Rows and Corners: A Look at Traditional Iranian Music

ROWS AND CORNERS

A LOOK AT TRADITIONAL IRANIAN MUSIC

by M. Rastgoo

What makes music sound good?

IN THE WESTERN VIEW, the explanation is encoded in a vast music theory, with melody and harmony, major and minor scales, and intervals and chords; a supremely effective tool for analyzing and creating Things That Sound Good. Its seeds planted in Ancient Greece, dormant during the Middle Ages, and blossoming with the advent of Bach and his theoretical Baroque counterparts, this music theory is the foundation upon which all of Western music, from classical to jazz to tinny elevator muzak, rests.

It would, I hope, not surprise the esteemed reader that this system is not the be-all and end-all of music theory in the world. It is certainly prominent, but is limited in its scope, and while it provides an amazing language in which to classify Western music, its ability does not fully extend to non-Western musical systems, be they Arabic, Indian, Chinese, Malay, or, indeed the Iranian system of radif.

You may be tempted to ask what the radif is, and fear not, dear reader, I shall tell you: it is a collection of dastgāhs, “a number of principal musical modal systems (generally twelve), … consisting of seven basic notes, plus several variable notes for ornamentation and modulation… and which revolve around a set of gūshehs, …where the process of centonization is personal and of great import.” So says Wikipedia.

Isn’t that nice and clear? Even to me, whose grasp of the Iranian classical music theory is, I wager, slightly better than the average person’s, this description is forbiddingly opaque. While the Wikipedia explanation does have its merits, I believe there is a better way to define the radif, a way that might perhaps not be fully accurate, but representative enough to understand the basic concept.

The definition of some basic terminology would be helpful at this juncture. The radif (lit. “order” or “row”) is the central repertoire of Iranian classical music, and is the name of the entire system. It is subdivided into dastgāhs (lit. “the place of the hand”, in reference to note placement on the neck of a stringed instrument) and āvāzes (lit. “song”); each of these are their own musical landscape, and are themselves composed of short melodic phrases and themes, called gūshehs (lit. “corner”). The distinction between a dastgāh and an āvāz is merely to do with length: a dastgāh has anywhere between twenty and forty gūshehs, while āvāzes generally go from four or five to twenty.

To understand how these concepts fit together, we first need to understand the concept of a mode. A mode, in music theory, is a complex concept, and explaining it in its entirety is beyond the scope of this article: suffice it to say that the difference between two modes lies not in their notes, but in the intervals between them.

A major scale starting on C (C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C) and a major scale starting on G (G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G) have different notes, but the intervals between those notes are the same in both cases — in sequence, a whole step (W), a whole step, a half step (H), a whole step, a whole step, another whole step, and then a half step (abbreviated WWHWWWH) — so the two are in the same mode; namely, major. A major scale starting on C and a minor scale starting on A (A-B-C-D-E-F- G-A) are composed of the same notes, but the sequences of intervals are different (WWHWWWH vs. WHWWHWW), and thus major and minor are different modes. The concept of a mode transcends that of key – a major scale starting on C and a major scale starting on G, as explained above, both fall within the major mode, while the C major scale and the A minor scale are different modes, though they are ostensibly in the same key.

Iranian dastgāhs and āvāzes, then, are sets of melodic phrases which each have a distinct sound or feel to them, and often are characterized by differing modes. The modes in question, though, are not confined to those familiar in Western music, which only differ by half steps and whole steps (and such multiples). New notes altogether are common in the Persian system, of which the most common is made with the koron accidental, which denotes a quarter step below the natural, and leads to new intervals and scores (no pun intended) of new modal possibilities.

Even taking these differences into account, the Persian system is still not strictly modal; each dastgāh has a central set of intervals that it operates on, akin to a mode, but it is not strictly confined to the notes of that mode, and often even incorporates two or more different modes. Phrasing, also, plays an extremely important role. In a sense, the system is multi-modal; the intervals between the notes of the different dastgāhs and āvāzes usually differ, but even when they don’t, what phrases are played and what notes are emphasized make all the difference.

Take Māhour, the closest dastgāh there is to a major (or minor) scale. Its intervals are identical (WWHWWWH, or such sequences starting at different points along the scale), but one cannot get Māhour by listening to major. Each dastgāh is also characterized by its phrasing, the common melodies that define it: playing three random notes on the Māhour scale does not automatically signal the Māhour dastgāh, but three notes that fowllow the characteristic patterns of it do.

Shūr is another dastgāh worthy of mention, since it is patterned on the G minor scale (or any minor scale, since the dastgāh system is fully diatonic) — however, the second and fifth of that scale (A and D if we’re in G) are brought down a quarter step, so that the interval sequence goes from WHWWHWW to ¾-¾-W-¾-¾-W-W, and an entirely different musical space is born.

There are seven dastgāhs — Shūr, Māhour, Homāyūn, Navā, Segāh, Chahārgāh, and Rāst-panjgāh — and (usually) five or six āvāz —Bayāt-e Esfahan, Bayāt-e Tork, Abū’ atā, Afshāri, Dashti, and sometimes Bayāt-e Kord. The āvāzes in some sense branch off from the dastgāhs (Bayāt-e Esfahān from Homāyūn, the other five or six from Shūr), and are shorter. Each of these twelve or thirteen have their own musical character and their own feel; they each consist of a central scale of whole steps, half steps, and, (unlike in Western music) three-quarter and five-quarter steps, with different start notes and final notes and emphasis notes, and, crucially, different common phrases. Although some might share a central scale (in fact, all the āvāzes have the same scale as the dastgāh they are associated with) they differ in which parts of the scale they emphasize, and on which notes they start and end, lending each a distinct musical signature.

So far, I’ve attempted to describe what makes the different sections of the radif, well, different. To give an idea of what, exactly, the point of all this is, I will, if you bear with me, indulge in a metaphor. In my view, the radif on which Iranian traditional music rests is for all intents and purposes a phrase book, a guide for expression, there to begin with but ultimately to transcend. To compare Iranian music to a language is a useful analogy: the radif, our collection of dastgāh and āvāz, is a phrasebook divided into different dialects, all of which make up the language but sound at times different and at times similar to each other, with melodies recurring in all the different dialects, but with their own local flavor and their own mood and feel. Each dastgāh and āvāz, each dialect, consists of gūshehs, individual phrases or melodies that are given their own names. Once these are all learned, the musician then incorporates them into his repertoire, and builds upon them in his original improvisations.

The radif is an intensely melodic system — while Western music places a lot of emphasis on harmony, and a lot of its pieces are defined by their chord progressions first and foremost, Iranian music is mainly concerned with the art of making melody, and as such, melodies are all that the radif consists of. This is not to say that there is no harmony in Iranian music — it is present in the melody itself, but the system is not defined by it.

Each dastgāh and āvāz has a narrative, a similar structure of ascent and descent. Each goes through a rising and falling progression, with each gūsheh higher (i.e., with a higher central pitch) than the one before, then coming down after the peak. Starting with the “darāmad” (lit. “entryway”), which sets the character of the dastgāh or āvāz, the gūshehs go up in central pitch until the “‘owj” (lit. “peak”) in the higher end of the scale, and back down to the “forood” (lit. “descent”), stopping, going up and down, and playing either free improvisation or rhythmic melodies along the way.

The phrasing that is so vitally important in distinguishing the dastgāhs and āvāzes reflects another aspect of the Persian system absent in Western music: its dependence on literature and poetry. In the vast majority of cases, the phrases that comprise the gūshehs are modeled on poetic meters, so that Persian poems in those meters can be sung with them. One of the formats of traditional Persian music is the tasnīf, an improvised or composed piece based in the radif which accompanies a specific poem — and since Iran has such a rich poetic history and tradition, the music and the literature go hand in hand to create something exquisite.

It must be stressed once more that this musical system is, at its core, improvisational, and the radif framework is very much cobbled together. Each musical master has their own personal radif, the melodies and emphases and progressions they’ve learned and taught throughout the years. Even the most mainstream radif, those of Mirzā Abdollah Farahāni and of his brother Hossein Qoli, differ by a substantial amount, and of course the radif’s peculiarities and subtleties also change depending on the instrument used, the one for the voice altogether different from the one for the tār or the santūr.

The roots of these disagreements lie in the radif ’s historical origins. Each region of Iran had its own melodies and music, and with Iran’s contact with the West in the 18th and 19th centuries and the introduction of Western music theory, Mirzā Abdollāh and others decided to assemble this diverse repertoire into a central system for the first time, assigning names to melodies based on local names or geographic origin (Bayāt-e Tork means “the Turkish peoples”, and Bayāt-e Kord the Kurdish). As with any such endeavor, there was no way to neatly order things that had evolved over a long time — Rāst-panjgāh, for example, is very close to both Māhour and Navā, and some masters do not even consider it independent, but it is generally classified as a dastgāh of its own. It is no stretch of the truth to say that there is not a single radif, but many, each different but still similar in the core elements. Played on the tār by Lotfi, on the santūr by Kiani, or sung by Karimi, Shūr still sounds like Shūr, Chahārgāh like Chahārgāh, and so on. Textual descriptions only go so far, so the best thing to do is go listen to some traditional Persian music, and all of this will quickly become far clearer — just type in any of the dastgāh names into YouTube, listen, compare, and enjoy.

The Iranian radif is an exceptionally diverse and vast landscape, a color wheel that traditional and even modern musicians use as a framework for their composition, and traces of it can be found in virtually all Iranian music. Like scales and chord progressions are in classical music and jazz, the radif is ultimately a guide with which musicians can structure their pieces and ultimately innovate; having learned the entire phrasebook and steeped themselves in the language, the student can stop repeating common sentences and start writing their own poetry.