Introduction
On Sunday, 21 March 2021, the Iranian families were sitting around their
Sofreh-ye Haft-seen, an ancient customary setup of seven dishes, to celebrate Nowruz, the Iranian New Year. This new year was special; it marked the beginning of a new century on their calendar – the year 1400. Despite many domestic and foreign challenges, including several revolutions, uprisings, changes of state, an eight-year war with Iraq, and international sanctions, Iran’s advancements in industrialization, education, territorial cohesion, and its regional influence over the past century are noteworthy. Persian classical music (hence abbreviated as PCM) is just one of many social and cultural fields that have developed considerably since the Persian year 1300. Building upon Nietzsche’s classification of history, this article explores the evolution of PCM over the past century, emphasizing its achievements in spite of the myriad challenges and flux of the period.
In a continuous dialogue, multiple schools of thought have expanded the idea of Persian music, but they have not been categorized as such. In fact, if there has been a categorization, it has been hierarchical and critical. The language of scholarship employs terms such as revival, westernization, and modernization that imply stagnation, subordination to other cultures, and perpetual struggle. This language neglects the developments as dialogue of ideas and constructive criticism. The binary perspective (e.g., modern/traditional, urban/folk, male/female, artistic/popular, elite/ordinary) has been prevalent in Persian music scholarship. Ironically, many non-academic music history books by Iranian musicians and scholars rarely engage in binary perspectives. The absence of Western academic training in history or musicology among these authors lends credence to the notion that Western scholarship has influenced this more recent dichotomous perspective.
