Masters of Persian Music
Hossein Alizadeh, Kayhan Kalhor, Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Homayoun Shajarian
by Jonathan Curiel
Was it fair that four of Iran's greatest musicians toured together across North America this year and were subjected to questions about fatwas, politics, and cultural freedom? It can be difficult for Westerners to reconcile Iran's reputation as a regressive country with the sublime songs that come from Tehran, but progress is progress: The concerts by Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Homayoun Shajarian, Hossein Alizadeh, and Kayhan Kalhor were an important step in spotlighting traditional Persian music, whose roots stretch back more than 1,400 years. "We're trying to prove that this musical heritage is worth listening to," Kalhor said.
Traditional Persian music is timeless. It can also be deceptively familiar. In the strains of Alizadeh's finger-plucking, you can hear echoes of guitar or even Ravi Shankar's sitar. In Kalhor's bowing of the kamancheh, an ancient instrument that predates the violin, you can hear sounds reminiscent of Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma. And in the stunning voices of Mohammad Shajarian and his son, you can hear the words of Rumi, Hafez, and other poets — words about love and yearning and hardship that have lifted spirits for generations and have been translated from continent to continent.
Despite all of its merits, traditional Persian music has never approached critical mass in the English-speaking world. Judging by the crowds who paid to see Kalhor, Alizadeh, and the Shajarians, this could change. In years past, all of the tour's ticket-holders would have been expatriates from Iran. At Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where the quartet performed in February, more than half the audience was non-Iranian. The same was true in Santa Barbara, California. Though some stops on the tour had a mostly Iranian audience, so many new fans flocked to see the four musicians that the World Music Institute in New York plans to bring the quartet back to North America next fall. "It was our hope from the very beginning that this tour would bring Americans (of non-Iranian descent) to see Persian classical musicians, and it happened," said Isabel Soffer, associate director of the World Music Institute. "This tour, in many ways, put classical Persian music on the map for many Americans."
Appropriately, tour organizers dubbed the musicians "The Masters of Persian Music" — an honorific that speaks to their lofty status in Iranian society. At age 61, Mohammad Shajarian is his country's best-known and best-loved classical singer; his concerts in Iran are so popular that people wait for days in line to get good seats. Shajarian's son Homayoun, 25, sings and performs on tombak, a goblet drum. Alizadeh, 50, plays a Persian lute called tar. Last year, Iran's Ministry of Culture named him the country's best contemporary artist. Kalhor, at age 37, rose to international prominence after leaving Iran. Now living in New York, he has performed with the Kronos Quartet and Ma, who commissioned Kalhor to work on his Silk Road Project.
Kalhor, Alizadeh, and the Shajarians had never performed together before embarking on their tour, which began in Europe, touched down in Canada, and crisscrossed the United States. Sold-out concert halls and standing ovations followed the musicians everywhere. So did skepticism from some observers who hadn't before heard traditional Persian music, which is improvised onstage and features arching, meditative songs that can last 30 minutes or longer. "Everyone was trying to politicize it," said Kalhor of the tour. "One (U.S. writer) asked, 'How can such music come out of the Ayatollah's country?' "
"The Ayatollah" in this case refers to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the gray-bearded mullah who ruled over Iran from 1979 until his death in 1989. The Iranian Revolution that Khomeini sparked 22 years ago — symbolized by hostage-taking at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the fatwa (religious edict) against author Salman Rushdie — continues to overshadow relations between Iran and the West and continues to influence people's perceptions of Iran, right down to the music.
It's true that some of Iran's religious clerics wanted to ban music completely after 1979. What they got was a compromise. Pop music was prohibited, silencing such pre-revolutionary divas as Googoosh, a Madonna-like figure who was deemed a temptress by the Khomeini regime and put under virtual house arrest. Classical singing was approved — with limits. On Iranian television, cameras could show only singers and the faces of instrumentalists, not the instruments themselves. One explanation for this: Traditional Iranian singing was considered virtuous because of its connection to the Koran. In certain Muslim religious circles, sacred Islamic texts are sung and chanted.
"Instrumental music was looked at as more of an evil," said Shahrokh Yadegari, the Iranian-born-and-raised artistic director of the Persian Arts Society in Los Angeles, which runs Kereshmeh Records. "It has a low position. Vocal music has become the core of traditional Iranian music. Instrumental music is even based on the vocal repertoire."
In the new millennium, the musical barriers have receded somewhat in Iran. (Khomeini never issued a fatwa prohibiting music, said Yadegari.) But women singers are still not allowed to perform publicly in front of men, and government censors must still approve all lyrics and liner notes before they are produced on CDs and tapes. Out of this void has come a tradition of music that emphasizes poetry with subtle political and social edges. For example, throughout their North American tour, Shajarian's quartet performed a song based on the poem "Winter," a 45-year-old work from Iranian poet Mehdi Akhavan Saless that talks of a man facing a "dark and slippery road" and the "trick" of a dawn that is really "the souvenir of the hard slap of the Winter." The poem can be interpreted to refer to today's political climate in Iran, where even reform-minded president Mohammad Khatami has said he prevented his children from listening to music.
