Setar

Setar means ‘three strings’, and for most of its history that is what it had. Today it has four. The fourth, placed between the second and the third, is usually credited to Moshtaq Ali Shah, a nineteenth-century musician and Sufi of Kerman, and it is still sometimes called the Moshtaq string. The name was never updated, which is very much in the instrument’s character: it is a modest thing that has never tried to announce itself.

The setar is a small long-necked lute with a pear-shaped wooden body, usually of mulberry, and a thin wooden face, not a skin. Its frets are tied gut, like the tar’s. It is played not with a plectrum but with the nail of the right index finger, brushing the strings in both directions. The sound is soft and close, best heard in a room rather than a hall. That softness is its point: the setar is the instrument a musician plays for himself or herself, or for a few friends late in the evening.

Sufi associations

The setar has long been linked with Sufi circles and with the reflective side of Persian music. Its compass suits the slow unfolding of the radif, and many players have described it as an instrument of meditation. It is the instrument that most closely shadows the voice in private gatherings, and it accompanies the recitation of mystical poetry, Rumi and Hafez above all, in homes and lodges. A single couplet may be sung, then answered on the setar, then sung again, until the room has settled into the poem.

Masters and makers

In the twentieth century the setar was carried into the concert world and onto recordings by players such as Abolhasan Saba, who taught a whole generation, and Ahmad Ebadi (died 1993), whose sparing, deeply personal style became widely loved through radio. The instrument is now one of the most popular among learners in Iran and in the diaspora, partly because it is light, relatively inexpensive and easy to carry. Makers in Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz are known for their setars, and a well-made one is prized for a warm, even tone across all its frets.

Related lutes appear across the Iranian world under related names, among them the dutor and the setor of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and the Indian sitar, whose name most scholars trace to the same Persian word, though the instrument itself developed along its own lines in South Asia.