July 2024 | BIPS Student Travel Grant

Preservation’ and Musical Hierarchies: Transmission of Iranian Traditional Music in France and Canada.

Summary of Topic:

My doctoral research focuses on the transmission of Iranian classical music outside Iran. Specifically, I compare musical practices in France and in Canada, examining discourses around the transmission, the influence of institutions on the music, and the intertwinements between the tradition and the host country’s social dynamics.

Report:

The BIPS’s Student Travel Grant allowed me to undertake fieldwork in France. Maison Persane, the organisation I worked with, is centred around Iranian culture and dispenses musical workshops. Although the musical instruction primarily revolves around the tombak, a goblet drum that constitutes the main percussive instrument in Iranian music, the instruction also encompasses the learning of songs and the presentation of the radif (a collection of modes and melodic segments that forms the basis of the tradition), as well as classical poetry in order to apprehend the rhythmic foundation of the tradition. In total, I attended three workshops in January 2025, March 2025, and August 2025, both as a participant and as an observant. I also conducted interviews with the instructor and the participants. I compared the collected data and musical material used with media reports, concert posters, theoretical methods and musical recordings stored in public archives and media libraries in Paris.

In France, Iranian classical music is often understood as spiritual, and necessitating strong intellectual qualities in order to learn it, perform it, or appreciate it. This is most perceptible in media discussions of the music, as well as in concerts promotions. Moreover, people who strive to learn the music are usually not of Iranian heritage, and are motivated by music appreciation or by new techniques and instruments, rather than by its cultural significance. In addition, the tombak, goblet drum and main percussion of the tradition, is more visible than any other traditional Iranian instruments. Institutions that solely focus on Iranian traditional music and—as opposed to music courses from institutions with a broader geographic scope—all initially started with the tombak, expanding their instructions to other instruments later. Moreover, during the workshops, the instrument was always discussed in relation to the radif: the shape of the instrument as well as the variety of the strokes create pitched fluctuation and ornamentations, compared to musical ornamentation created by melodic instruments. This contrasts scholar analysis I had read elsewhere, in which the tombak is usually described as an accompanying instrument. Moreover, I identified the development of an unformalised rhythmic repertoire occurring through oral transmission. I compared the instruction received at Maison Persane with the work of other tombak musicians based in France, namely Madjid Khaladj, and Djamchid Chemirani and his sons, as well as French professional musicians who received musical training from them. The suites learned during the workshops, presented as traditional, were found in various recordings and tombak methods. The repertoire they form are comparable to the radif, in the sense that they constitute the basis for performances and ornamentations, are organised in a specific manner, and are transmitted orally as ‘traditional motifs’ without any definite origin or composer.