Happiness, Money, and Making it Work: Musician Asal Kheradyar Weighs In
I am sitting in Asal Kheyradyar’s car, and she is driving us to her music rehearsal space in downtown Tehran. Asal is a young, classically trained flutist and vocalist who studied at Tehran Art University. She is currently a member of an all women’s classical music ensemble performing in Iran’s public concert scene. Asal slips in a CD for us to listen to on the way featuring some early recordings of vocalists and instrumentalists performing musiqi-e sonnati, Iran’s classical music. The recordings are almost a hundred years old, and we take a little journey through some of the musical greats of this genre, including performances by famed tār (six-stringed lute) player Darvish Khan (1872-1926) as well as master vocalists Seyyed Ahmad Khān and Qoli Khān Shahi, who are also thought to have lived during the late Qajar era spanning the years 1785-1925. As a particularly skilful passage of tahrir ensues (a vocal technique involving the generation of yodel-like sounds using phonemic patterns from ancient poetry), Asal remarks:
“Listen to that... they have such ‘esgh’”
Traditionalist Musician Mohammad Reza Lotfi
I nod effusively in agreement. Esgh is a term colloquially associated with historical performances of Iranian classical music and refers to a sensation lying somewhere in between “love,” “passion,” and “happiness,” taken as an indicator of the presence of creative freedom in the performer. The concept is particularly significant in this tradition because of a historical ideology maintaining that the classical musician’s impetus to perform ought come out of esgh or a love of the art form, so much so that the classical tradition (unlike other genres of Iranian music) was not typically something pursued as a profession, i.e. in exchange for money. Despite substantial evolutions in practice throughout the 20th century, something of a legacy persisted in the veneration of the concept of esgh. It was not uncommon, for example, for many of Iran’s mid-20th century classical musicians to favour retaining their amateur status by being educated and working in other professions while simultaneously cultivating their musical artistry. However, many of today’s young, classically trained musicians emerging from Iran’s university system, like Asal, pursue careers as professional musicians, securing paid performances and supplementing their income with teaching work, and—if they become more successful—obtaining research positions and/or recording contracts, sometimes in Iran but frequently also abroad.
At the turn of the 20th century, classical performers were typically court musicians who performed as soloists or in ensembles of a few in the homes and gardens of Iran’s royalty and urban elite. Performances were usually not restricted in duration, taking place intermittently over a day, or several days. Audiences were small, mostly encompassing a few other musicians and a handful of initiated listeners highly familiar with the art form. Performance settings were informal. Participants would typically be seated comfortably on cushions and rugs with the musicians, gathered around refreshments and tea while performances unfolded. Ideally, the performer would intuitively adjust the performance based on the communal rapport generated by the collective atmosphere and intimate performance setting. While other genres of Iranian music are associated with recreational practices like dancing, Iranian classical music is performed for contemplation and involves spontaneous improvisation based on a framework called the radif, which encompasses approximately five hundred motifs called gushehs that are organized into dastgāhs. A performance is typically of a dastgāh, from which a group of gushehs are brought to presence, loosely in ascending sonic order, through a process of spontaneous improvisation that articulates both more structured passages—typically the opening and closing passages of a performance—and freer, more drawn-out unmetered components in the middle. The radif is sometimes thought of as a canon of motifs, sometimes as a theoretical model, sometimes as a musical grammar of sorts, and sometimes as a more implicit and dynamic concept in the musician’s psyche. Musicians who have achieved mastery of the art form are awarded the title of Ostād, which connotes simultaneously and without distinction a composer, performer, teacher and researcher of the classical genre. Traditionally, the concepts of the radif would be transmitted from Ostād to apprentice sine-be-sine—meaning from chest to chest—using a lengthy process involving one-to-one transmission by rote through observation and bodily mimicry over the course of several years. This process was thought to enable intuitive absorption of the radif, taken as the structuring framework that guides improvisation. In the most traditional instruction, the theoretical parameters of the radif would not be explicitly discussed. Under the traditional ethos, apprentices become musicians when they find themselves able to spontaneously reproduce and rearrange motifs in a manner consistent with the radif’s structure without needing to actively think about the structuring of a performance.
Nightingale and Rose Motif in Hasht Behesht Palace, Esfahan.
The most common metaphor associated with this traditional performance ideal is the nightingale, an important cultural motif in Iran. In a mythical garden of Persian legend, the nightingale is famed for its ability to endlessly sing subtly different melodies without ever repeating itself, all for the love of the rose to which it sings. This is the condition of musicality to which traditional classical musicians aspire.
Ruminating on the differences between her day-to-day life as a classical musician and the narratives of the past to which she alludes, Asal is somewhat nostalgic about the perceived creative freedoms associated with performing in an era when the ethos of esgh was driving practice. This much is clear when she compares the performances we are listening to on her CD to the ones she participates in professionally. “Today’s performances,” she says, “have a more mechanical feel.” When I ask Asal if she advocates a return to more traditional performance parameters—such as durational freedom and more intimate settings—she is hesitant to do so. “Everything is moving faster today,” she responds, “and traditional performances require a lot of time and patience. In today’s culture the feeling is different, it’s a different time.”
Time seems to be an often discussed concept as musicians reflect, as Asal does, about the narratives surrounding the instruction, performance and appreciation of the sonnati genre. The tradition obtained a wider and more public face in Iranian culture when its transmission became more codified in Iran’s emerging public university system in the early 20th century. While some Ostāds preferred to adhere to more traditional instruction ideals, others experimented with techniques aimed at accommodating more accelerated learning, such as permitting the use of notation or tape recordings as memory aids, or engaging in explicit discussion of the theoretical components of the radif and processes of improvisation. In addition, performers began adjusting to more limiting constraints on performance duration and settings when artists—like those we are listening to in the car—first started laying down tracks for early recording technology. Similarly, more formal concerts of much shorter duration for much larger and more varied audiences have become the norm in recent decades.
Contemporary Public Performance.
As such, a common thread that emerges among the musicians in the study of which Asal shares her insights is a perception that there is a mismatch between historical performance ideals and the contemporary society within which today’s musicians are developing their artistry. Like the other musicians, Asal advocates a more pragmatic approach that balances historically venerated ideals such as the musician’s love of the art form and the creative freedom of the performer with an approach to musicality that will speak to contemporary tastes and contemporary audiences, as well as working in contemporary spaces. As we pull into the rehearsal space, Asal remarks:
“In the end, we want audiences to connect with the music and feel happy as well. So we try and find a way to work with—rather than against—the feel of today’s culture. ”