1

Ancient Music, Modern Myth

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
—L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between

The past is another planet.

—Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos

In the fall of 2000, I was sitting in one of my classes at UCLA, eagerly awaiting an
announced guest speaker. He was coming to teach us about traditional Persian
music, one of Iran’s great music traditions. I was excited because I already had
some knowledge of Arabic and Turkish music, but at the time I knew much less
about Persian music. Arabic and Turkish music had many similarities as well as a
shared history, so it seemed that Persian music would relate to these other cultures
of the Middle East in some way. But the concept of Persian music clearly refer-
enced something different in my imagination. It was an image of great antiquity.
Great Persian empires stood in Central and West Asia long before the Arab expan-
sion or Turkic migrations overtook these empires, so surely Persian music could
be older than music from these other large regional cultures. In my mind, the idea
of Persian music certainly carried a unique sense of history and cultural prestige in
comparison with these other large language groups of the region.
The guest lecturer arrived and proceeded to give us a history of Persian music
that met with my expectations. He first established that Persia and Iran were one
in the same. When people spoke of Persian music, they were in fact talking about
Iranian music associated with the Persian language. He then acknowledged that
scholars knew very little about music of ancient Persia, but some vague evidence
of Persian music-making was still observable in bas reliefs and other artifacts
found among the ruins of the Achaemenid Empire (700–330 bce) and the Sassa-
nian Empire (224–650 ce). He began teaching about the known history of Persian
music from the same era of history when narrations of Arabic music history often
begin: after the rise of Islam, starting around the ninth century ce. My assump-
tions were correct: the history he told did indeed portray Iranians as active partici-

1
2    chapter 1

pants in a cosmopolitan music culture, first in the company of the Arabs and later
in the company of Turkic and even Mongol peoples. There had basically been one
general set of extensively documented musical principles that Iranians had shared
with other language groups of the Middle East for many centuries, within a shared
culture that paired Islam with a dynastic system of kingship. As the guest lecturer
narrated this history, he highlighted key historical writings and sources on music
in the Persian language, focusing on the very important role of Iranians in this
extensive, sophisticated music culture.
Once he arrived at the sixteenth century, about halfway through the class, our
guest stopped narrating this history and informed the class that Persian music
went into decline for several centuries and afterward traditional Persian music
became something completely different than anything he had just discussed. He
then began to explain what traditional Persian music was now, speaking of a new
system of music that emerged in the nineteenth century, distinct from the histori-
cal music principles he had just described. According to our guest’s own knowl-
edge of Persian music history, the music described in the first part of class was a
wholly different phenomenon from traditional Persian music since the nineteenth
century. It was a phenomenon of the modern era, while historic Persian music was
something altogether different.
While the first part of his presentation had fit with my expectations of Persian
music, the second part completely contradicted my assumptions about the histo-
ricity of Persian music. He was telling us that traditional Persian music did not
come out of the mists of ancient Persian antiquity, nor did it come from a glorious
renaissance of culture that came with the rise of medieval Islamic empire. Tradi-
tional Persian music came from the modern nation of Iran beginning in the nine-
teenth century, which marked a time and place of difficult turmoil. The images
of a medieval ruler in his court, feasting surrounded by the sophisticated enter-
tainment of his musicians evaporated. This was the music of a very complicated,
modern place that had experienced two revolutions, authoritarian rule, and most
recently an anti-imperial Shi‘a Islamic regime. The historical narrative of ancient
Persian music was clearly important to understanding Iranian music, but it did
not explain key aspects of Iran’s indigenous music in the modern era, which had a
different structure as well as a different context.
I saw something very profound in this narrative and this change. The nine-
teenth century marked a pivotal moment in Europe’s growing global influence and
global interventions. The United States would eventually take over various aspects
of Europe’s global interventions, and much of Iran’s modern history can be nar-
rated according to which Western power asserted control over its national sover-
eignty, and how various constituencies within Iran attempted to reassert indig-
enous control against these different foreign interventions. In this context, it is
not surprising that Iranians never wholly stopped playing music with indigenous
roots. Though Western music had been (and, in many ways, still is) ubiquitous in
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    3

Iran, they nevertheless maintain a unique tradition of Persian music that shows no
obvious signs of Westernization.
This more recent music system functions within an indigenous framework that
follows some basic tenets of all music in the Middle East. It has multiple melodic
modes that use various pitches both within and beyond those used in Western
scales. Playing music often involves various amounts of improvisation upon basic
melodic phrases. There are rhythms played by drums that may accompany the
melody. Performances consist of both unmetered improvisations by solo instru-
ments and metered sections that are often composed. Metered compositions may
be played by a soloist or a larger ensemble of instruments, and when the latter
performs as a group, the metered melodies become heterophonic, with differ-
ent instruments elaborating on the same melody in a slightly different way. The
instruments common in the tradition include long-necked lutes, zithers, spiked
fiddle, and endblowned flute, which all bear relation to musical instruments in
other parts of the Middle East, Central Asia, and even South Asia. While a singer
is not required to perform this music, it is desirable. When a singer is present, the
instruments focus on accompanying the singer, but the basic process of working
through unmetered improvisation and metered composition continues to prevail.
Traditional Persian music since the nineteenth century continues to share these
types of musical features with other indigenous musics of its surrounding region.
This is true if one compares traditional Persian music with historical practices, but
it is also true if one compares it with contemporary indigenous music traditions
across the cultures of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. In this
sense, the modern manifestation of traditional Persian music is not an imported,
alien musical phenomenon in its geographic and historical context. But the per-
formance practice itself—how musicians decided to go about organizing their
music to determine how they would actually learn it and play it—is both surpris-
ingly specific and unlike the historic music taken as its ancient Persian antecedent.
In leaving the class and beginning my research, these specifics of organization
and structure were central to my questions. At the heart of traditional Persian
music’s modern existence today is a melodic repertoire referred to as the radif
(radīf), organized into separate ordered sets of melodies referred to as dastgah
(dastgāh). Both musicians and scholars remark on the unique nature of the radif,
which has formed the basis of traditional Persian music’s pedagogy and perfor-
mance practice in the twentieth century. In historical documentation, it seems to
have been formed around a distinct performance practice of the late nineteenth
century, and the furthest back any family of musicians associated with that prac-
tice can be documented is the nineteenth century. The oldest any music scholar
could responsibly declare it based on the historical evidence would be the late
eighteenth century, and even this requires much speculation about what might
have been.1 If one assumes that there really has been a continuous, multimillennia
existence of Persian culture, 150 to 170 years of history barely registers as a signifi-
4    chapter 1

cant space of time to practice a particular music tradition. But even in relation to
the history of Persian-speaking people since the rise of Islam, the history of this
particular music represents a very short legacy.
The melodic material of the radif ranges from short motifs to multisectional
pieces, and it can be used as the basis of an instrumental or vocal improvisation or
for composition. Though there were originally only seven dastgah within which
this melodic material was ordered, sections of the original seven dastgah were
subdivided in the twentieth century to create a total of eleven or twelve melodic
complexes. Seven of the dastgah are still the largest of these melodic complexes,
while four to five additional smaller complexes may be referred to as dastgah or
avaz (avāz). In theory, each of these melodic complexes has a set of melodies that
operate within a fairly distinct set of unique pitches. For this reason, both musi-
cians and scholars tend to treat them as scales or modes. Yet it is the melodies of
the radif themselves that define the traditional progression of unmetered impro-
visation and metered composition in performance. The melodies, referred to indi-
vidually as gusheh (gūsheh), determine which pitches will be used in the perfor-
mance of a dastgah, and in what order specific sets of pitches can be used.
Historically, a performance of this radif-dastgah tradition consisted of musi-
cians choosing a dastgah—or perhaps an avaz-dastgah—and creating a perfor-
mance around the particular melodic material chosen. Musicians would impro-
vise upon the gusheh of a dastgah in a fairly organized way, with some melodies
being more improvised upon than others, even as most were unmetered. Addi-
tional metered compositions that are often not part of the radif appear at set times
in the performance of a dastgah to supplement the mostly unmetered improvisa-
tion. These compositions are defined by how their rhythms are counted and their
association with a given dastgah relates to how their pitch usage mirrors that of
the gusheh in the dastgah.
While conducting my research, I wanted to know how and why this particu-
lar performance practice associated alternately with radif and dastgah developed
as music particular to Iran in the modern era, and why a different approach to
music-making was so important within educated courtly society in Persian-
speaking lands for the six centuries previous. The older principles of music-mak-
ing that held the narrative position of the radif-dastgah tradition’s antecedent in
the history of Iran’s Persian music were quite different from radif or dastgah in
significant ways. I came to refer to these older principles as the twelve-maqam
system because they generally centered on twelve melodic modes, referred to
alternately as maqam (maqām), shadd (shadd), or pardeh (pardeh). The twelve
maqam were melodic modes that alternately broke down or combined in various
ways to create additional modes. This distinct commitment to systematic, internal
derivation and extraction of melodic modes was central to the twelve-maqam sys-
tems’ conception. Within this closed system of melodic modes, any given modal
entity needed to be matched with rhythmic cycles called usul (ūṣūl) to create an
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    5

actual, functional melody. These melodies further related to an ever-changing set

of compositional forms. Some forms were songs in Persian, Arabic, or Turkish,
while others were instrumental pieces, but all had various configurations of pri-
mary and secondary melodies, recapitulations, and codas. In order to make music
in the twelve-maqam system, musicians had to combine the use of a maqam or
related melodic mode with an usul in the execution of these forms, which were
structurally distinct from any of the gusheh or compositional forms of the radif-
dastgah tradition.
Both the radif-dastgah tradition and the twelve-maqam system arise somewhat
suddenly in the historic record, and in each case this sudden rise correlates with
a historical event. The radif-dastgah tradition emerged at the height of European
colonization and intervention in the region, but also in a moment of monumental
global transmutation in the history of humanity: the Middle East’s full integra-
tion into the global economic system and the global system of nation-states. Yet
the twelve-maqam system began to dominate educated musical discourse of the
region in the midst of the Mongol invasion: the moment Genghis Khan’s massive
push for dominance over all of Asia overtook key parts of the Islamic world. These
two different historical moments introduced different contingencies that changed
the trajectory of history in West and Central Asia, even as the changes they affected
caught people unawares. While modern Iranian musicians saw great continuity in
the history of their national Persian music, I saw a historical record of great politi-
cal and social disruption, often fostered by unforeseen circumstances. History writ
large for the region could be told as an ongoing series of invasions, migrations,
and other exogenous changes, involving various language groups over millennia.
If such changes and disruptions were large enough, they could be key moments of
cultural transformation that related to musical transformation.

A N C I E N T M U SIC , M O D E R N M Y T H : R E SE A R C H I N G
I D E O L O G I E S I N T H E M U SIC O F I R A N

In the case of the radif-dastgah tradition, it was ethnographic researchers who

were the first to address the extent to which it breaks with the norms established
and maintained in the Persian-speaking world historically. Jean During suggested
the radif-dastgah system did not directly descend from the twelve-maqam system,
but rather seemed Azeri in origin. Indeed, the Qajar Dynasty—whose nineteenth-
century court in Tehran patronized the radif-dastgah tradition—was Turkic from
Azeri territory. In addition to patronizing the radif-dastgah tradition at their seat
of power in Tehran, they also patronized a similar music tradition sung in Azeri
Turkish in their court in Tabriz. This court music of Tabriz became the basis for
the music of Azeri mugham.2 Bruno Nettl further suggested that, though it was
not Westernized per se, the radif-dastgah tradition still could represent changes
that occurred in relation to the rise of Western musical hegemony in Iran dur-
6    chapter 1

ing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He thought that the radif
specifically could have been created out of a modern sense of Iranian national-
ism.3 These contrasting hypotheses notwithstanding, both During and Nettl
observed how different the radif-dastgah tradition was in relation to Persian music
history and sought ways to explain why the modern phenomenon of traditional
Persian music was so different from historical norms documented in Persian-lan-
guage sources.
Nettl and During were just two of several foreign scholars studying music in Iran
as it was in the late twentieth century and the primary focus on the ethnographic
present at that time limited what researchers could conclude about musical change
both during and before modern era. It did not, however, limit researchers’ interest
in expounding on the idea of an ancient Persian music history, nor did it pre-
vent speculation about how the radif-dastgah tradition evolved out of the ancient
ether of Persian music history. Though During’s and Nettl’s attempts to explain the
conundrum of the radif-dastgah tradition’s modern emergence are telling, they are
also relatively unique within all ethnographic attempts to historicize the modern
tradition. Ethnographic researchers have confidently dated the ultimate origins of
Persian music to eras both before and after the rise of the twelve-maqam system.
Thus, the ultimate origins of Persian music might be in pre-Islamic times (c. 550
bce–650 ce), or the height of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate (c. 750–950), or somewhat
after the final fall of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate in the thirteenth century, when Persian
reemerged as a broadly-used lingua franca, and writings began outlining the basic
tenants of the twelve-maqam system.4
When I first arrived in Iran to do research in 2003, I encountered Iranian musi-
cologists arguing about the question of where the radif came from on fairly spe-
cific historical terms. Two scholars, Hooman Asadi and Mohsen Mohammadi, had
begun a debate about the influence of the West that Nettl proposed, and the spe-
cific terms of musical change in the modern era. Iranian musicology more broadly
was turning more attention to music from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century,
an era that had been largely ignored in research conducted prior to the 1990s.5
Iranian musicologists took a period of history that had been considered a period
of musical decline and demonstrated how it encompassed an extensive amount
of musical activity. Their new discoveries have highlighted how there was con-
tinuous Persian music-making from the era of the twelve-maqam system into the
modern era of dastgah and radif, and this has put more attention on the idea that
the twelve-maqam could have gradually evolved into new approaches to music-
making in the nineteenth century, which provided the basis for the radif-dastgah
tradition as it came to exist in the twentieth century. As a result, the historical
question of how Iranians evolved away from using the system of maqam into the
system of dastgah and eventually radif has taken on a significance it did not have
in the late twentieth century, and it is a question of paramount importance to Ira-
nian scholars specifically.
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    7

In reading, speaking with, and observing Iranian musicologists, I realized that

my interests in Persian music history were quite distinct from theirs. They were
seeking to write the one, true history of Persian music. This required one definitive
explanation for how the twelve-maqam system turned into the modern system of
traditional Persian music. For them, the gap between maqam and dastgah was a
missing piece in a single culture’s historic music puzzle. By contrast, I saw different
cultures that dominated in different points in time, and distinct methods of music-
making that related to these temporally distinct cultural spaces. I was researching
at least two distinct cultural puzzles and looking for alignments between cultural
change and changing conceptions of music.
My perspective was not one that could make much sense to my Iranian musi-
cology counterparts. The music culture of radif I encountered in the twenty-first
century was steeped in pre-radif music history, and previous ethnographers’ testa-
ments to the ancient nature of Persian music came directly from the conceptions
of music history narrated by the Iranian musicians they worked with. A number of
musicians in the radif tradition were musicologists, studying and editing editions
of Persian music treatises written between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries,
while also studying the Arabic treatises they believed to have been written by Ira-
nians before the twelfth century. But one did not have to be so educated in specific
historical information about music to make ancient historical perspective the basis
of musical understanding. Some musicians I met knew far less about the specifics
of these historical writings, but nevertheless referenced tropes of this premodern
history in discussions, lessons, and lectures. One of the most common ways to do
this was to reference commonalities in language and music jargon. On one hand,
the general shared usage of Persian language was evidence of an ongoing, shared
music culture. Yet both musicians and musicologists could also point to overlap in
nomenclature: terms used to describe structures in the twelve-maqam system that
also appear in the terminology of the radif-dastgah tradition.
This dependency on language analysis to create cultural commonality in music
history fascinated me. To achieve a narrative of one specific shared cultural legacy
of ancient Persian music, interpreting language over and above music was essen-
tial. The language provided opportunities for interpretation that music did not,
yet the interpretation had to be very selective. Throughout the Middle East, there
are overlapping pools of terminology that many types of music traditions from
multiple language groups pull from in their application of music jargon. Persian
terminology specifically is very common even in the music terminology of non-
Persian speakers. The types of terms that get repurposed are often quite abstract
and sometimes they do not have any demonstrable musical meaning in any par-
ticular tradition. When they do, the musical meaning could have multiple possible
interpretations. When it is possible to compare actual music to its terminology, the
fungible nature of language is apparent, even when everyone speaks Persian. For
instance, in the radif-dastgah tradition, the term avaz has several different mean-
8    chapter 1

ings. It is sometimes used to refer to the smaller dastgah, but it also refers to the
vocal-based improvisatory section of a performance. It can also generally mean
melody or song. In general modern Persian usage, it can mean any kind of sound,
musical or not.
This case of music having a shaky relationship with language is not unique.
Charles Seeger was the first to observe the general reality that language could not
properly represent music, or be analyzed in place of analyzing music.6 But lan-
guage remains a modern tool anyone can use to construct identities for music,
identities that the music itself may or may not be able to validate. Focusing on
general shared linguistic features of certain types of music in specific contexts has
allowed ethnolinguistic identity to remain the central theme of Iranian music his-
tory. Musicians can talk about what have become the great names of Iranian music
history, mixing premodern treatises by writers like al-Farabi (d.c. 950) and ‘abd
al-Qader al-Maraghi (d.c. 1435) with names of the earliest known practitioners of
radif, such as Mirza ‘Abdullah (c. 1843–1918) and Husayn Qoli (d. c. 1915). They
understand that the music system used by Mirza ‘Abdullah and Husayn Qoli was
not discussed by premodern treatise writers. But they did share some music ter-
minology and they probably also shared some semblance of a mother tongue. This
overlap in language provides a rhetorical bridge to narrate Iran’s singular Persian
music history, even when that narrative relies on cultural commonality between
diverse historical realities and their divergent concepts of music. Major differences
in music’s conception, structure, and value at different points in time could not
represent any significant change in the cultural order, as long as the ethnolinguis-
tic bond of the language could be found in either general or specific terms. In
this context, no one has been waiting to understand the specific way the maqam
could have evolved into the dastgah before declaring Iran’s claim to a long history
of Persian music valid. No one needs to know how the transformation occurred
exactly to know that these two systems have to be connected and defined by a
single shared culture.
My idea of different music existing at different points in time because of dis-
tinctions in culture over time was not simply foreign in the realm of Persian music
research because it was somehow foreign to Iranian sensibilities. In the case of
Persian music, the narrative of a single, ethnolinguistic, national music history
has been underpinned by Western scholarship, specifically some of the earli-
est research done on music of the Middle East in Europe under the nineteenth-
century rubric of Oriental studies. By the 1930s, some practitioners of the radif-
dastgah tradition had received education in Europe and knew that Europeans had
researched ancient music of the Arabic- and Persian-speaking world, and that this
research had revealed a distinct, noteworthy history that Europeans saw as being
Persian in nature. Information on the work of Oriental musicologists such as
Raphael Georg Kiesewetter (1773–1850), and Jan Pieter Nicolaas Land (1834–1897)
appears in some of the early writings about the radif-dastgah system. The earliest
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    9

attempts of radif-dastgah musicians to trace a single Persian music history focused

on making a connection between the ancient twelve-maqam system, which Orien-
talists praised, and their own radif-dastgah tradition.7
Though Orientalist scholars had a big impact on how the history of Persian
music would ultimately be told, Iranians were always providing their own inter-
pretations of how Persian culture related to Iran’s history of music. In 1942 the Ira-
nian Journal Rūzgar-i Naw published two articles attributed to the prolific Orien-
talist musicologist Henry George Farmer (1888–1966). One was titled “The Great
Sciences of Iran in the Art of Music” (“Ulamā’-i bozorg-i Īrān dar fann-i mūsīqī”)
and the other “The Impact and Influence of Iran on the Construction of Instru-
ments” (“Ta’tīr va nufūẕ -i Īrān dar ṭab‘īyat-i alāt-i mūsīqī”).8 These articles were
indigenous explanations of information from Farmer’s chapter in Arthur Upham
Pope’s multivolume magnum opus A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times
to the Present, published in 1938. Ironically, Farmer depended heavily on Arabic
sources and French translations of Persian texts to write this chapter and mostly
spoke of cross influences between Persians and Arabs. Conversely, the Persian
interpretations of his work said less about the Arabs, and much more about Iran,
taking Farmer’s article as validation of Iran’s historic musical legacy. Yet publish-
ing the reinterpretation of Farmer’s work in Persian under his name validated the
veracity and importance of the information, even more than published research
under a Persian name.
This borrowing and reinterpreting of Orientalist musicology research on
music of the Middle East were thus ongoing and pervasive before ethnographic
research began on the radif-dastgah tradition later in the twentieth century.
Europeans were telling Iranians they had a great history of Persian music worth
preserving. This may not have been the dominant message coming from Europe,
but it was a message indigenous peoples of the Middle East heard from Europe
and it did not fall on deaf ears. Henry George Farmer was at the 1932 Congress
of Arab Music of in Egypt, where he was one of several European voices making
this argument to Arabs in support of their unique music heritage against the
pervasive growing influence of Western music. The comparative musicologists
from Europe further asserted this perspective on the broader basis that Arabs
had different music from Europe because of their distinct racial traits. Many
Arab voices at this conference favored adapting to a more Western music aes-
thetic, but key Europeans voices were there to argue in favor of the indigenous
music.9 Farmer echoes these sentiments in his chapter on Persian music from
1938. He begins with the statement “In spite of the many alien influences trace-
able in Persian culture over a period of several millennia, Babylonian, Assyrian,
Greek, Aramaean, Indian, and Arabian, there is perhaps something sui generis
in Persian music.”10 He ends the chapter by complaining that the import of West-
ern-style military music to Tehran was “Occidentalizing the Persian musical ear,
to the detriment of the native art.”11
10    chapter 1

While Orientalist research and comparative musicology have proved to be

underpinned by problematic assumptions and issues of racial bias, not all music
scholars or musicians of “the East” want to remove themselves from their joint
legacy. In Iran, the musicians and the musicologists often value Orientalism’s focus
on the great “otherness” of Eastern music history, which they understand to be
mostly Iranian music history. From the perspective of Iranian musical intellectuals
I met, it was clear that Orientalists found Iran’s long-lost music of ancient times
and demonstrated how Iran’s Eastern music had a great musical sophistication and
great history that are both distinct yet comparable to Europe. Iran having its own
distinguished music culture and distinct music history vis-à-vis the West is part
of larger nativist discourses against the domination of Western culture in Iran, of
which there are many.
The priorities of Orientalist musicology and comparative musicologists also
involved many nineteenth-century ideas that still hold sway in American higher
education. Orientalist musicology focused on history and the historic writ-
ings in Arabic and Persian that referenced ancient Greek philosophy, a central
aspect of academic learning in the West even today. Medieval writing on music
first appeared in Arabic between the ninth and thirteenth centuries ce, and then
continued in Persian starting sometime around the thirteenth century. Orientalist
musicology initially took an interest in historic Arab and Persian music because
of its ties to ancient Greek music, which tied Oriental music history to Occiden-
tal music history. Yet the distinct contributions of Arabs and Persians based on
their unique histories and racial distinctions eventually became important, even
as such racial distinctions were also the basis for the analysis of music in compara-
tive musicology.12
In focusing on the individual writings of a handful of authors, Orientalists also
established a certain degree of Great Man Theory in their musicology, with each
medieval author representing a musical genius, from which unique aspects of
genius among the races of the Middle East could be observed. Europe had Bach,
Brahms, Beethoven, within an endless list of composers and theorists, while the
ancient Middle East mostly had great music theorists like al-Kindi (c. 801–866),
al-Farabi, Ibn Sina (980–1037), Safi al-Din Urmawi (d. 1294), Qutb al-Din Shirazi
(c. 1300), and ‘abd al-Qader al-Maraghi. On this basis, Kiesewetter famously pro-
claimed Safi al-Din Urmawi to be the “Zarlino of the Orient,” with one genius of
the East mirroring another genius in the West.13 Among the Arabs and the Per-
sians, each genius revealed some aspect of the race’s musical and cultural truth.
Orientalist musicological writings sought to understand a single, verifiable, cor-
rect truth of music history among the races of the region via the study of indi-
vidual geniuses.
The lingering legacy of Oriental studies in scholarship on music of the Middle
East tends to present some functionalist limitations on what music and musi-
cal change could possibly mean. If Iran’s Persian identity is sui generis, then tra-
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    11

ditional Persian music will always be a mere reflection of Iran’s Persian culture
no matter how much music and society change. In moments of massive social
upheaval, music can only serve to maintain the complex whole of Persian culture.
While other music traditions of the world demonstrate the agency of music to
engage in social protest and the inversion of social norms, or even to foster unique
subcultures of their own, traditional Persian music largely continues to simply
represent the continuity of a predetermined cultural order.
It is within this functionalist/positivist framework of understanding—and
Iran’s knowledge of it—that most of the modern historiography of Persian music
currently resides. Yet this is not purely a conundrum of Persian music or Iran. In
many of the nations around Iran, musicians and researchers often want to know
what music of the past was really like, and how much historic indigenous tradi-
tions have in common with contemporary traditions. These avenues of inquiry
often occur via set ethnolinguistic categories. Thus cultural categories like Persian,
Arab, Turkish (or Azeri, or Kurdish, or Uzbek, or Afghan) can stand as a priori,
while researchers focus on analyzing the music itself and inserting it into a pre-
determined cultural category of historical development. In this context, musical
analysis proceeds largely from the presumption that modern ethnolinguistic iden-
tities have a perennial existence in the known history of music in the Middle East,
no matter how awkward or incomplete the resulting historical narrative might be.
The focus on reconstructing individual ethnolinguistic music histories has
allowed scholars to focus their analysis on what music of the past might have
looked like, sometimes in great detail. Conversely the meaning of it all remains
open to interpretation and standing disagreements on music’s meaning seem
unending. Today, Iranians, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, Uzbeks, and Tajiks could
argue ad infinitum about which group gets to claim the historic legacy of great
music thinkers like al-Farabi, Safi al-Din Urmawi, and Maraghi. These arguments
stem from the ambiguity of these figures’ historical context in relation to cur-
rent ethnolinguistic realities.14 They physically and intellectually moved between
language groups, with no comment about where they were born or what lan-
guage they spoke from birth. Instead, they focused their lives on the urban spaces
where patrons of their work could be found, and they wrote in whatever the lin-
gua franca was in their time and place. Thus, while the twelve-maqam system had
a general region of practice, it was not defined by any one language group, race,
or nation.
By contrast, the modern tradition of Persian music is very defined by a national
ethnolinguistic identity. The radif-dastgah tradition belongs to Iran and only
Iran, referred to by musicians and scholars using such labels as traditional Iranian
music (mūsīqī-i ṣon ‘atī-i īrānī) and authentic Iranian music (mūsīqī-i aṣīlī-i īrānī).
Practitioners of the radif-dastgah tradition might leave Iran and live almost any-
where on Earth, but this music tradition would still be Iranian. Before this tradi-
tion existed, historical documentation discussing music did not use Iran as a geo-
12    chapter 1

graphic concept that delineated where on the map music practices would start or
stop. Whether it was purely theoretical music (mūsīqī), sophisticated urban music
practices (ghīnā’), or basic melody and rhythm (laḥn and īqā’), the adjective Ira-
nian (īrānī) did not relate to music. People of the past were not blind to differences
in different peoples, languages, and locations. Indeed, musicians tended to occupy
predominantly cosmopolitan spaces where music-making must account for such
differences. It was not enough to make music for Persian-speaking people (‘ajam).
Music had to speak across languages.
In continuing to read music treatises about the twelve-maqam system written
in Persian and Arabic as far back as the thirteenth century, the differences I saw
between the radif-dastgah tradition and the twelve-maqam system became more
striking. The twelve-maqam system clearly shares features with music traditions
of the Middle East and Central Asia cross-culturally, as does the radif-dastgah
tradition.15 Yet the rise of a traditional Persian music based on the organizational
principles of dastgah and radif in the nineteenth century pivoted away from the
twelve-maqam system’s organizational principles in significant ways. In his expan-
sive analysis of modal concepts in the Middle East and South Asia musicologist
Harold Powers analyzed Turkish and Arabic modal concepts together, but had
to analyze modal concepts in the radif-dastgah tradition separately.16 The historic
twelve-maqam system had more in common with the latter than the former, in
terms of both structure and execution.
Even beyond basic structural features, however, the twelve-maqam system was
epistemologically different from the radif-dastgah tradition. Structural features
and music-making processes were different, and these differing structural features
had different meanings and goals even as they necessitated different music-mak-
ing processes in very different contexts. These two music systems were from very
different places in time and thus related to different cultural orders. Both modern
musicians of the Middle East and their scholars anticipate changes in music to
indicate changes in culture when music is different between geographies and lan-
guage groups. Yet changes in cultural order also occur across time. Accounting for
temporally distinct cultures with specificity across history can answer questions
about music history that music alone cannot.
Given the central place of the twelve-maqam system in multiple music histories
of the region, it could not have simply evolved into the radif-dastgah tradition
within a single, Persian cultural trajectory. Nor could it inevitably evolve into any
other modern maqam/makam tradition in relation to a single Turkic or Arabic
cultural trajectory. The centrality of cultural stability to modern understandings
of music history in the Middle East, whether indigenous or foreign, belies the
important implications of musical change and what it reveals about cultural differ-
ences between the past and the present. In considering the potential for significant
change in music to indicate the existence of different cultural orders in distinct
temporal space, the twelve-maqam system is something much more than a mere
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    13

progenitor of the radif-dastgah tradition. The radif-dastgah tradition is also some-

thing much more than a mere regurgitation of a perennial culture.

W R I T I N G A N D R EW R I T I N G P E R SIA N M U SIC H I ST O RY

In recent years, more critical readings of music history and musicians’ historical
narratives in areas surrounding Iran have provided a basis to distinguish between
past and present musical epistemologies. For instance, Jonathan Shannon distin-
guishes the contemporary nostalgia of Middle Eastern musicians for medieval al-
Andalus as a cultural imaginary that lives in contemporary musicians’ rhetoric,
far away from the realities of medieval Muslim Spain.17 In South Asia, research by
Katherine Butler and Bonnie Wade has demonstrated that modern agency and
cultural synergies created the indigenous tradition of Hindustani music leading up
to the nineteenth century.18 Beyond these localized deconstructions of historical
discourse, the entire discipline of anthropology has also experienced very broad
critiques of its culture paradigm via reflexive analysis of the discipline in relation
to its subject of culture and indigenous peoples.19 Anthropology’s internal critique
has stemmed in part from the realization that many indigenous traditions that
researchers initially identified as quite old were in fact quite new.
In the midst of these changing conceptions of music, history, culture, and tradi-
tion, Iran has been largely absent. This is partially due to purely logistical challenges
of ethnographic research and music performance. The revolution in 1978–1979
and ensuing upheaval, followed by international sanction, prohibitive travel poli-
cies, and heavy government intervention into music regulation, have all provided
difficult hurdles for both Iranian musical performance and research. Social and
cultural historians have faired somewhat better under the current Iranian govern-
ment. Research since 1978 on early-twentieth-century Iran has been able to reveal
the modern agency involved in the rise of the modern Iranian nation, referencing
indigenous interpretations of European intellectual trends such as Orientalism,
nationalism, and political activism.20
But the Iranian government throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centu-
ries has also done a high degree of enforcement of its own nationalist narratives of
Iranian history, making these kinds of alternative interpretations of Persian history
for music more difficult. By the 1960s many indigenous musicians and researchers
depended on the Pahlavi Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Information for their
work, even as the Pahlavi state had been invested in notions of modern Iran as the
heir to the great ancient Persian empires for several decades.21 In this environment,
researchers had the impetus to write within a narrative of Iranian music history
that related to the Pahlavi preference to connect Iran to the most ancient interpre-
tation of Persian culture available.22 When the revolution in the late twentieth cen-
tury brought Shi‘a Islamic identity to the fore, this placed emphasis on the origins
of Iranian identity in the sixteenth century, when Shi‘a Islam came to dominate the
14    chapter 1

Iranian plateau. Pre-Islamic and even early Islamic history no longer provided the
primary framework of Iran’s political identity, and thus more historical research of
music in Iran now focuses on music from the period from the sixteenth century to
the present. The Islamic Republic’s influence on music has primarily been directly
filtered through its regulation of music performance, which has altered the nature
of current music practices in novel ways, even as it claims to maintain some type
of native purity.23 Yet government ideas about what Iran is, where it come from,
and what its ideal cultural essence is change the framework for understandings of
music far beyond performance.
More recently, government officials have tried to mix and match various aspects
of pre-Islamic and Islamic identity with their specific political interests in modern
Middle Eastern affairs. The most visual example of this more recent trend was the
ceremonial induction of the ancient Persian ruler Cyrus the Great (600–529 bce)
into the Shi‘a government’s Basij militia in 2010.24 This required the government
to get an actor to play the part of the ancient Zoroastrian ruler, upon whom the
president placed a kuffiya, the iconic scarf of the mostly Sunni Arab Levant, which
the Basij wear both in support of Sunni Palestine and in keeping with the Shi‘a
organization Hezbollah in Lebanon.
While performing a formal ceremony to symbolically induct a prehistoric Per-
sian king into a modern government militia seems unusual and ostentatious, it
demonstrates that the pre-Islamic nationalist narrative that dominated Iranian
politics for most of the twentieth century still has power and relevancy. Finding
ways to explain or otherwise connect the pre-Islamic nationalist narrative with the
more recent history and nationalist discourses of the Islamic Republic is a useful
initiative in current Iranian politics. It also demonstrates the futility of taking the
modern discourse on Iranian national identity as the historical truth of identity
in the Persian-speaking world for all time. Grand spectacles such as this display
highly visual juggling of contradictory imagery, highlighting the large amount
of agency involved in creating and re-creating a modern national identity. The
continuity emphasized in historical discourses surrounding Iran’s Persian music—
whether from a musician or a scholar, an Iranian or a foreigner—contradicts the
ephemeral construction of unity for a single Iranian culture and history. Modern
Iranians write and rewrite their own history, even as the peoples in surrounding
nation-states write and rewrite their histories, creating overlap and conflict in his-
torical discourse. Music provides evidence upon which to build multiple subjec-
tive interpretations of past realities to explain the ever-changing present moment
and prospects for the future.25
Ensuring that Iran has a place on the modern political map of the world
requires this ongoing negotiation of Iranian identity and objective enforcement of
its subjective nature. Despite the perceived historic symmetry between Iran and
the Persian language, only about 50 percent of Iranians speak Persian as their first
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    15

language. Iran encompasses a lot of both musical and cultural diversity. Even Per-
sians have music traditions that are unique to one particular region or even one
particular city.26 Some of its larger language minorities have agitated for national
independence over the past century, including Azeris, Baluchis, and Kurds, who
all have their own contiguous language regions that defy Iran’s borders as well as
those of surrounding nations. Within Iran itself, there are multiple possibilities for
national divisions that modern Iran has had to confront.
The fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the subsequent independence
of Persian- and Turkic-speaking peoples of Central Asia have created even more
challenges to Iran’s historic Persian façade. While Iran clung to the European label
of Persia for most of the twentieth century, the term Persianate emerged as a com-
mon term to describe societies that fell outside of Iran’s national history as aware-
ness grew of Persian-speaking people in Central and South Asia. When Central
Asia emerged as an accessible area for research in the shadow of Iran’s Islamic
revolution in the 1990s, the use of adjective Persianate soared. Central Asia and
South Asia have become prime areas for research on Persianate music while Iran
has remained isolated.
All of this demonstrates that Iran is a modern nation-state that must actively
work to create and maintain itself as a distinct cultural entity that has political
standing in the modern world. Like all nation-states, this requires Iran to engage
in ever-changing narratives that justify its historical existence in the midst of
changing circumstances and other national possibilities. Iran’s national identity is
negotiated, renegotiated, and enforced in relation to other nations, who are also
negotiating and renegotiating their national identities.
Music has a role to play in such negotiations. Thus, one old song in the radif
tradition highlights the negotiation of Iran vis-à-vis Azerbaijan in the early twen-
tieth century, describing Azerbaijan as “Iran’s key, Iran’s hope, Iran’s martyr” while
singing against Azerbaijan’s Turkic identity by telling it to “avoid the Turks and the
Turkish.”27 More recently, Iran formally turned to the West for musical affirmation
of its cultural strength. In 2009, UNESCO approved Iran’s application to have the
radif inscribed on its “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of
Humanity.” Here the international community officially recognized the radif as
a key aspect of Iranian music that “reflects the cultural and national identity of
the Iranian people.”28 These are musical actions taken in an ongoing negotiation
of national culture. Iran made its application for the radif to be added to this list
a year after UNESCO started it. In its first year, UNESCO added multiple music
traditions from Iran’s neighbors, including the Azeri Mugham, Uzbek and Tadjik
Shahmaqom, and Uyghur Maqam. With nations all around it receiving cultural
validation from UNESCO through music, Iran could not afford to be left out.
Indeed, Iran is very concerned about its standing in its surrounding region. It is
currently very focused on the countries around it and what they can do to com-
16    chapter 1

promise Iran’s position, including their ability to present affronts to its political
interests and cultural identity.

P E R SIA N M U SIC I N C U LT U R A L H I S T O RY:

A N EW A P P R OAC H

While people studying musical practices in areas of the world with little physi-
cal documentation of music history may be able to embrace the idea of history
as a pure exercise in mythology for the present, it creates a teleological quandary
for areas like the Middle East where historical documentation of musical ideas
and practice goes back centuries. In meeting Iranian musicians in the twenty-first
century and directly experiencing their music and their understanding of their
culture, I wanted my research to honor their perspectives, including their inter-
pretations of music history. The feeling of obligation to the present I experienced
was immediate and visceral.
This presents a predicament for considering the meaning of the musical past.
I can read about the musical past, but I cannot directly observe or hear a reality
from centuries in the past. I can ponder how those musicians existed in the past
playing different music under very different circumstances, but their reality can-
not live with me the way current Iranian music culture can. For this reason, direct
experiences with a present musical reality weigh heavily on attempts to under-
stand documentation of the musical past, no matter how many centuries or mil-
lennia removed music history is. It is possible to do complex analysis to reveal
highly distinct music systems of the past in detail, and yet there is a tendency to
construct the significance of music culture past in relation to a designated music
culture present, no matter how musically and culturally distinct the past maybe. In
considering a new approach to Persian music’s historiography, moving away from
such telescopic interpretations of the past provides an opportunity to locate the
more specific meanings of music at different points in time. This greater specificity
of meaning can reveal a more active and arguably more significant role for music
and musicians in the societies of the Persian-speaking world, past and present.
In considering how to write historiography that more equally accounts for the
possibility of distinctions in musical and cultural order marking differing epochs,
I kept reading the historical writings in Persian considered by both musicians
and scholars to be the physical and intellectual evidence of Iran’s great music his-
tory, seeking points of analysis that could provide insight into the musical past on
its own terms, with no predetermined narrative direction for culture or identity
beyond what documentation could support. I focused my research on the cata-
log of Persian music treatises compiled by the Iranian musicologist Mohammad
Taghi Massoudieh in the late twentieth century, Manuscrits persans concernant la
musique.29 Besides being an extensive catalog of Persian musical writings in print, I
found that this catalog had a certain symbolic significance, acting as a metaphori-
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    17

cal bible of Persian music that documented its historic tales and origins over cen-
turies. Massoudieh was a very influential scholar in late-twentieth-century Iranian
musicology and his cataloging of Persian manuscripts validated modern belief in
Persian music’s unity and antiquity and modern Iran’s ownership over this Persian
musical legacy. I was also able to analyze writings Massoudieh did not document,
but his cataloging of manuscripts remained the center of my research. The types of
manuscripts he documented had been used to tell a specific story about Iran’s his-
tory. I wanted to reanalyze this documentation without the assumptions of Iranian
national history.
I quickly discovered that Oriental musicology’s influence over indigenous musi-
cal thought and the diffuse history of Persian-speaking peoples in Asia reflected
the geography of the historical documentation in this catalog and the general tra-
jectory of historical studies of Iranian music history overall. The documentation of
Iran’s music history cataloged by Massoudieh was all over the Eurasian continent,
which held much of it in archives and libraries all over Europe, South Asia, and
Central Asia. Researching the catalog required me to travel to Iran, and the United
Kingdom, Germany, and France, while requesting documents from archives in
the Netherlands, Uzbekistan, Russia, Pakistan, and India. Sometimes I could get
Persian music treatises from institutions I could not visit through normal requests
to the constituent institutions. Sometimes I shared documents I had access to with
Iranian musicologists who needed them, and in turn they shared documentation
they had obtained. All this movement belied notions of armchair scholarship. Not
even Iranian musicians themselves had full access to Persian music history. They
would have to travel far and wide to see it.
I started my research reading texts that other scholars had written about, but
also texts no one had written about, and large sections of text that scholars omitted
from analysis due to their inability to illuminate practice or their redundancy of
discourse. Redundancy of discourse, even purely theoretical concepts, struck me
as too important of a phenomenon to ignore. Modern studies of historical music
texts from the Middle East have tended to follow medieval European classification
of discourse between the purely speculative (musica speculativa or ‘ilm) and the
practical (musica practica or ‘amal), leaving the latter to either admire or ignore
and the former to explain what really happened.30 But reading all statements and
locating consistent patterns of musical discourse across such categorization can
reveal and map music’s relationship with the cultural order: stable constructs of
human belief and meaning and what music contributed to those constructs within
a particular space and temporality, in relation to both praxis and possibilities
of praxis.
Within this general framework, I saw the need to reread much of what had
already been read and I deal with the documentation already recognized as cen-
tral to Iran’s Persian music history. Restricting the analysis of music within the
set labels such as “Persian history” or “Iranian culture” put significant limits on
18    chapter 1

the types of information that could be valued in these writings and narrowed the
possibilities for how they could be analyzed. But in taking music as a key indi-
cator that could define cultural and temporal space, new readings of these texts
are possible.
Analyzing musical thought’s relationship to the stability and change of the cul-
tural order creates a cultural history of music in the true sense of cultural history:
the study of how specific musical knowledge and practice can be aligned with
nonmusical knowledge and practice in the broader context of cultural production.
The goal of such a cultural history is to identify the specific realities that made
different parameters for music-making possible at different points in time. In this
approach to historiography, parameters of music culture relate to the successive
temporal alignments between discourses within a field (in this case, music) and
the discourses of other fields that make up its surrounding context. Within this
framework, music is part of an active realm of cultural production that can reveal
significant changes in cultural dynamics. More significantly, music analyzed as
cultural production in this framework can reveal the dynamics of changing local
histories, as well as connections between local history and the broader dynamics
of world history.
On its face, this kind of study borrows much from Foucauldian archeology.31
In such a study, the purpose of discourse analysis would be to locate a broad con-
ceptual basis for a set of musical possibilities within the cultural order, looking for
moments of one discourse’s extinction in relation to another, in order to locate
successive change in music and culture, rather than a single, evolving cumula-
tive change.32 Yet some of the strongest epistemological breaks in the history of
Persian-speaking people are not accompanied by wholesale cultural or musical
extinction, highlighting points made about the relationship between historical
events and the contrasting stability of cultural order in historical anthropology.
Thus, Marshall Sahlins insists that the past does not have to be victimized by the
present in the sense that it can be analyzed to locate its own unique cultural order.
He further suggests, beyond Foucault, that the goal of modern historiography is
“understanding people’s cultural constructions of events, not of determining ‘facts’
in the physicalist sense of objective happenings.”33
In the analysis of historical documentation from this perspective, radical trans-
formations of culture occur in relation to exogenous events and world history,
yet the standing cultural order will have input into the process of adaptation and
reinterpretation in the establishment of a new order. Indigenous peoples of the
Middle East do not simply lose their cultural orders in the midst of invasions,
migrations, and colonizations, nor do they maintain the cultural order and ren-
der historical events and the causations of world history meaningless to local cul-
tural perspective. Rather, the cultural order becomes a key aspect of how societies
adapt to events and establish new cultural order via idiosyncratic responses to the
event, not just contact with external forces. In this context, the idea of musical
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    19

tradition is less one of an enduring monument to a single cultural existence and

more akin to Marshall Sahlins’s definition of tradition as a culturally specific form
of change.34 Humanity’s local musical abilities and knowledge come into play as
adaptive responses to changing life circumstances tied to an ever-changing world.
In writing a cultural history of Persian music in this way, Nettl’s suggestion
of the radif-dastgah tradition emerging from the dual historical events of rising
Western cultural hegemony and rising sentiments of nationalism takes on a very
different meaning that warrants investigation, with deeper consideration of the
relationship between music, cultural order, and historical events. On one hand,
social scientists no longer take nationalism for granted as a purely organic pride
in a naturally perennial culture of a nation. It is almost a truism to say that nation-
states are actively constructed in the modern era, with grand historical narratives
built upon purloined historical data. This is the source of modern Iran’s ability
to give different and even contradictory conceptions of national identity, with-
out ever questioning the legitimacy of Iran’s perennial nature. This metaphorical
stealing of history is part of the adaptation process: an aspect of older, localized
cultural order being actively repurposed in adaptation to modernity, in support of
the modern nation.
The specific circumstances encompassing the historical event of modernity’s
transmutation facilitate a heterogeneous synergy between various aspects of
indigenous cultural order, external forces, and the localized contingencies of the
event itself. In this context, the modern radif-dastgah tradition is not required to
be either a replica or an abandonment of indigenous music culture, nor does it
have to be a compromise position between Persian and Western culture. It can be a
culturally moded change in music’s practice and conception that addresses unique
cultural adaptation to the modern world in a particular place. It is not limited
to being a static symbol of Iran’s national culture: it can be an active producer of
Iranian culture that makes the nation of Iran possible, in part by voicing a narra-
tive for modern Iran using new interpretations of indigenous musical expression.
The radif-dastgah tradition’s unique historical moment highlights its distinc-
tion from the twelve-maqam system. No one writing about, thinking about, or
performing within the twelve-maqam system in the fifteenth century had a crystal
ball to tell them of the historical events from which the radif-dastgah tradition
emerged four centuries later. Though the modern music culture of the radif-dast-
gah tradition requires the history of the twelve-maqam system to adapt to Iran’s
modern cultural order, the twelve-maqam system related to a different cultural
order, which emerged in the adaptation to very different historical events in the
Persian-speaking world: the rise of Islam via Arabic-speaking peoples from the
West, and the Mongol Invasion accompanied by Turkic migrations from the East.
It is here, in the midst of cosmopolitan, polyglot Islamic empires across Central
and West Asia, that the twelve-maqam system became a highly valued model of
music’s conception and performance practice.
20    chapter 1

To consider historical documentation of music in the Persian-speaking world

in relation to these contrasting historical events, I identified three categories of
musical discourse found across Persian writings about music, from the thirteenth
century into the 1940s, which demonstrate the contrasts between the cultural
order of the twelve-maqam system and the radif-dastgah tradition. Discourse
on the meaning of technical aspects of music’s structure and execution directly
addresses what made each music system possible and valuable within its constitu-
ent historical context. Discourse on the moral parameters of musical practices
further extrapolates contrasting moral dilemmas in the execution and conception
of musical expression for each constituent music system. Finally, song texts allow
musical expression to fully enunciate contrasting priorities of each system’s cul-
tural context.
On the basis of these three categories of discourse in relation to two distinct
music systems, I have organized my analysis into two parts: part 1 for the twelve-
maqam system from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, and part 2 for the
radif-dastgah tradition from the nineteenth century to the 1940s. Chapter 2 is
an introduction to part 1, providing a more detailed background and history of
the twelve-maqam system and its intellectual practitioners within the Persian-
ate Islamic empires established by Mongol and Turkic rulers. Chapter 3 examines
technical discourse on the twelve-maqam system, along with its metaphysical and
cosmological underpinnings. Chapter 4 examines the discourses of morality sur-
rounding the practice of listening for divine connection in the context of Islamic
mysticism. These discourses run concurrent with the twelve-maqam system,
sometimes in the same texts, reflecting on the benefits and perils of mystical prac-
tices that used listening to musical expression as a method of direct connection
with God. Chapter 5 completes part 1 with an analysis of song text collections
from the Timurid courts (1370–1501 ce) and the Safavid courts (1501–1722 ce).
These texts highlight the centrality of imperial principles in musical expression,
while also demonstrating musical adaptation to the changing politics of empire
over time.
Chapter 6 is an introduction to part 2 that provides a more detailed background
and history on the radif-dastgah tradition and the historical context of its intel-
lectual practitioners within the fall of the cosmopolitan model of empire and the
rise of the nation of Iran. Chapter 7 examines technical discourse on the radif-
dastgah tradition, focusing on how its structure related to developing national
discourses in the descriptions and theoretical models of the tradition described
by Forsat al-Dowleh Shirazi (1855–1920), Mehdi Qoli Hedayat (1864–1955), and
Ali Naqi Vaziri (1887–1980). Chapter 8 examines the changing morality of music
in this newly nationalized culture, considering the moral issues of national music
discussed from different perspectives by Vaziri and the singer-poet Aref Qazvini
(1882–1934). Chapter 9 examines the nationalist choices that create much of the
original structure for radif-dastgah performance, as well as the modern nationalist
 Ancient Music, Modern Myth    21

discourses of tasnif (taṣnīf)—the metered song compositions commonly inserted

into radif-dastgah performances.
In chapter 10, I conclude by reflecting on the significant contingencies that
put Iran’s musical modernity on a unique path, which was further shaped and
reshaped by different readings of what the nation of Iran needed from its music in
order to survive and thrive. I consider the larger picture of the contrasts between
the radif-dastgah tradition and the twelve-maqam system, and return to the ques-
tion of methodology in music historiography and how placing cultural production
at the center of music history sheds light on music’s larger role in both local and
world history.