September 2015 | BIPS Travel Grant

The purpose of my trip was to collect the archive of Prof. Tsuge Gen’ichi, an eminent musicologist from Tokyo who was the first non Iranian student to study music at Tehran University’s Department of Music.

I first began discussion with Prof. Gen’ichi about collecting and preserving his archive for posterity back in July 2009 when we met at SOAS in London following a lecture that I had given there on my work on archiving the Golha Radio Programmes (on which, see: http://www.golha.co.uk/). At that time he explained to me how he had gone to Iran in the 1960s to do research on Persian music. Being the first foreigner to pursue the academic study of Persian music in Iran. While doing his doctoral research in Tehran, he studied under and associated with many of the great virtuosos of Persian music, including the likes of Murtaza Hananeh, Ruhu’llah Khaliqi, Ali-Naqi Vaziri, and Ahmad Ibadi, and even associated with Davud Pirnia, the creator of the famous Golha programmes on Iranian National Radio.

Prof. Gen’ichi and I remained in email contact over the ensuing years, until finally, in January 2016, thanks to a generous grant from the British Institute of Persian Studies, I was able to travel to Tokyo to collect his archive. His archive contained Iranian field recordings made during his research into the rhythmic aspects of classical Persian singing (Avaz). His music archive consists of ninety 7.5-inch reel-to-reel tapes and twenty-five 5-inch reel-to-reel
tapes, which are accompanied by descriptive notes pertaining to their contents in Persian, English, and Japanese. A brief description of some of the archive’s contents based on the descriptive notes on the tape boxes and inserts within the boxes and additional descriptive notes provided by Professor Gen’ichi is as follows:

• The complete radif of Musa Ma‘rufi performed on the Tar by Sulayman Ruhafza, from recordings made by the Ministry of Arts and Culture in 1959
• The complete radif of Musa Ma‘rufi performed on the Tar by Sulayman Ruhafza, from recordings made by the Ministry of Arts and Culture in 1959
• Recordings of the radif of Abu’l Hasan Saba performed on the Santur by Mahvash Gerami
• A selection of early recordings from the 78-shellac collection of Mujtaba Minovi, as well as from the Radio Iran archive
• Field recordings from Kerman, Rasht, Gilan, Fars, Kermashah and Mashad featuring folksongs, lullabies, Zurkhaneh performances, Naqali performances, Zoroastrian ritual chants and street minstrel performances, as well as private recordings of Iranian virtuosos.

These recordings are in the process of being digitalized. Considering the age and fragility of the magnetic reel-to-reel tapes on which they were recorded, this is a delicate and time consuming project. Once they are all digitalized, they will be fully indexed and a copy will be deposited in the British Library Sound Archive. They will also be made freely available to the public through the Golistan Project (at www.golistan.org). I would like to thank BIPS for their efforts at the preservation of endangered archives of Persian Music in general and for their generous support for this project in particular.

Jane Lewisohn, Department of Music, SOAS, University of London