierarchy of notes found in a
melodic formula used in improvisations.
Shur one of the seven main modes or melody types = C D Ek F G Ak Bb C in G.
It has the greatest number of melodic formulas (gusheh-ha). Considered a
parent mode to four subsidiary ones.
sori indicates that a note is a micro-tone interval above the lower tone.
tahrir vocal trill (ornamentation in songs).
tar another plucked, long-necked lute with double belly, covered with
sheepskin membrane. It has six strings, tuned in pairs, and twenty-six
movable gut frets. Used as solo instrument and to accompany singers.
tasnif a measured, composed song or ballad, the most popular form in Persian
cities today. Poetry for each type of singing is different-occasionally
quotes single lines from classics but uses contemporary poetry or topical
subjects.
tekke-ha pieces with individual names and a special style, usually having
strict metric regularity. May be in any of the twelve modes as they have no
modal identity.
zarb (tombak) a goblet-shaped drum carved of a single block of wood, open at
the lower end.
Bibliography
Abraham, Gerald. 1938 A Hundred Years of Music. London: Duckworth.
Barkeshli, Mehdi. 1960. "La musique iranniene." In LHistoire de la musique,
edited by Roland Manuel. Encyclop6die de la plgiade, 9, 1. Paris.
Caron, Nelly, and Dariouche Safvate. 1966. Iran, les traditions musicales.
Collection de l'Institut International d'Etudes Comparatives de la, Musique
publi6e sous le patronage du Conseil International de la Musique. Paris:
Buchet/Chastel.
Farhat Hormoz. 196E**. "The Dastgah Concept in Persian Music," Ph.D.
dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. University Microfilms,
Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1966.
Gerson-Kiwi, Edith. 1963. The Persian Doctrine of Dastgah-Composition.
Tel-Aviv: Israel Music Institute.
Khatchi, Khatchi. 1962. Der Dastgah. Regensbury: Bosse.
Nettl, Bruno. 1970. "Attitudes toward Persian Music in Tehran." Musical
Quarterly 56 (April), 183-97.
1974. "Aspects of Form of the Instrumental Avaz." Ethnomusicology 18
(September), 405i4.
1975. "The Role of Music in Culture: Iran, A Recently Developed Nation." In
Contemporary Music and Music Cultures, by Charles Hamm,
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