EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 21 - Persian Classical Music

Genre of the Day - Persian Classical Music 

Album of the Day - I Will Not Stand Alone by Kayhan Kalhor & Ali Bahrami Fard (2012)

August 21, 2024

In the continued claws of emotion I find myself trying to shake off, I’m aware that I need to find new ways to appreciate a place that I’m finding it quite difficult to be in. Part of what makes Los Angeles so wonderful is that it feels tangibly global wherever you go. One of the most important communities unique to Los Angeles is the Persian presence so large it’s got its own moniker, Tehrangeles. The city holds the largest community of Iranians in the world outside of the country of Iran—immigrants flocked to the city after the 1979 revolution as its mountainous environment and car culture reminded them of home. It’s serendipitous, then, that a deep dive into traditional Persian music comes my way shortly after my return.

As ornate and intricate as the geometric wall designs of Persian mosques, Persian classical music descends from a regional line of music based on maqam modes. Rather than a focus on harmony, Persian classical music features long movements through musical phrases. Those phrases revolve around the shâhed, a word for the base note that poetically translates to “one who bears witness.” The relationship between Persia’s renowned poetry and its music is one of kindred spirits. Rumi, the US’ best-selling poet and surely Iran’s as well, exalted the ability of the musician to elicit ecstasy in a listener. Classical music performances often feature a vocalist creatively improvising the lines of a poem in tandem with an instrumentalist, a deeply mystical connection between the two musicians unfolding similarly to Indian dhrupad. In between these laborious yet fruitful improvisational efforts, pre-composed vocal deliveries called tasnif and rhythmic zarbi fill the gaps.

Classical Persian musical performance balances so many distinctive aspects of songcraft in a way that is only befitting of the country with so many centuries of reflective, Sufi mystic-influenced artistic development under its belt. A beautiful assortment of lutes with giraffe-length necks for fuller resonance, fiddles, flat daf and goblet-shaped zarbi drums often played in 6/X time, flutes, and santur dulcimers populate the instrumental mise-en-scène. Vocalists ornament their syllables as testaments to their musical depth and knowledge, the voice an equally renowned instrument; it speaks to words’ deep centrality in the form, as medieval Persian scholars didn’t differentiate music and poetry as separate forms of creation. 

The savvy vision it takes to bring classical music into a new age is shrewdly reflected on today’s album, as our artist literally invented an instrument to convey his musical talent. The kamanceh looks like a lute, but is played with a bow like a violin; Kayhan Kalhor wanted nothing less than the most bespoke kamanceh and bent its form to his will, replacing its traditional structure with wooden cones inside its body to better carry low notes and with more ‘sympathetic strings’ that provide a subtle resonance underneath the main playing. Musically, the shah kaman (king of kamancehs) assists him from crafting the tender, melancholic opening to “Between the Heavens and Me” that builds to a mournful release of longing by the eleventh minute to the rapid soars and jumps of “Pluck a Star from the Sky.” “Where Are You?” (good question) moves with a synchronous urgency, yet between the lines of its insistency, zeroing in on each instrument’s differing voicings reveals nuanced beauty. Music is just another plane of poetry in action, and the unspoken words here speak a million resonant truths.