17 - Compositional forms

Summary

The main body of Persian classical music is the radif of traditional pieces, which are subject to extensive variation through improvisation, as has been shown in the preceding chapters. Recent developments, dating back only to the late nineteenth century, have added a new genre of pieces to the classical repertoire. These pieces differ from the traditional body of the radif in three ways: they are composed pieces of more or less defined form; they are rhythmically stable, and fall into regular metric patterns; they are mostly composed by known contemporary musicians, and, as such, they represent an ever-expanding repertoire.

These compositions fall into three instrumental categories: pišdarāmad, reng and Čahārmezrāb; and one vocal form, the tasnif or tarāne.

Pišdarāmad

In the late nineteenth century, as a result of influences from Europe, Persian musicians became interested in group playing. Since the overwhelming bulk of traditional music is improvisatory and cannot be effectively rendered by more than one person at a time, a need for compositions with fixed melodic and rhythmic form was keenly felt. As a response to this need, an instrumental form called pišdarāmad was introduced. This innovation has been attributed to Qolām Hoseyn Darvis (1872–1926), a famous tār player and a gifted composer.

A pišdarāmad is intended as an overture to precede the darāmad section of the dastgāh, and the name simply means pre-darāmad, or pre-opening.