22 - It’s a physical thing: A Persian musician relocates the radif
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 December 2023
Summary
On stage, Elshan Ghasimi cuts a graceful figure with her tar lute; in her playing and in her commentary, every phrase is invested with deep thought and grave authority. She was born in Isfahan in 1981, two years after the Islamic revolution. ‘The first music I heard was by the leading masters of the Persian classical tradition,’ she told me in 2019.
They were all members of the Chavosh Institute, which had been set up to defend Persian classical music against attacks from the revolutionary guards. I loved that music, so when I went for my first lessons at the age of eight with Majid Vasefi, I copied it on my miniature setar lute. When I was eleven I graduated to the bigger tar, and I was sent to the Honarestane Musighi conservatoire, where I was taught by Fariborz Azizi. And whatever he told me to do, I did.
Persian classical music is framed by a suite-form known as the radif, within which modes known as dastgahs and melodic units called gushehs are component parts. Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, Elshan played her tar all day, every day, but there was a problem:
Iranian masters don’t usually reveal the secrets of the theory behind certain dastgahs until they believe you are ready – and for them being ready meant knowing the associated literature, and even the associated mathematics. Only then would they initiate you into the secrets – when you had earned the right to know them. But to play the radif properly, you need to understand the complicated system on which it is based. And that means, in practical terms, to understand how you can progress from one mode to another. They let me imitate them, without explaining why they were doing what they were doing. I would listen and listen, and sometimes I would understand – in a sudden flash – how a particular transition could be made. I remember once intentionally playing a wrong succession of gushehs, making a wrong transition to a different dastgah, and my tar master didn’t stop me. I said, ‘You are my teacher, so surely you must correct me’ – but still he wouldn’t.
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- Musics Lost and FoundSong Collectors and the Life and Death of Folk Tradition, pp. 235 - 238Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021