Aspects of Form in the Instrumental Performance of the Persian Avaz

Abstract

n establishing the identity of a piece or a performance, one of the most intriguing problems found in Persian classical music (and, for that matter, Indian, Arabic, and Turkish as well) is a certain duality of role occupied by the dastgah (or maqam, or raga). In a sense, each improvised performance by a Persian musician is equivalent to a composition of Western music, for a Persian musician giving many performances of, say, the dastgah of Homayoun in his life is, as it were, responsible for many pieces of music in the same sense that a Beethoven composed many piano sonatas. Seen by a Westerner, the Persian musician's performances are all much more alike than are Beethoven's sonatas, but then objective comparisons which nevertheless take into account the perceptional distinctions among cultures can hardly be made at this point. On the other hand, in a sense, all performances of a dastgah by one musician are variants of the same piece and differ from each other only in the sense that all performances of the Waldstein Sonata also differ. Again, although the degree of difference may be greater in Persian music, we have difficulty in making comparative measurements. At any rate, this second view seems to conform more or less to the Persian musician's appraisal of his music.