Avaz: the classical voice

Avaz means simply ‘voice’ or ‘song’, but in Persian classical music it has a narrower sense: the unmetred, improvised singing of classical poetry within a mode of the radif. A singer and an instrumentalist, often a tar, setar, kamancheh or ney player, share the performance. The singer delivers a line or a couplet; the instrument answers, echoing and extending the phrase in a practice called javab-e avaz, ‘the answer to the voice’. The rhythm is free, following the metre and sense of the poem rather than a regular beat.

The texts are poems, and above all ghazals, the short lyric form of Persian literature. Hafez, Saadi and Rumi are sung most often, along with Attar, Iraqi, Khwaju and later poets. A singer chooses a poem to suit the mode and the occasion, and may move through several couplets or stay on one, repeating a hemistich to draw out its meaning. Listeners who know the poem by heart hear it anew; those who do not learn it, as generations of Iranians have, by ear.

The tahrir

The signature ornament of the Persian voice is the tahrir: a rapid, rippling break between registers, rather like a yodel compressed into a quaver, that the singer places on long vowels at the height of a phrase. Different schools of tahrir are associated with different cities, Isfahan and Tehran among them, and a skilled ear can place a singer by it. It is not decoration for its own sake. It is the moment when the voice leaves the words and becomes pure line, before returning to the poem.

Singers

Early recordings in the first decades of the twentieth century preserved singers such as Seyyed Hossein Taherzadeh and Eqbal Azar. Qamar ol-Moluk Vaziri became, in the 1920s, one of the first women to sing unveiled in a public concert in Iran, and her recordings made her famous across the country. The radio era of the mid-century brought Gholam-Hossein Banan and many others to a national audience, and Mohammad-Reza Shajarian (1940–2020) became, for many listeners, the defining classical voice of the late twentieth century. Younger singers continue the tradition inside Iran and abroad, and the old recordings remain the school in which many of them first learned.

The art is also a link across borders. Tajik and Afghan singers have their own classical traditions of setting the same poets, and in Kabul, Herat, Dushanbe and Bukhara a ghazal of Hafez or Bidel may be sung in styles quite different from Tehran’s, each of them a local answer to a shared literature.