professor emeritus of musicology
Sonorities magazine
Experiences in Iran: Field Work a Generation Ago
How much things have changed since I first went to Iran, in 1966, in the era of the last Shah, to try to
learn something about the musical culture of the Persian people. Before I went, people would ask me
whether “Iran” was the same as “Iraq” and couldn’t find it on a map. Today, Americans see Iran as a
problem in international relations, oil production, and military matters, but most are unaware of the great
traditions of literature, art, and music that have developed there over hundreds of years. My first foray,
five summer weeks, resulted from a relationship the Universities of Illinois and Tehran had established,
and I arrived knowing only that Iranians, like other Middle Eastern Muslims, tended to be ambivalent
about music, loving to hear music and yet feeling that musical activity might be morally dangerous,
frowned upon or forbidden by Islamic law, perhaps even by the Holy Koran. And I knew that a major
characteristic of the traditions that Middle Easterners designate as their classics was the centrality of
improvised music. I quickly found Persian classical music fascinating, slightly odd at first with its use of
three-quarter and five-quarter tones, and I quickly determined to return for longer to try to learn
something about the workings of this improvised music, hoping to answer such questions as, Is this
music in some ways like jazz, or contemporary free improvisation, or Indian ragas? (Well, it is, but it’s
also quite unique.) How do Persian musicians’ minds work? How, creating music in the course of
performance, do they decide what to do next?
On that first visit I met a musician who was to make a great difference in my life, Nour-Ali Boroumand,
an older blind gentleman known mainly as a teacher and authority. He agreed to be my principal guide
when I returned. But in the meantime we arranged to bring him to the Urbana campus for a month in
1967 as a Miller Professor to give classes introducing our students to Persian music. Dr. Boroumand
had a flair for the dramatic, beginning his first class by saying, “To understand Persian music, you must
understand the singing of the nightingale, because when it sings, it doesn’t repeat itself, and Persian
musicians must not repeat themselves. But as you don’t have nightingales in America, I have brought
you a recording,” and he proceeded to play a tape. Only later came the nitty-gritty of Persian music and
theory. Well, nightingales—which symbolize the good and beautiful in Iran—and Persian musicians do
sometimes repeat, but he used this gesture to present important principles about music and culture in a
way none of us ever forgot.
Then, during1968–69, I lived, with my family, in Tehran for a year, devoting myself to the problem of
improvisation. Dr. Boroumand told me this: We don’t teach improvisation outright; we teach a repertory
of some 300 largely non-metric short pieces called the
Radif, divided into twelve parts, each in one
mode or
dastgah (a concept related to the better-known Arabic maqam). Once the radif has been
memorized—it should be learned aurally, without notation, contemplated, over several years—it
becomes the basis or point of departure for improvised performance, somewhat like chord changes or
tunes for jazz, but probably more complex. I undertook to learn two or three of the twelve modes on a
small long-necked lute called
sehtar, and I’m afraid I sound on it like a violin student sounds after just a
year of study, but I tried to learn Persian music more or less like Dr. Boroumand’s Iranian students. I
also determined to look at the system as an outsider, recording as many musicians as I could, some 45
over the year, improvising in the same mode, to see how they differed or agreed, and I got them to help
me analyze their performances, so I could learn what might always be required, and what could never
be done, and what was typical, and where musicians could show their individuality. While I was living in
Iran, my first ethnomusicology advisee at UI, Dr. Stephen Blum—Ph.D. in Musicology, 1972, now
professor of music at the CUNY Graduate Center and the foremost American authority on the folk
traditions of Northeastern Iran—was doing dissertation research, and I went several times to spend time
with him in villages, watching him record folk songs and narratives.
The richness of this tradition, in a culture in which on the surface music and musicians were not really
respected, continued to amaze me. The musicians I recorded thought, however, my research method
“wacky.” I had selected for my case study the mode or dastgah of
Chahargah (which means “fourth
place”)—about which I later wrote a short book—and in time musicians began joking, calling it “the
mode of Illinois.”
Chahargah was associated in vocal music with heroic poetry about great battles, and
was thought to have a warlike character, and so I wonder today whether elderly musicians who
remember me think, today, “no wonder this American was so attracted to our warlike musical mode.”
Probably not. Governmental relations between Iran and the United States have had their ups and
downs, but basically, Iranians like Americans, and I have always found Iranians to have exceptionally
strong traditions of kindness, courtesy, hospitality, and broad-mindedness.
I returned to Champaign-Urbana and began teaching Persian music, particularly its improvisatory
system and its interestingly ambiguous place in Islamic culture, and I returned to Tehran a few more
times, briefly, until 1974. The revolution of 1978 caused musical life to become vastly more restricted,
music influenced by Western musical culture (which I had also tried to study) was outlawed, and public
musical life was for a time shut down, as Ayatollah Khomeini said, “music is a treason to our country.”
Many of the greatest Iranian musicians settled abroad, notably in Paris and Los Angeles. But since
1990, most governmental restrictions have been lifted, and the classical music of Iran is again
flourishing, at home and abroad, and is being taught at institutions. Dr. Azin Movahed, who received her
D.M.A. in flute at UIUC in 1993 and wrote a dissertation on Persian traditional flute music, now teaches
both Western and Persian music at the University of Tehran. The events of the past decades have
actually made Persian music better known in Europe and America; and Iranian immigrants to America,
who would once have scoffed at their traditional music at home, now treasure it as a central aspect of
their heritage. I have continued to be interested in cross-cultural research on improvisational systems
and hope that this branch of music-making will flourish further in the School of Music in performance,
scholarship, and education.
Professor Bruno Nettl
professor emeritus of musicology
سید رسول صدریه خرداد۸۷ 
