Music of a Thousand Years

Front matter

A NEW HISTORY OF PERSIAN MUSICAL TRADITIONS

ANN E. LUCAS

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Part One: Culture of Maqam d Vv Ge. ope

Musical Empires Musical Structure: Cosmology and the Universal Order, c. 1100-1800 Music and Morality: Listening to Dangers Inherent in the Cosmos

The Politics of Song: Music for Kings, Music for Empire, c. 1400-1722

Part Two: The Culture of Dastgah 6. 7 8. 9. 10

Musical Structure, Musical Nation, c. 1800-1950

The Nation's Music: Discovering and Recovering the Dastgah Music and Morality: The Recovery of a Nation, c. 1880-1940 Singing the Nation: Words of the People, Music for Iran History, Agency, and the Power of Music

103 105 130 168 185

X CONTENTS

Notes Discography Reference List

Index

221 230 231

ILLUSTRATIONS

Common format for representing the twelve-maqam system as a closed, interconnected system 30

Depiction of the twelve-maqam system with usul from the Bahjat al-Rüh The Khafif Saqil rhythmic cycle 32

Two versions of the Ramal rhythmic cycle 33

High Wall in the “Music Room" of the ‘Ali Qapu Palace 82 Mural of Shah Tahmasp I with Humayun 82

Mural of Shah ‘Abbas I with Vali Muhammad Khan 83 Modal interpretation of the dastgah by Jean During 107 Modal interpretation of the dastgah by Lloyd Miller 108 Examples of gusheh that exhibit modal independence 109 Legend for figures 13, 15, and 16 136

The dastgah Shur 137

Interpretation of the dastgah Shur's representation 138

The dastgah Nava and Mahur 139

Interpretation of the dastgah Navas representation 140 Interpretation of the dastgah Mahur's representation 140 Nodal lines in On The Sensations of Tone — 145

Nodal lines in the Majma‘ Al-Advar | 145

Helmholtz resonator in On The Sensations of Tone 146 xi

ILLUSTRATIONS

Helmholtz Resonator in the Majma ‘ Al-Advar 146 Tuning fork experiment in On The Sensations of Tone 146 Tuning fork experiment in the Majma‘ Al-Advar | 146 Hedayat’s hypothetical scales of the seven dastgah 152 Legendforfigure23 152

Legendforfigure 26 159

Vaziri's changing representation of the dastgah scales 159

Vaziri's analysis of the gusheh Bidad 161

CN ON un A c

MAPS

The Ghaznavid Empire at its largest 37

The Ilkhanate at its largest 39

Division of the former Ilkhanate, c. 1345 39

The Timurid Empire at its largest 4:

The empire of the Qara Qoyunlu Turkomans 41

The Safavid Empire at its largest under Shah 'Abbas I (r. c. 1599-1629) The Afsharids Empire at its largest and after its fall 46

Iran, Qajar Dynasty Territorial Legacy 118-119 xiii

TABLES

Summary of Hedayat's Description of Dastgah Shur in practice 148 Summary of Hedayat's Description of Dastgah Mahur in Practice 149 3 Summary of Hedayats Description of Dastgah Nava in Practice 150

Division of Poetry in Chahargah According to Davami, First Version 191 Division of Poetry in Chahargah According to Davami, Second Version xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Iowe so much gratitude to so many people who both directly and indirectly facilitated my research and the production of this book. I must first thank Amir Hosein Pourjavady, Mohsen Mohammadi, Ali Jihad Racy, Anthony Seeger, and James L. Gelvin, all of whom directly educated me and guided the development of this book and made its publication possible. I am so grateful for all of the insight and critique you all provided over months and years. I also owe a great debit of thanks to Hamid Reza Maleki, who was so instrumental in facilitating my first trip to Iran. Thank you Hamid Reza for all of your help, and thank you to your wonderful family, who were all so welcoming to me during my time there. I would also like to thank Sassan Tabatabai, who read and critiqued many of my song text translations. I was hoping to avoid translating Persian poetry, as any translation of it feels highly unsatisfactory compared to the original. Thank you for helping me confront such challenges of poetry translation throughout the writing of my book.

There are many great music scholars in Iran and my ability to conduct research on the subject of Persian music relied directly on high-quality scholarship produced by Iranian scholars over the past several decades. Of these scholars I am greatly indebted to Hooman Asadi, Taqi Binesh, Hormoz Farhat, Sasan Fatemi, Mojtaba Khoshzamir, Ali Reza Mir Ali Naqi, Faramarz Payvor, Mansourah Sabetzadeh, and Sasan Sepanta. I am further indebted to the great legacy of ethnomusicological research in Iran, which includes scholars such as Stephen Blum, Margaret Caton, Jean During, Lloyd Clifton Miller, Owen Wright, and Ella Zonis. I would especially like to thank Bruno Nettl, whose own hypothesizing about the history of Iranian music and theoretical explorations of music history first got me interested how we narrate Iranian music history.

XV xvi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Itruly stand on the shoulders of so many giants, whose work made my research possible in so many different ways. Please accept my heartfelt gratitude for all you have taught me over the years. I could not have researched this book without active assistance from other researchers, nor could I have done my work without the research of so many scholars that went before me.

A NOTE ABOUT TRANSLITERATION

This book references indigenous terminology extensively. For the most part, indigenous terms that recur throughout the book are only fully transliterated once parenthetically when the term is first used. When referencing proper titles and terminology of specific texts, terms are transliterated for Persian if the original text was in Persian, and for Arabic if the original text was in Arabic. Foreign terms may be fully transliterated more than once for clarification of usage in specific contexts, or when cited directly from both Arabic and Persian language texts.

Z t/T a UT

- s/S a th/Th € jJ € jJ

€ ch/Ch = 7

€ WH WH

€ kh/Kh é kh/Kh E d/D E d/D

B ZZ Ó z/Z xvii xviii NOTE ABOUT TRANSLITERATION

Transliteration Chart

Persian Transliteration Arabic Transliteration o s/S o^ s/S a sh/Sh T: sh/Sh ua s/S us s/S ua 2/2 us d/D Lh YT 4 VT A zz 4 zuz € í t ‘ t gh/Gh E gh/Gh E f/F x f/F fe) q/Q 3 q/Q < k/K ES k/K & g/G -$ g/G J V/L J VL e m/M e m/M Ù m/N o m/N 3 ü/Ü/aw E ü/Ü/- w/W è h/H/eh E ah/at E T/y G Wily or | a/A or | a/A or ! e/E** or! i Sor | o/O bor | u/U an An

* diacritical omitted for initial ! ** also transliterated as -i for the Persian ezafeh grammatical particle

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

—L. P. HARTLEY, THE GO-BETWEEN

The past is another planet.

In the fall of 2000, I was sitting in one of my classes at UCLA, eagerly awaiting an announced guest speaker. He was coming to teach us about traditional Persian music, one of Iran's great music traditions. I was excited because I already had some knowledge of Arabic and Turkish music, but at the time I knew much less about Persian music. Arabic and Turkish music had many similarities as well as a shared history, so it seemed that Persian music would relate to these other cultures of the Middle East in some way. But the concept of Persian music clearly referenced something different in my imagination. It was an image of great antiquity. Great Persian empires stood in Central and West Asia long before the Arab expansion or Turkic migrations overtook these empires, so surely Persian music could be older than music from these other large regional cultures. In my mind, the idea of Persian music certainly carried a unique sense of history and cultural prestige in comparison with these other large language groups of the region.

The guest lecturer arrived and proceeded to give us a history of Persian music that met with my expectations. He first established that Persia and Iran were one in the same. When people spoke of Persian music, they were in fact talking about Iranian music associated with the Persian language. He then acknowledged that scholars knew very little about music of ancient Persia, but some vague evidence of Persian music-making was still observable in bas reliefs and other artifacts found among the ruins of the Achaemenid Empire (700-330 BCE) and the Sassanian Empire (224-650 CE). He began teaching about the known history of Persian music from the same era of history when narrations of Arabic music history often begin: after the rise of Islam, starting around the ninth century cz. My assumptions were correct: the history he told did indeed portray Iranians as active participants in a cosmopolitan music culture, first in the company of the Arabs and later in the company of Turkic and even Mongol peoples. There had basically been one general set of extensively documented musical principles that Iranians had shared with other language groups of the Middle East for many centuries, within a shared culture that paired Islam with a dynastic system of kingship. As the guest lecturer narrated this history, he highlighted key historical writings and sources on music in the Persian language, focusing on the very important role of Iranians in this extensive, sophisticated music culture.

Once he arrived at the sixteenth century, about halfway through the class, our guest stopped narrating this history and informed the class that Persian music went into decline for several centuries and afterward traditional Persian music became something completely different than anything he had just discussed. He then began to explain what traditional Persian music was now, speaking of a new system of music that emerged in the nineteenth century, distinct from the historical music principles he had just described. According to our guest's own knowledge of Persian music history, the music described in the first part of class was a wholly different phenomenon from traditional Persian music since the nineteenth century. It was a phenomenon of the modern era, while historic Persian music was something altogether different.

While the first part of his presentation had fit with my expectations of Persian music, the second part completely contradicted my assumptions about the historicity of Persian music. He was telling us that traditional Persian music did not come out of the mists of ancient Persian antiquity, nor did it come from a glorious renaissance of culture that came with the rise of medieval Islamic empire. Traditional Persian music came from the modern nation of Iran beginning in the nineteenth century, which marked a time and place of difficult turmoil. The images of a medieval ruler in his court, feasting surrounded by the sophisticated entertainment of his musicians evaporated. This was the music of a very complicated, modern place that had experienced two revolutions, authoritarian rule, and most recently an anti-imperial Shi'a Islamic regime. The historical narrative of ancient Persian music was clearly important to understanding Iranian music, but it did not explain key aspects of Iran's indigenous music in the modern era, which had a different structure as well as a different context.

I saw something very profound in this narrative and this change. The nineteenth century marked a pivotal moment in Europes growing global influence and global interventions. The United States would eventually take over various aspects of Europes global interventions, and much of Iran's modern history can be narrated according to which Western power asserted control over its national sovereignty, and how various constituencies within Iran attempted to reassert indigenous control against these different foreign interventions. In this context, it is not surprising that Iranians never wholly stopped playing music with indigenous roots. Though Western music had been (and, in many ways, still is) ubiquitous in

Iran, they nevertheless maintain a unique tradition of Persian music that shows no obvious signs of Westernization.

This more recent music system functions within an indigenous framework that follows some basic tenets of all music in the Middle East. It has multiple melodic modes that use various pitches both within and beyond those used in Western scales. Playing music often involves various amounts of improvisation upon basic melodic phrases. There are rhythms played by drums that may accompany the melody. Performances consist of both unmetered improvisations by solo instruments and metered sections that are often composed. Metered compositions may be played by a soloist or a larger ensemble of instruments, and when the latter performs as a group, the metered melodies become heterophonic, with different instruments elaborating on the same melody in a slightly different way. The instruments common in the tradition include long-necked lutes, zithers, spiked fiddle, and endblowned flute, which all bear relation to musical instruments in other parts of the Middle East, Central Asia, and even South Asia. While a singer is not required to perform this music, it is desirable. When a singer is present, the instruments focus on accompanying the singer, but the basic process of working through unmetered improvisation and metered composition continues to prevail.

Traditional Persian music since the nineteenth century continues to share these types of musical features with other indigenous musics of its surrounding region. This is true if one compares traditional Persian music with historical practices, but it is also true if one compares it with contemporary indigenous music traditions across the cultures of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa. In this sense, the modern manifestation of traditional Persian music is not an imported, alien musical phenomenon in its geographic and historical context. But the performance practice itself—how musicians decided to go about organizing their music to determine how they would actually learn it and play it—is both surprisingly specific and unlike the historic music taken as its ancient Persian antecedent.

In leaving the class and beginning my research, these specifics of organization and structure were central to my questions. At the heart of traditional Persian musics modern existence today is a melodic repertoire referred to as the radif (radif), organized into separate ordered sets of melodies referred to as dastgah (dastgah). Both musicians and scholars remark on the unique nature of the radif, which has formed the basis of traditional Persian music’s pedagogy and performance practice in the twentieth century. In historical documentation, it seems to have been formed around a distinct performance practice of the late nineteenth century, and the furthest back any family of musicians associated with that practice can be documented is the nineteenth century. The oldest any music scholar could responsibly declare it based on the historical evidence would be the late eighteenth century, and even this requires much speculation about what might have been.' If one assumes that there really has been a continuous, multimillennia existence of Persian culture, 150 to 170 years of history barely registers as a significant space of time to practice a particular music tradition. But even in relation to the history of Persian-speaking people since the rise of Islam, the history of this particular music represents a very short legacy.

The melodic material of the radif ranges from short motifs to multisectional pieces, and it can be used as the basis of an instrumental or vocal improvisation or for composition. Though there were originally only seven dastgah within which this melodic material was ordered, sections of the original seven dastgah were subdivided in the twentieth century to create a total of eleven or twelve melodic complexes. Seven of the dastgah are still the largest of these melodic complexes, while four to five additional smaller complexes may be referred to as dastgah or avaz (aváz). In theory, each of these melodic complexes has a set of melodies that operate within a fairly distinct set of unique pitches. For this reason, both musicians and scholars tend to treat them as scales or modes. Yet it is the melodies of the radif themselves that define the traditional progression of unmetered improvisation and metered composition in performance. The melodies, referred to individually as gusheh (güsheh), determine which pitches will be used in the performance of a dastgah, and in what order specific sets of pitches can be used.

Historically, a performance of this radif-dastgah tradition consisted of musicians choosing a dastgah—or perhaps an avaz-dastgah—and creating a performance around the particular melodic material chosen. Musicians would improvise upon the gusheh of a dastgah in a fairly organized way, with some melodies being more improvised upon than others, even as most were unmetered. Additional metered compositions that are often not part of the radif appear at set times in the performance of a dastgah to supplement the mostly unmetered improvisation. These compositions are defined by how their rhythms are counted and their association with a given dastgah relates to how their pitch usage mirrors that of the gusheh in the dastgah.

While conducting my research, I wanted to know how and why this particular performance practice associated alternately with radif and dastgah developed as music particular to Iran in the modern era, and why a different approach to music-making was so important within educated courtly society in Persian-speaking lands for the six centuries previous. The older principles of music-making that held the narrative position of the radif-dastgah tradition's antecedent in the history of Iran's Persian music were quite different from radif or dastgah in significant ways. I came to refer to these older principles as the twelve-maqam system because they generally centered on twelve melodic modes, referred to alternately as maqam (maqam), shadd (shadd), or pardeh (pardeh). The twelve maqam were melodic modes that alternately broke down or combined in various ways to create additional modes. This distinct commitment to systematic, internal derivation and extraction of melodic modes was central to the twelve-maqam systems’ conception. Within this closed system of melodic modes, any given modal entity needed to be matched with rhythmic cycles called usul (asi) to create an actual, functional melody. These melodies further related to an ever-changing set of compositional forms. Some forms were songs in Persian, Arabic, or Turkish, while others were instrumental pieces, but all had various configurations of primary and secondary melodies, recapitulations, and codas. In order to make music in the twelve-maqam system, musicians had to combine the use of a maqam or related melodic mode with an usul in the execution of these forms, which were structurally distinct from any of the gusheh or compositional forms of the radif-dastgah tradition.

Both the radif-dastgah tradition and the twelve-maqam system arise somewhat suddenly in the historic record, and in each case this sudden rise correlates with a historical event. The radif-dastgah tradition emerged at the height of European colonization and intervention in the region, but also in a moment of monumental global transmutation in the history of humanity: the Middle East’s full integration into the global economic system and the global system of nation-states. Yet the twelve-maqam system began to dominate educated musical discourse of the region in the midst of the Mongol invasion: the moment Genghis Khan's massive push for dominance over all of Asia overtook key parts of the Islamic world. These two different historical moments introduced different contingencies that changed the trajectory of history in West and Central Asia, even as the changes they affected caught people unawares. While modern Iranian musicians saw great continuity in the history of their national Persian music, I saw a historical record of great political and social disruption, often fostered by unforeseen circumstances. History writ large for the region could be told as an ongoing series of invasions, migrations, and other exogenous changes, involving various language groups over millennia. If such changes and disruptions were large enough, they could be key moments of cultural transformation that related to musical transformation.

ANCIENT MUSIC, MODERN MYTH: RESEARCHING IDEOLOGIES IN THE MUSIC OF IRAN

In the case of the radif-dastgah tradition, it was ethnographic researchers who were the first to address the extent to which it breaks with the norms established and maintained in the Persian-speaking world historically. Jean During suggested the radif-dastgah system did not directly descend from the twelve-maqam system, but rather seemed Azeri in origin. Indeed, the Qajar Dynasty—whose nineteenth-century court in Tehran patronized the radif-dastgah tradition—was Turkic from Azeri territory. In addition to patronizing the radif-dastgah tradition at their seat of power in Tehran, they also patronized a similar music tradition sung in Azeri Turkish in their court in Tabriz. This court music of Tabriz became the basis for the music of Azeri mugham.’ Bruno Nettl further suggested that, though it was not Westernized per se, the radif-dastgah tradition still could represent changes that occurred in relation to the rise of Western musical hegemony in Iran during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He thought that the radif specifically could have been created out of a modern sense of Iranian nationalism. These contrasting hypotheses notwithstanding, both During and Nettl observed how different the radif-dastgah tradition was in relation to Persian music history and sought ways to explain why the modern phenomenon of traditional Persian music was so different from historical norms documented in Persian-language sources.

Nettl and During were just two of several foreign scholars studying music in Iran as it was in the late twentieth century and the primary focus on the ethnographic present at that time limited what researchers could conclude about musical change both during and before modern era. It did not, however, limit researchers' interest in expounding on the idea of an ancient Persian music history, nor did it prevent speculation about how the radif-dastgah tradition evolved out of the ancient ether of Persian music history. Though During’s and Nettl’s attempts to explain the conundrum of the radif-dastgah traditions modern emergence are telling, they are also relatively unique within all ethnographic attempts to historicize the modern tradition. Ethnographic researchers have confidently dated the ultimate origins of Persian music to eras both before and after the rise of the twelve-maqam system. Thus, the ultimate origins of Persian music might be in pre-Islamic times (c. 550 BCE-650 CE), or the height of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate (c. 750-950), or somewhat after the final fall of the 'Abbasid Caliphate in the thirteenth century, when Persian reemerged as a broadly-used lingua franca, and writings began outlining the basic tenants of the twelve-maqam system.‘

When I first arrived in Iran to do research in 2003, I encountered Iranian musicologists arguing about the question of where the radif came from on fairly specific historical terms. Two scholars, Hooman Asadi and Mohsen Mohammadi, had begun a debate about the influence of the West that Nettl proposed, and the specific terms of musical change in the modern era. Iranian musicology more broadly was turning more attention to music from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, an era that had been largely ignored in research conducted prior to the 1990s.° Iranian musicologists took a period of history that had been considered a period of musical decline and demonstrated how it encompassed an extensive amount of musical activity. Their new discoveries have highlighted how there was continuous Persian music-making from the era of the twelve-maqam system into the modern era of dastgah and radif, and this has put more attention on the idea that the twelve-maqam could have gradually evolved into new approaches to music-making in the nineteenth century, which provided the basis for the radif-dastgah tradition as it came to exist in the twentieth century. As a result, the historical question of how Iranians evolved away from using the system of maqam into the system of dastgah and eventually radif has taken on a significance it did not have in the late twentieth century, and it is a question of paramount importance to Iranian scholars specifically.

In reading, speaking with, and observing Iranian musicologists, I realized that my interests in Persian music history were quite distinct from theirs. They were seeking to write the one, true history of Persian music. This required one definitive explanation for how the twelve-maqam system turned into the modern system of traditional Persian music. For them, the gap between maqam and dastgah was a missing piece in a single culture' historic music puzzle. By contrast, I saw different cultures that dominated in different points in time, and distinct methods of music-making that related to these temporally distinct cultural spaces. I was researching at least two distinct cultural puzzles and looking for alignments between cultural change and changing conceptions of music.

My perspective was not one that could make much sense to my Iranian musicology counterparts. The music culture of radif I encountered in the twenty-first century was steeped in pre-radif music history, and previous ethnographers testaments to the ancient nature of Persian music came directly from the conceptions of music history narrated by the Iranian musicians they worked with. A number of musicians in the radif tradition were musicologists, studying and editing editions of Persian music treatises written between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries, while also studying the Arabic treatises they believed to have been written by Iranians before the twelfth century. But one did not have to be so educated in specific historical information about music to make ancient historical perspective the basis of musical understanding. Some musicians I met knew far less about the specifics of these historical writings, but nevertheless referenced tropes of this premodern history in discussions, lessons, and lectures. One of the most common ways to do this was to reference commonalities in language and music jargon. On one hand, the general shared usage of Persian language was evidence of an ongoing, shared music culture. Yet both musicians and musicologists could also point to overlap in nomenclature: terms used to describe structures in the twelve-maqam system that also appear in the terminology of the radif-dastgah tradition.

This dependency on language analysis to create cultural commonality in music history fascinated me. To achieve a narrative of one specific shared cultural legacy of ancient Persian music, interpreting language over and above music was essential. The language provided opportunities for interpretation that music did not, yet the interpretation had to be very selective. Throughout the Middle East, there are overlapping pools of terminology that many types of music traditions from multiple language groups pull from in their application of music jargon. Persian terminology specifically is very common even in the music terminology of non- Persian speakers. The types of terms that get repurposed are often quite abstract and sometimes they do not have any demonstrable musical meaning in any particular tradition. When they do, the musical meaning could have multiple possible interpretations. When it is possible to compare actual music to its terminology, the fungible nature of language is apparent, even when everyone speaks Persian. For instance, in the radif-dastgah tradition, the term avaz has several different meanings. It is sometimes used to refer to the smaller dastgah, but it also refers to the vocal-based improvisatory section of a performance. It can also generally mean melody or song. In general modern Persian usage, it can mean any kind of sound, musical or not.

This case of music having a shaky relationship with language is not unique. Charles Seeger was the first to observe the general reality that language could not properly represent music, or be analyzed in place of analyzing music.* But language remains a modern tool anyone can use to construct identities for music, identities that the music itself may or may not be able to validate. Focusing on general shared linguistic features of certain types of music in specific contexts has allowed ethnolinguistic identity to remain the central theme of Iranian music history. Musicians can talk about what have become the great names of Iranian music history, mixing premodern treatises by writers like al-Farabi (d.c. 950) and 'abd al-Qader al-Maraghi (d.c. 1435) with names of the earliest known practitioners of radif, such as Mirza ‘Abdullah (c. 1843-1918) and Husayn Qoli (d. c. 1915). They understand that the music system used by Mirza 'Abdullah and Husayn Qoli was not discussed by premodern treatise writers. But they did share some music terminology and they probably also shared some semblance of a mother tongue. This overlap in language provides a rhetorical bridge to narrate Iran's singular Persian music history, even when that narrative relies on cultural commonality between diverse historical realities and their divergent concepts of music. Major differences in music’s conception, structure, and value at different points in time could not represent any significant change in the cultural order, as long as the ethnolinguistic bond of the language could be found in either general or specific terms. In this context, no one has been waiting to understand the specific way the maqam could have evolved into the dastgah before declaring Iran's claim to a long history of Persian music valid. No one needs to know how the transformation occurred exactly to know that these two systems have to be connected and defined by a single shared culture.

My idea of different music existing at different points in time because of distinctions in culture over time was not simply foreign in the realm of Persian music research because it was somehow foreign to Iranian sensibilities. In the case of Persian music, the narrative of a single, ethnolinguistic, national music history has been underpinned by Western scholarship, specifically some of the earliest research done on music of the Middle East in Europe under the nineteenth-century rubric of Oriental studies. By the 1930s, some practitioners of the radif-dastgah tradition had received education in Europe and knew that Europeans had researched ancient music of the Arabic- and Persian-speaking world, and that this research had revealed a distinct, noteworthy history that Europeans saw as being Persian in nature. Information on the work of Oriental musicologists such as Raphael Georg Kiesewetter (1773-1850), and Jan Pieter Nicolaas Land (1834-1897) appears in some of the early writings about the radif-dastgah system. The earliest attempts of radif-dastgah musicians to trace a single Persian music history focused on making a connection between the ancient twelve-maqam system, which Orientalists praised, and their own radif-dastgah tradition."

Though Orientalist scholars had a big impact on how the history of Persian music would ultimately be told, Iranians were always providing their own interpretations of how Persian culture related to Iran's history of music. In 1942 the Iranian Journal Rüzgar-i Naw published two articles attributed to the prolific Orientalist musicologist Henry George Farmer (1888-1966). One was titled "The Great Sciences of Iran in the Art of Music" (“Ulama-i bozorg-i Iran dar fann-i müsiq1") and the other “The Impact and Influence of Iran on the Construction of Instruments" (“Tatir va nufüz -i Iran dar tab‘tyat-i alat-i müsiqr").? These articles were indigenous explanations of information from Farmer’s chapter in Arthur Upham Popes multivolume magnum opus A Survey of Persian Art from Prehistoric Times to the Present, published in 1938. Ironically, Farmer depended heavily on Arabic sources and French translations of Persian texts to write this chapter and mostly spoke of cross influences between Persians and Arabs. Conversely, the Persian interpretations of his work said less about the Arabs, and much more about Iran, taking Farmers article as validation of Iran's historic musical legacy. Yet publishing the reinterpretation of Farmer's work in Persian under his name validated the veracity and importance of the information, even more than published research under a Persian name.