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Persian Folksong in Meshhed (Iran), 1969

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2019

Stephen Blum
Stephen Blum*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, Illinois
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Extract

This paper offers a brief survey of important genres of folksong in the Persian language, as presently cultivated in Khorasan (the large province in northeastern Iran). The ten transcriptions discussed in the body of the paper represent portions of a large collection of Khorasani folksong made in 1969 in and around Meshhed, a city of over 400,000 persons, and Bojnurd, a smaller town with perhaps 40,000 inhabitants. As indicated in the annotations following each transcription, several of the singers recorded and interviewed in Meshhed and Bojnurd had come to these communities from other towns and villages in Khorasan and Sistan (the province immediately south of Khorasan). The repertoire of Persian folksong performed in a single community generally encompasses a variety of genres, some of which carry specific regional associations, easily (though sometimes differently) identified by singers and listeners.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council , Volume 6 , 1974 , pp. 86 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 By the International Folk Music Council 

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References

Notes

1. The field work on which this paper is based was supported by a generous grant from the Midwest Universities Consortium for International Activities. Some of the material presented here was included, in a different form, in my doctoral thesis, “Musics in Contact: The Cultivation of Oral Repertoires in Meshed, Iran” (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1972). The field recordings mentioned in the paper are deposited in the University of Illinois Archives of Ethnomusicology. I am indebted to Robert Peck, who kindly shared with me information and recordings obtained during his field work among the Khorasani Kurds in 1968-69.Google Scholar

2. Blum, S., “The Concept of the Asheq in Northern Khorasan,” Asian Music 4/1 (1972), pp. 27–47.Google Scholar

3. Zonis, Ella, for example, classifies Iranian traditional musics as folk, religious, popular, ceremonial, and classical; see her Classical Persian Music: An Introduction (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 3–16. Similarly, Nelly Caron and Dariouche Safvate speak of “la musique populaire, la musique religieuse, la musique des Soufis, la musique de guérison, la musique de Zurkhané, la musique de danse”; see the volume Iran in the series Les traditions musicales (Paris, 1966), pp. 199-212. Neither of these typologies addresses the issue of the relationship between professional and amateur repertoires, despite the use of the words folk and popular.Google Scholar

4. According to Nasser Pakdaman, in the late 1940's the term taerane came to be used in place of the older (Arabic) word taesnif to denote urban popular songs which were heavily influenced by European and Latin American styles; see N. Pakdaman, “La situation du musicien dans la société persane,” in Jean-Paul Charnay, ed., Normes et valeurs dans l'Islam contemporain (Paris, 1966), p. 340. For whatever reason, the term taeşnif is used infrequently by present-day Khorasani musicians.Google Scholar

5. Ivanov, W., “Rustic Poetry in the Dialect of Khorasan,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, N.S. 21 (1925), pp. 233–242.Google Scholar

6. Jiři Cejpek, “Die iranische Volksdichtung,” in Jan Rypka et al., Iranische Literaturgeschichte (Leipzig, 1959), p. 463.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Binder, Leonard, Iran: Political Development in a Changing Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), pp. 165–166.Google Scholar

8. Iran Almanac and Book of Facts, 2nd ed. (Tehran, 1962), p. 302.Google Scholar

9. Cejpek, loc. cit., pp. 463, 516.Google Scholar

10. Jan Rypka has correlated “the increasing popularity of both the ghaezael and the quatrain from the second half of the sixth-twelfth century on” with “a growth in the powers of the towns, guilds, and bazaars, and an increasing antagonism to feudal overlords on the part of their tenants,” adding that “sufism, particularly widespread in the non-feudal layers of society, adopted the ghaezael and the quatrain for its own ends.” See his “Poets and Prose Writers of the Late Saljuq and Mongol Periods,” in J. A. Boyle, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. V: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (Cambridge, 1968), p. 552.Google Scholar

11. Ivanov (loc. cit., p. 297) printed four Saebzevari quatrains attributed to Hosseina. He remarked elsewhere that he had been unable to obtain biographical information concerning the poet; see “Some Poems in the Sabzawari Dialect,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1927), p. 4. Jan Weryho printed a Sistani version of one of the Hosseina quatrains most frequently sung by my Khorasani informants, with a hypothesis regarding Hosseina's possible identity; see “Sistani-Persian Folklore,” Indo-Iranian Journal, 5 (1962), p. 283. The titles of some popular collections of Persian folk poetry call the reader's attention to the fact that the books contain verses of Hosseina: two of these are Folklor. Hezar taerane aez taerane-ha-ye rusta'i vae maehaelli-ye Iran ba nezmam-e dobeiti-ha-ye Hosseina (Tehran, Maetbucati-ye cAebdollahi, n.d.) and Delju and Aram, eds., Hezar taerane be laehje rusta'i ba nezmam-e dobeiti-ha-ye jaedid-o qaedim-e Hosseina (Tehran, Ketab-forushi-ye Borji, 1346sh).Google Scholar

12. See Blum, loc. cit. (above, note 2), pp. 34–35.Google Scholar

13. Examples of these publications are cited in note 11, above, and in the notes to the transcriptions. Consideration of the aims and methods of Iranian folksong scholarship in the twentieth century lies beyond the scope of this paper, but it should be mentioned that some of the popular collections of texts derive from the work of outstanding writers and scholars, notably Ebrahim Shaekur Zade, Hossein Kuhi Kermani, and Sadeq Hedayaet. In addition to Hedayaet, other major Iranian writers (including Jaelal Al-e Aehmaed and Şaemaed Behraeng) have actively pursued an interest in folklore.Google Scholar

14. The concept of “melody type” is perhaps the most easily verbalized aspect of musical structure among Khorasani musicians. Persian words used to indicate “type” in this sense include nouc, raeqaem, jur, and taeriqe (literally “manner” or “way”). The Arabic word maeqam was never used by my informants in conversation, but it does occur in a few names of tunes, e.g. Qushaeng maeqaem, and in some lines of folk poetry, e.g. Bazæn nei ro moqam-e khod nae gaerdun, “Play the nei and don't change the maeqam proper to it.” The Persian term daestgah is used by Khorasani musicians only with reference to music learned from publications or recordings originating in Tehran, or in Baku (capital of Soviet Azerbaijan).Google Scholar

15. See also Ivanov, loc. cit. (above, note 5), p. 236.Google Scholar

16. Tsuge, G., “Rhythmic Aspects of the Avaz in Persian Music,” Ethnomusicology, 14 (1970), pp. 208–210.Google Scholar

17. I am using the term density referent as defined by Mantle Hood: “the fastest pulse in the piece, discounting momentary doubling or tripling characteristic of rhythmic ornamentation”; see his The Ethnomusicologist (New York, 1971), p. 114.Google Scholar

18. My discussion of parallelism in the textual and musical structures of Khorasani folk poetry is heavily dependent upon the concepts presented by Roman Jakobson, “Grammatical Parallelism and Its Russian Facet,” Language, 42 (1966), pp. 399–429.Google Scholar

19. In one widely-sold print of this story—Kolliyat-e haeft dastan-e Naejjamae shirazi (Tehran, Sherkaet-e Nesbi-ye Kanun-e Ketab, n.d.)—the text of Transcription 3 occurs on p. 43.Google Scholar

20. For descriptions of taehrir and related forms of ornamentation in other vocal styles, see Tsuge, loc. cit. (above, note 16), pp. 222–223 and Bruno Nettl, “Persian Popular Music in 1969,” Ethnomusicology 16 (1972), p. 222.Google Scholar

21. Mohaemmaed Reza Baba'i, “Gol-ha-ye saehra'i,” Khorasan (Meshhed), 23 Tir, 1348 (= July 14, 1969).Google Scholar

22. See also Zonis, op. cit. (above, note 3), pp. 147–148.Google Scholar

23. Weryho, loc. cit. (above, note 11), pp. 292–294, gives seven Sistani examples of ghaeribi, along with a brief description of the genre. Cejpek also discusses the Tajik ghaeribi (loc. cit., p. 543).Google Scholar

24. Weryho's glossary of Sistani terms similarly defines roba ci as “lament, wailing” (loc. cit., p. 306).Google Scholar

25. Weryho (p. 303) describes the chelli of Sistan as “a tribe of Gypsy minstrels of Indian origin.” My Khorasani informants applied several different terms to the small groups of gypsies camped in tents on the outskirts of towns; these included ghorbaeti, qereshmol, saeyyar, and qilqili. On the word ghorbaeti, see W. lvanov, “The Language of the Gypsies of Qainat,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, N.S. 10 (1914), p. 442. On the term qereshmol, see C. E. Yate, Khurasan and Sistan (Edinburgh, 1900), p. 149, and Ebrahim Shaekur Zade, cAeqqayed vae rusum-e camme-he maerdom-e Khorasan (Tehran, 1346sh), p. 513. The social roles of the Sistani chelli and the Khorasani ghorbaeti or qereshmol are not unlike those of the Baluchi lori or domb analyzed by Robert N. Pehrson, The Social Organization of the Marri Baluch (Chicago, 1966), p. 30. H. F. Schurmann also discusses the comparable daelak-s and ghaerib-zade-s of Western Afghanistan as “an essentially urban group”; see his The Mongols of Afghanistan (The Hague, 1962), p. 277.Google Scholar

26. English, Paul Ward, City and Village in Iran: Settlement and Economy in the Kirman Basin (Madison, 1966), p. 88.Google Scholar

27. Goody, Jack and Watt, Ian, “The Consequences of Literacy,” in Goody, ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, 1968), pp. 27–68. See in particular the authors’ remarks on “the social differentiation to which the institutions of literate culture give rise,” “the effect of professional intellectual specialization on an unprecedented scale,” and “the immense variety of choice offered by the whole corpus of recorded literature” (p. 62).Google Scholar

28. For the distinction between “optional” and “obligatory” features of grammatical categories, see Roman Jakobson, “Boas’ View of Grammatical Meaning,” American Anthropologist, 41/5, part 2 (1959).Google Scholar

29. In other words, both the role of itinerant musicians and the stance adopted by the poet of folksong may represent further instances of what Alan Merriam has called a “pattern of low status and high importance, deviant behavior and the capitalization of it.” See his The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, 1964), p. 140.Google Scholar