Persian Classical Music: A First Orientation

When Iranians speak of their "classical music," they are referring to the Radif, a repertoire consisting of several hundred gūše (melodic types), organized into twelve modal systems (seven dastgāh, together with five āvāz). Until the end of the nineteenth century, the Radif was transmitted exclusively through oral tradition. Memorizing it required years of study, and there was no authoritative written text to which musicians could refer.

The first serious attempt to commit the repertoire to writing dates from the early decades of the twentieth century, when Persia began adopting Western staff notation. A musician named Mūsā Maʿrūfī, fearing that the oral tradition might eventually be lost, devoted nearly thirty years to comparing the versions preserved by different masters. The result was a complete transcription of the Radif in staff notation. The collection was published in 1963 under the title Radif-e haft dastgāh-e mūsīqī-ye īrān ("The Radif of the Seven Dastgāh of Iranian Music"). It was the first complete written edition of the Radif and remains a fundamental source to this day.

At that point, the Persians possessed an imposing musical monument—something comparable to the Denkmäler der Tonkunst tradition in the German-speaking world, that is, to the great historical editions produced by Austro-German musicology. This, in turn, enabled them to claim that Persia, too, possessed a "classical" musical tradition.

Yet, during the 1960s and 1970s, sound recordings became almost more important than written transcriptions. The reason is that Western staff notation can represent only imperfectly the rhythmic nuances, ornamental details, and microtonal inflections that characterize Persian music. In the end, the transcription of the Radif did not replace the oral tradition. Even today, learning the Radif in Iran primarily means studying directly with a master and listening to recordings by the great performers. Written notation serves as a mnemonic and analytical aid, but it does not replace oral transmission. This provides an instructive example of how a musical tradition can be documented in writing without losing the primacy of orality—a possibility that Walter Jackson Ong did not sufficiently take into account.

In other words, Mūsā Maʿrūfī's transcription may create the impression that there exists a single, definitive Radif. This is not the case. In reality, there is a family of Radifs, as many as there are versions embodied in performance and transmitted by different lineages of musicians. This challenges the Western notion of the musical "text." In the West, once an oral repertoire is transcribed, writing tends to endow it with authority and fixity. In the musical traditions of the Middle East and much of Asia, however, this has generally not been the case.