Touraj Kiaras and Persian Classical Music: An Analytical Perspective by Owen Wright (review)

Wright’s new book is an analysis of a recording of a performance in the Persian classical tradition. The recording is by Touraj Kiaras, a vocalist currently resident in London. He is accompanied by a small ensemble comprising ney (end-blown flute), tar (plucked lute), santur (hammered dulcimer), and tonbak (goblet drum). The recording, made in the late 1990s, comprises a suite of instrumental pieces, songs, and improvisations in dastgāh homāyun. The performance involves knowledge of the radif, a nineteenth-century codification of modal knowledge that was variously transcribed and notated throughout the course of the twentieth. In this recording, as elsewhere, the central sung sections of the performance (the āvāz) move from one prescribed gushe (‘corner’) of the radif to another.

The poetic couplets used in the vocal sections are mainly drawn from the thirteenth-century poet Sa‘di. The singer’s choice of couplets involves tiny but significant nuances of interpretation. In one section, Kiaras substitutes for the conventional line ‘she who keeps wishing my ruin while I wish for her well-being / whatever she brings about through her beauty, let no one blame her’ a couplet expressing more wistful and lighter sentiments: ‘It is a new year and a new love / what has become of my past pleasures?’ (p. 57). The poetry may not always be the most important thing, as Wright shows. Sometimes, indeed, it is ‘no more than a stepping stone towards the emotional and aesthetic engagement of the listener with the technical mastery displayed in negotiating, adjusting and re-arranging familiar melodic elements . . . ’(p. 123). But these poetic choices are hard to ignore. This is, after all, a poignant performance, carried off against many odds.

Touraj Kiaras was born in 1938. His father was a senior army office. He opposed his son’s precocious musical talents, having in mind for him, instead, training in Vienna followed by a career in ophthalmology. Kiaras ended up staying in Iran to study political science. He subsequently took up a post in the Cultural Attaché Office, with particular responsibility for the promotion of Persian culture in Afghanistan, China, and Turkey. Many traditional routes to musical knowledge (for example, studying Qu’ran recitation) were, as result, barred to him. However, early in the 1960s, he eventually managed to secure lessons with Mahmud Karimi, a distinguished master of the radif. This, and his budding reputation as a vocalist, meant increasingly close connections with Radio Iran, with the new Ministry of Culture and Arts, and with the modernizers and intellectuals of the Persian music world. By the mid-1970s Kiaras’s career had taken off. The Islamic revolution of 1979 put an abrupt end to all this, however. Like many other Iranian musicians, Wright notes, Kiaras was ‘reduced . . . to silence and despondency’ (p. 18). In 1989 he came to England, where his son was studying. In the early 1990s he began to put his musical life back together. A teaching appointment and general encouragement and interest in his work at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London led to a revival of his performance career, and this recording. We should be grateful for this. It gives this sombre story some kind of happy ending. And the recording really is superb. As Wright himself notes, the CD is ‘not just a significant addition to the stock of available recordings of Persian classical music but also ... a particularly affecting personal document, a re-affirmation of belonging, a spiritual return and a reclamation of lost time’ (p. 127).

Wright’s analysis of Kiaras’s performance is, however, a technical one, and such poetic musings are strictly confined to the margins. The first two chapters move swiftly, establishing the historical and political context, and raising various questions about how to analyse this music. In the second, he speaks of the problems of score-based analysis in improvisation-based genres; of the...