Iranian Classical Music

This book interrogates musicological discourses of creativity from the perspective of critical theory and postcolonial studies, examining their ideological underpinnings and the relationships of alterity which they sustain. The repertoire which forms the book’s main focus is Iranian classical music, a tradition in which the performer plays a central creative role. Addressing a number of central issues regarding the nature of musical creativity, the author explores both the discourses through which ideas about creativity are constructed, exchanged and negotiated within this tradition, and the practices by which new music comes into being.

Questions of creativity, and particularly the processes which underlie creative performance or ’improvisation’, form some of the central areas of interest in current musicology. Yet the predominant discourses on which musicological thought in this area are based have rarely been challenged. In this book Laudan Nooshin interrogates musicological discourses of creativity from the perspective of critical theory and postcolonial studies, examining their ideological underpinnings, the relationships of alterity which they sustain, and the profound implications for our understanding of creative processes in music. The repertoire which forms the book’s main focus is Iranian classical music, a tradition in which the performer plays a central creative role. Addressing a number of issues regarding the nature of musical creativity, the author explores both the discourses through which ideas about creativity are constructed, exchanged and negotiated within this tradition, and the practice by which new music comes into being. For the latter she compares a number of performances by musicians playing a range of instruments and spanning a period of more than 30 years, focusing on one particular section of repertoire, dastgāh Segāh, and providing transcriptions of the performances as the basis for analytical exploration of the music’s underlying compositional principles. This book is about understanding musical creativity as a meaningful social practice. It is the first to examine the ways in which ideas about tradition, authenticity, innovation and modernity in Iranian classical music form part of a wider social discourse on creativity, and in particular how they inform debates regarding national and cultural identity.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Iran’s particular system of traditional Persian art music has been long treated as the product of an ever-evolving, ancient Persian culture. In Music of a Thousand Years, Ann E. Lucas argues that this music is a modern phenomenon indelibly tied to changing notions of Iran’s national history. Rather than considering a single Persian music history, Lucas demonstrates cultural dissimilarity and discontinuity over time, bringing to light two different notions of music-making in relation to premodern and modern musical norms. An important corrective to the history of Persian music, Music of a Thousand Years is the first work to align understandings of Middle Eastern music history with current understandings of the region’s political history.

This book is the first full-length analysis of the theory and practice of Persian singing, demonstrating the centrality of Persian elements in the music of the Islamic Middle Ages, their relevance to both contemporary and traditional Iranian music and their interaction with classical Persian poetry and metrics.

In this book Owen Wright analyses a single recording of classical Persian music made by Touraj Kiaras, a distinguished singer, accompanied by four noted instrumentalists. The format of the recording is typical of a public concert performance, and thus includes instrumental compositions as well as a central exploration of vocal repertoire and technique. The analysis identifies salient structural features, whether of the individual components or of the whole, in a way accessible to the western reader, but it also takes account of the analytical metalanguage used in Persian scholarship, and includes consideration of the relationship between music and poetry. It is important to note that it is also guided by the perceptions of the performer, whose input and responses to questions have significantly influenced the enterprise. To avoid the dryly impersonal, the analysis is also framed by an introduction which combines a biographical sketch of Touraj Kiaras with a survey of the twentieth-century evolution of Persian classical music and of the position of the vocal repertoire within it, and by an epilogue which examines further the ideological basis of prevalent attitudes to music, and seeks to explore the validity of the analytical enterprise within this context.