Touraj Kiaras and Persian Classical Music: An Analytical Perspective

Owen Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351538893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

In this book Owen Wright analyses a single recording of classical Persian music made by Touraj Kiaras, a distinguished singer, accompanied by four noted instrumentalists. The format of the recording is typical of a public concert performance, and thus includes instrumental compositions as well as a central exploration of vocal repertoire and technique. The analysis identifies salient structural features, whether of the individual components or of the whole, in a way accessible to the western reader, but it also takes account of the analytical metalanguage used in Persian scholarship, and includes consideration of the relationship between music and poetry. It is important to note that it is also guided by the perceptions of the performer, whose input and responses to questions have significantly influenced the enterprise. To avoid the dryly impersonal, the analysis is also framed by an introduction which combines a biographical sketch of Touraj Kiaras with a survey of the twentieth-century evolution of Persian classical music and of the position of the vocal repertoire within it, and by an epilogue which examines further the ideological basis of prevalent attitudes to music, and seeks to explore the validity of the analytical enterprise within this context.

Part 1
Touraj Kiaras

Touraj Kiaras was born in 1938, and his biography as an expert singer of Persian classical music during the second half of the twentieth century is in many ways exemplary. First, in the difficulties he faced in pursuing music as a vocation and the decisions he made about the degree to which he would accept a public rôle, for his is a culture where a musical career has not normally enjoyed high esteem. This is not of itself particularly surprising: there have been many societies in which professional musicians are either outsiders or regarded as of inferior status by the élites who patronize them, but to understand why this should be so in modern Iran one needs to take some account of the evolving complexities of a society where conflicting ideologies have not just competed for power, but have also offered rival views of the ethical evaluation of music and hence (to use a secular phraseology) have elaborated different agendas for the control of artistic policy. What made things particularly difficult for Touraj Kiaras was coming from what might be called an establishment background, one where there were insistent family pressures favouring quite other career expectations, and one, moreover, in which there was no rôle model for public performance.

Typical, too, even if the order of events was unusual, was the way in which his artistic formation combined different and contrastive elements. He enrolled, in a perfectly orthodox manner, for traditional oral/aural tuition with a teacher of recognized authority, one of the grand masters of the classical vocal repertoire, thereby experiencing a method inculcating scrupulous attention to detail and requiring the memorization and faithful rendition of material recognized as normative. But this only happened long after he had already absorbed a variegated repertoire of vocal compositions, partly through random exposure to both live and broadcast performances, but largely though listening to gramophone records, a solitary experience of a medium paradoxically both permissive and authoritarian.

Also, although here one should speak less of the exemplary than the universal, he was subjected, together with all other musicians, to the dramatic political and cultural upheavals of the twentieth century. He arrived to maturity in a society that was attempting in multiple ways to accelerate the process of westernization, and in the course of so doing both emphasized the still novel concept of an indigenous ‘classical tradition’ and challenged its pre-eminence, even its right to survive, through the parallel support it gave to an imported and prestigious competitor. Then, at the age of 41, when he had established a significant reputation as a technically outstanding singer at the peak of his artistic maturity, he had to come to terms in 1979 with revolutionary upheaval and a new regime that at least in its early years was profoundly inimical to the public consumption of music, whetherviewed as art or entertainment. Like many others he took refuge in silence, and later chose exile in London, where the cessation of his active singing career has at least been partially compensated for by his teaching activity, from which, indirectly, the present study is derived.

Historical Context

In terms of social and cultural background Touraj Kiaras is to be placed securely within a particular segment of the pre-revolutionary élite. For much of the twentieth century the prevailing policy of the state was some form of westernization, irrespective of whether governments veered towards constitutional or (more usually) autocratic forms, particularly so during the Pahlavi period (1924–79), and most markedly during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza (1941–79), and fundamental to the maintenance of power and the ability to prosecute a policy of modernizing institutions and developing industrial production along western lines was the loyalty of the armed forces. The fact that Touraj Kiaras’s father was a senior army officer thus placed him near the centre of the state apparatus.

The importance of the military as an agent of modernization and centralization as well as a bulwark against western expansionism had become crucial already in the mid nineteenth century,¹ when Iran, following the same pattern as the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, attempted to reform its army along European lines. Essential to this process of change were technological borrowing and the importation of foreign expertise, to be followed by potentially radical transformations of training and education. Many of those subjected to the new curricula inevitably showed a degree of receptivity to western ideas, and not merely of administration and politics, so that eventually, as elsewhere, there emerged a new intellectual élite with a western-style educational background, a knowledge of western languages (usually French in the first instance) and an increasing interest in western art forms. From this would eventually stem innovations in literature, first through a shift, encouraged by journalism, from a mandarin style to one more in touch with the demotic, then later, in the twentieth century, through the introduction of new forms of narrative prose – first the short story and then the novel – and the development of theatrical presentations. In the visual arts European elements had begun to be absorbed much earlier, and already in the nineteenth century the grand tradition of miniature painting in Iran was virtually abandoned. State patronage was transferred to the production of western-style oil painting, and the Qajar ruler Nasir al-Din Shah (1848–96), especially, fostered this development by commissioning both portraits and large-scale military scenes, and supportingthe training of artists at western art schools. Their output would, as a result, be radically estranged from the earlier tradition.²

¹By which time Iran had already lost territory in the eastern Caucasus and Azerbayjan to Russia. To the Russian threat from the north would later be added British efforts to extend their sphere of influence in the south. ²Although it should be noted on the one hand that the importation of western motifs and techniques within miniature painting had begun considerably earlier, and on the other that in the twentieth century there would be, in a variety of ways, a re-engagement with traditional elements ranging from the folkloric to the calligraphic. There is, inevitably, a vast literature on contact with and reactions to the West. For Ottoman Turkey a classic general study is B. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, 1961). For the gradual infiltration of western ideas into Arabic literature see S. Jayyusi, Trends and movements in modern Arabic poetry (Leiden, 1977) and S. Hafez, The genesis of Arabic narrative discourse: a study in the sociology of modern Arabic literature (London, 1993). For Iran in general (although, interestingly, not at all for music) see the Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, which has sections on art, architecture, and a decidedly thin treatment of modern trends in literature appended to a history of journalism. For the contrast between earlier and later, westernized, styles of Qajar painting see the materials in L.S. Diba (ed.), with M. Ekhtiar, Royal Persian paintings. The Qajar epoch 1785–1925 (New York/London, 1998) and, especially, pp. 58–62.

But no such drastic rupture was to take place within music. Here, again, whatever the local chronological differences, one can trace a broad Middle Eastern pattern of contact with, and eventual interest in, western music as part and parcel of an increasingly admired or at least respected culture that was in any case difficult for local Elites simply to ignore. But there is little evidence, except perhaps for the more cosmopolitan milieu of Istanbul, with its significant minority populations already more open to western culture, that there was much active engagement or accommodation with western music outside court circles.³ Where it clearly did have an impact, to loop back gradually to Kiaras père, was within the specific context of the military band. Following the earlier models of the reforms instituted by Sultan Mahmut II (1808–39) in Istanbul and Muhammad ‘Ali (1805–48) in Cairo, in 1868 Nasir al-Din Shah invited a French band-master, Alfred Lemaire, to institute a western-style military band to replace the traditional trumpet and drum ensembles (naqqāre-khāne) that had served for ceremonial occasions as well as on the battlefield. Lemaire seems to have been both energetic and efficient, procuring instruments and introducing basic techniques (and manuals) of music education through which Persian bandsmen were gradually exposed notjust to notation but also to elements of western theory.⁴ But western-style band music, even if increasingly heard and accepted as part of the reformed military structures, operated within a restricted milieu, its sonic substance constituting a cultural enclave. Whatever the eventual implications of the educational structures and methods associated with it, it made no inroads into the space occupied by indigenous court music which, in any case, the Qajar shahs continued to support, as did members of the traditional cultural élite.

³In Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria also had significant European minorities. But the extent to which the types of music they patronized percolated into the awareness of the majority Arab community is difficult to determine, given the paucity of relevant documentation. The inadequacy of the sources is even more striking in the case of Iran, as witness the unavoidable thinness of the survey of the nineteenth century provided in M.T. Massoudieh, ‘Tradition und Wandel in der persischen Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in R. Günther (ed.), Musikkulturen Asiens, Afrikas und Ozeaniens im 19. Jahrhundert (Regensburg, 1973), pp. 73–94. ⁴He also, in an incidental but amusing illustration of the caprices of autocrats, had to produce at the behest of the Shah an Iranian national anthem overnight, which involved not just composing it but having the parts copied, rehearsed and then performed the next day (C. Huart, ‘Musique persane’, in Encyclopédie de la musique (Lavignac), vol. 1 (Paris, 1922) p. 3077b). He also provided material to whet Orientalist interest at home, supplying the Paris public with samples of classical Persian music arranged with piano accompaniment.

Learning

But Kiaras père was not one of its patrons, and was in any case often away on military duty. Although himself by no means indifferent to music, he did nothing to further his son’s interest, still less, when it became apparent, his talent, as a musical career was out of the question. In a brief autobiographical memoir Touraj Kiaras speaks of a particular family celebration at which he sang when he was 12 or 13 as being the one and only occasion on which his father showed him any encouragement.

It was in the domestic environment, rather, of his mother that his musical interests and activities first developed, and already as a young child he would experiment with the available kitchen and tableware for the sounds they could produce. In addition to learning songs from those around him he absorbed whatever the radio had to offer, but initially it was largely through exposure to the gramophone records his mother liked to play that his interest in singing was sparked and, by playing them repeatedly himself and imitating what he heard, his potential developed, so much so that from the age of ten he would be encouraged by friends and relatives to sing at private gatherings and parties. Within the limitations of what was available at the time this allowed him to become familiar with samples of classical and semi-classical singing, as well as with some Azeri pieces.⁵ None of this material had been affected in any significant way by westernizing elements.⁶

⁵For the early development of the record industry see P. Gronow, ‘The record industry comes to the Orient’, Ethnomusicology, 25 (1981): 251–84, and, more specifically, H. Tabar, Les transformations de la musique iranienne au début du XXe siècle (1898–1940) (Paris, 2005). ⁶Some idea of the vocal quality of the great singers of the first half of the twentieth century may be gained from a 2003 Mahur two-CD reissue of vintage recordings: Gozide-i az sad sāl-e āvāz/A century of âvaz: an anthology, M.CD-135.

In relation to previous patterns of transmission, the ability to play records repeatedly and so learn sections or whole songs quickly provided a novel learning opportunity. However, although at the time this approach was still unusual, it may be noted that Touraj Kiaras was not alone in benefiting from the legacy of pioneer recording artists such as Seyyid Hoseyn Taherzade (1882–1956). In fact, reliance upon recordings was to become an increasingly common element in the formation of Middle Eastern musicians. Of its profound effects on the transmission of performance skills just two may be mentioned here: the way in which it increased access, particularly in societies where the major performers of classical music were concentrated in the capital city, with opportunities to hear live performances elsewhere being few and far between; and the way in which, by the very inalterability of the recording, it served to establish an historically stratified set of canonical performances. A further radical change associated with both recording and broadcasting was brought about by developments in technology: early acoustic recordings reproduce the forceful high-pitched delivery presumably typical of Qajar practice, but subsequently amplification enabled singers to reduce both volume and register and aim for greater flexibility, an aesthetic shift already apparent in the recordings of the 1930s and 40s which were Touraj Kiaras’s primary sources.

However, whatever the benefits to be gained from technology, he suffered from the frustrating lack of the direction and discipline that a stable master-pupil relationship c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Transliteration
• Purpose
• Part 1 Touraj Kiaras
• Part 2 Analytical Frameworks
• Part 3 The Present Performance
• Part 4 Epilogue
• Select Bibliography
• Index