Compelling Reasons to Sing: The Music of Ta'ziyeh

Ta'ziyeh is a performance genre in which the dramatic action motivates people to use their voices in highly expressive ways. What performers do with their voices tells us whether the characters they portray are human or less-than-human. The imams, their family members, and their supporters engage one another in dialogue that combines sung poetry with vocalizing free of linguistic constraints. Through their singing, they continually affirm their humanity. By contrast, the imams' antagonists are incapable of rising above their basest instincts and hence cannot produce the kinds of sounds that forge bonds of empathy among human beings. At no point does the rhythmic declamation of the antagonists approach the musicality of song. If an unbeliever sings in his first scenes, as do Hor and the Western ambassador who enters pursued by a lion, one knows with certainty that he will be converted before the play ends.

It is a fundamental assumption of ta'ziyeh and of Iranian performing arts more generally that humans who have been properly socialized are able to communicate through singing, wailing, groaning, sighing, and the like, not just through speaking. Singing is often understood as motivated by the pain of separation from a beloved, and in ta'ziyeh this pain is, above all, anguish at the prospect of impending separation from family members.

Characters in Iranian stories and dramas perform actions that motivate others to respond with their voices, and upon hearing such a response, these characters are apt to ask what has prompted a particular vocal outburst. "Why did you wake up heaving a sigh [ah] and a groan [feğan]?" asks Zainab of her brother, Imam Hassan, on the morning of his martyrdom. He answers that, in a dream, their father and mother have told him that he will soon be joining them in paradise. Later in the same conversation he urges her to "refrain from painful wailing [naleh] and groaning [afğan]!"¹ When asked by his younger brother, Hussein, what support the women and children of his household will have after his martyrdom, Hassan replies "no support but a sigh [ah] and a groan [feğan]."

Certain of the musical and other vocal responses elicited from characters in the drama are also elicited from members of the audience, who never sit passively all through a performance. Spectators stand and join the performers in singing the refrain of the prayers that conclude some plays. When a protagonist announces that the time has arrived, or will soon arrive, for matam-beating one's breast while singing appropriate verses of mourning-he may invite spectators to join in this ritual. As the protagonists weep and urge one another to weep or to cease their weeping, many spectators are quite visibly and audibly weeping.

The emotional power on which everything depends becomes accessible to performers only through emulation of older practitioners. It is not uncommon for a villager to learn a role from his father and teach it to his son. Members of professional troupes are also likely to have learned from older family members, developing the vocal and gestural mannerisms appropriate to one of the three main types of characters: men of the imam's party, their women, and their opponents.

The expressive power of ta'ziyeh singing depends on a performer's ability to handle contrasts between precomposed verses in quantitative poetic meters and the vocables that are interjected at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of certain lines. The vocables are symptomatic of the protagonists' overwhelming need to address and respond to one another, which could not be fully satisfied by the relative formality of the verses. One important character produces vocables and nothing else: in the final scene of the drama of Hussein, a lion removes spears and arrows from the corpses lying around the performance space and covers them with dirt, all the while uttering the groans and moans that articulate the grief of the assembled spectators.

Beyond this fundamental contrast between verses and interjections, several options for the musical presentation of quantitative verses are available to singers. Each quantitative...