The radif and the dastgah

A Persian classical performance rarely begins from a score. It begins from memory, and specifically from the radif, literally ‘a row’ or ‘an ordering’: a large body of short melodic pieces that a pupil learns from a master, one phrase at a time, over many years. The radif is not played as it stands in concert. It is the grammar a musician absorbs so thoroughly that, on stage, he or she can improvise within it, choosing, extending and recombining its pieces in answer to the poem, the moment and the audience.

The pieces of the radif are called gusheh, ‘corners’. Each has its own melodic figure, its characteristic notes and its place in a sequence. The gushehs are grouped into twelve modal systems: seven principal dastgahs, Shur, Mahur, Homayun, Segah, Chahargah, Rast-Panjgah and Nava, and five smaller groups called avaz, which are usually understood as offshoots of Shur and Homayun: Abu Ata, Bayat-e Tork, Afshari, Dashti and Bayat-e Esfahan. A performance in one dastgah moves upward through its gushehs, touching higher registers and new tonal centres, and then returns, at the close, to the mode where it began.

The Farahani family

The radif as it is taught today took shape in the Qajar period, above all in one family of Tehran musicians. Ali-Akbar Farahani was a celebrated tar player at the court of Naser al-Din Shah. His sons Mirza Abdollah (died 1918) and Mirza Hossein-Qoli (died 1915) organised the repertoire they had inherited into a systematic teaching order. Mirza Abdollah’s version passed through his pupils, among them Nur-Ali Borumand, whose recorded teaching became a reference for later generations; Mirza Hossein-Qoli’s passed through his son Ali-Akbar Shahnazi. Other masters assembled radifs of their own, and singers keep a vocal radif, associated in the twentieth century with Abdollah Davami, which follows the same modal systems.

The modes did not appear from nowhere in the nineteenth century. Earlier Persian theory, from al-Farabi and Ibn Sina to Safi al-Din Urmavi and Abd al-Qadir Maraghi, described a system of twelve maqams shared with the Arab and Turkish worlds. Some of the old names survive as gushehs inside the dastgahs: Hejaz, Eraq, Esfahan, Rahavi. The dastgah system can be seen as the Persian branch of that older family, reorganised around a smaller number of large, many-roomed modes.

Heritage and practice

In 2009 UNESCO inscribed the radif of Iranian music on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, describing it as the traditional repertoire of the classical music of Iran and the core of Iranian musical culture. The inscription recognises what musicians have always said: that the radif is less a set of tunes than a way of thinking, and that it lives only as long as it is taught. Neighbouring traditions keep related systems under their own names, among them the Azerbaijani mugham and the Central Asian maqom, each with its own masters and its own history.