Use and function of forms and content in Iranian Dastgāhi musical performance

When all the elements of a piece of music resonate with a listener’s cultural background, they perceive it as belonging to their own culture. However, this sense of cultural connection is not absolute. We may find ourselves drawn more to one piece of music than another, even if both originate from similar cultural contexts. The elements that make music feel familiar and connect to our identity are a combination of the music’s own characteristics (musicological) and the cultural context it evokes. This study proposes a model based on these two aspects, which I have named “musical shamsa.” My model takes the form of a Shamsa. Traditionally, Shamsa illustrations depict motifs in a universal form, inspired by the shape of the radiant sun (shams literally translates to “sun”). Through the Shamsa model, you’ll see how each structural element of Persian music is completed by its surrounding cultural context, ultimately forming the complete picture.

What is a dastgāh, how did it emerge, and how did become the modal system of Iranian music? This paper attempts to address those questions briefly. In the 13th century, Safiuddin al-Urmawi established a system of modes and explained how modes were connected by pointing out the shared notes between mode scales. His theoretical discourses were followed by the subsequent authors, including Qotboddin Shirazi was the first to write about the structural connections between the modes in a way that could be used in modulations. Abd-ol-Qader Marāghi applied Shirazi’s concept of proximity of the modes to Ormavi’s approach of using the set of twelve modes as the basis of the discussion. Eventually, the first version of modulation instructions appeared in seventeenth-century musical texts, and they expanded into more elaborate modulations which included a suggested order for going from one mode to another. These collections were called shad and later dastgāh. After providing the brief history of the formation of dastgāh as a musical form, this paper attempts to explain how it was transformed into a modal system.

This paper investigates the social aesthetics of the precomposed instrumental form of reng, as one of the main parts of the Iranian dastgāh music repertoire and its gradual fade since the late 20th century. Originally performed to accompany dance (raqs), reng shares a long history as an instrumental piece often in duple or triple meter with a moderate to fast tempo in Persian classical and art music (Farhat 2004, 22). For centuries, the association of reng with dance embodiment, the courtesan entertainment, improvisatory theater ruhowzi genre, and lighter musical implication identified this form with a social stigma, lower artistic class, and complexity in Iran under the Islamic rule. However, the course of modernity, new establishment of Iranian art music genre and new socio-cultural changes under the modernist Pahlavi regime in the early 20^th century elevated the musical complexity and social status of reng to a well-received instrumental composition, standing out for its upbeat mood, vibrant rhythmic structure and stylized syncopation, especially to conclude a dastgāh, a concert program, and prominent vocal compositions such as tasnīf (Lucas 2019; Azadehfar 2011; Zonis 1973). Many influential master-musicians including Vaziri, Khaleqi, Saba, Darvishkhan and Payvar composed innovative pieces in reng form for performance and pedagogical purposes. Regardless of its role in the aesthetic and pragmatic repertoire of Iranian dastgāhi music, reng composition met a new phase of decline in the following decades. In this research, by looking into selected musical examples, I discuss the gradual fade of the reng composition interlinked with socio-cultural changes including the new waves of traditionalism enhanced by orientalist enthusiasm in Iranian arts, inclination toward ideologies of spirituality, and dismissing Iranian pop elements such as the 6/8 groove (shio-hasht) which were later intensified by the socio-political reformations under the 1979 Islamic Republic revolution. I argue the role of social aesthetics, embodied ideologies, and reformed identities in shaping dynamics of cultural change and fade of Iranian reng form in the 20^th century.

Charkh is one of many keywords when considering Iranian culture. In Persian, Charkh initially means “a wheel”. This concept of Charkh is, for Persian music studies, highly suggestive if only for its implications of “circulation “. In this presentation, I illustrate how a Charkh-like structure is reflected in performance form and in the musical structure, and how it exists in various scales as multilayers and interlaces in one performance. Finally, I clarify the Iranian way of listening, feeling and making music which is peculiar to a Charkh feeling. The Charkh-like structure in Iranian music indicates the following temporal distribution of traditional melody types such as “change and recursion of tessitura and atmosphere”. Several traditional melody types, which constitute the mode of Iranian music, are, roughly speaking, performed from melody types, which take on lower tessitura, to melody types which take on higher tessitura. And after reaching the highest tessitura of the mode, it returns quickly to the tessitura and atmosphere of a base through a fixed melody type called “forūd(down)”. This “Charkh” structure is surely reflected in their performance form and musical structure. There is, therefore, way of listening, feeling and making music peculiar to a “Charkh feeling” there. Namely, this “View of Charkh” has a very important meaning in the mind of the performer during improvisation in terms of “what to do next,” and that is reflected in the musical form as well. In traditional music, musical acquisition is not merely memorizing traditional melody types as a repertory but rather the acquisition of a “View of Charkh”.