Music of a Thousand Years

Iran’s particular system of traditional Persian art music has been long treated as the product of an ever-evolving, ancient Persian culture. In Music of a Thousand Years, Ann E. Lucas argues that this music is a modern phenomenon indelibly tied to changing notions of Iran’s national history. Rather than considering a single Persian music history, Lucas demonstrates cultural dissimilarity and discontinuity over time, bringing to light two different notions of music-making in relation to premodern and modern musical norms. An important corrective to the history of Persian music, Music of a Thousand Years is the first work to align understandings of Middle Eastern music history with current understandings of the region’s political history.  “Ann E. Lucas very effectively combines historical analysis, ethnomusicology, and musicology to provide a broad, holistic explanation for complex, nuanced processes of change. Well written and highly original in its approach, this is a major contribution to the field.” KAMRAN SCOT AGHAIE, Associate Professor of Iranian History, University of Texas  “Music of a Thousand Years presents an innovative narrative of Persian music history and also provides important new perspectives on how to analyze the meaning of music and culture in historical perspective.” MOHSEN MOHAMMADI, Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles  “Lucas turns the standard history of Persian music on its head, proving it is not a story of the survival of an ancient tradition, but rather the story of the invention of tradition. Revisionist in the best sense of the word.” JAMES L. GELVIN, author of The Modern Middle East: A History  ANN E. LUCAS is Assistant Professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Boston College, where she also teaches in the Islamic Civilizations and Societies Program. She is recognized for her work on music historiography of the Middle East

Music of a Thousand Years

"Iran’s particular system of traditional Persian art music has been long treated as the product of an ever-evolving, ancient Persian culture. In Music of a Thousand Years, Ann E. Lucas argues that this music is a modern phenomenon indelibly tied to changing notions of Iran’s national history. Rather than considering a single Persian music history, Lucas demonstrates cultural dissimilarity and discontinuity over time, bringing to light two different notions of music-making in relation to premodern and modern musical norms. An important corrective to the history of Persian music, Music of a Thousand Years is the first work to align understandings of Middle Eastern music history with current understandings of the region’s political history. “Ann E. Lucas very effectively combines historical analysis, ethnomusicology, and musicology to provide a broad, holistic explanation for complex, nuanced processes of change. Well written and highly original in its approach, this is a major contribution to the field.” KAMRAN SCOT AGHAIE, Associate Professor of Iranian History, University of Texas “Music of a Thousand Years presents an innovative narrative of Persian music history and also provides important new perspectives on how to analyze the meaning of music and culture in historical perspective.” MOHSEN MOHAMMADI, Lecturer in Ethnomusicology, University of California, Los Angeles “Lucas turns the standard history of Persian music on its head, proving it is not a story of the survival of an ancient tradition, but rather the story of the invention of tradition. Revisionist in the best sense of the word.” JAMES L. GELVIN, author of The Modern Middle East: A History ANN E. LUCAS is Assistant Professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at Boston College, where she also teaches in the Islamic Civilizations and Societies Program. She is recognized for her work on music historiography of the Middle East.

Decorative Timbre: Integrating characteristics of Spectral and Dastgah music

Decorative Timbre is a portfolio of original compositions and an accompanying written dissertation. In this thesis, I propose a new musical language synthesising the expressive element of Western Spectral and Persian Dastgah music via the marriage of timbre and ornamentation. Persian and Spectral music are two fundamentally distinct musical approaches derived from different philosophies and traditions, each possessing a particular value and aesthetic. However, in researching mutual characteristics and modalities, I draw connections between the two forms of music under the concept of decorative timbre. I discuss approaches to 'converting a melody to timbre and vice versa' and offer a new compositional technique of 'excessive multilayering' that is inspired by shared commonalities in both traditions. The portfolio comprises four works that explore the application of excessive multilayering; Abalfazl, War is Peace, Let me Tune, and Beautifully Untuned Mind. The centrepiece of my creative portfolio, Panbe Zan (the cotton beater), is an experimental electroacoustic opera that recreates and recontextualizes the forgotten sounds of an obsolete profession 'Panbe Zani (Cotton Beating).' Featuring a redesigned bow-shaped instrument together with live musicians, pre-recorded and manipulated sounds, and staging, the work portrays this nostalgic scene in a modern context

A Dataset for Greek Traditional and Folk Music: Lyra

Studying under-represented music traditions under the MIR scope is crucial, not only for developing novel analysis tools, but also for unveiling musical functions that might prove useful in studying world musics. This paper presents a dataset for Greek Traditional and Folk music that includes 1570 pieces, summing in around 80 hours of data. The dataset incorporates YouTube timestamped links for retrieving audio and video, along with rich metadata information with regards to instrumentation, geography and genre, among others. The content has been collected from a Greek documentary series that is available online, where academics present music traditions of Greece with live music and dance performance during the show, along with discussions about social, cultural and musicological aspects of the presented music. Therefore, this procedure has resulted in a significant wealth of descriptions regarding a variety of aspects, such as musical genre, places of origin and musical instruments. In addition, the audio recordings were performed under strict production-level specifications, in terms of recording equipment, leading to very clean and homogeneous audio content. In this work, apart from presenting the dataset in detail, we propose a baseline deep-learning classification approach to recognize the involved musicological attributes. The dataset, the baseline classification methods and the models are provided in public repositories. Future directions for further refining the dataset are also discussed

Classification of Iranian traditional musical modes (DASTGÄH) with artificial neural network

The concept of Iranian traditional musical modes, namely DASTGÄH, is the basis for the traditional music system. The concept introduces seven DASTGÄHs. It is not an easy process to distinguish these modes and such practice is commonly performed by an experienced person in this field. Apparently, applying artificial intelligence to do such classification requires a combination of the basic information in the field of traditional music with mathematical concepts and knowledge. In this paper, it has been shown that it is possible to classify the Iranian traditional musical modes (DASTGÄH) with acceptable errors. The seven Iranian musical modes including SHÖR, HOMÄYÖN, SEGÄH, CHEHÄRGÄH, MÄHÖR, NAVÄ and RÄST-PANJGÄH are studied for the two musical instruments NEY and Violin as well as for a vocal song. For the purpose of classification, a multilayer perceptron neural network with supervised learning method is used. Inputs to the neural network include the top twenty peaks from the frequency spectrum of each musical piece belonging to the three aforementioned categories. The results indicate that the trained neural networks could distinguish the DASTGÄH of test tracks with accuracy around 65% for NEY, 72% for violin and 56% for vocal song

Contemporary tombak playing in Iran : an ethnographic experience of practice, interaction and music making

The aim of this work is to highlight the growth and establishment of tombak playing within the domain of Iranian music over the last century, a period which stimulated tombak players to advance and elaborate their playing techniques, to enrich their rhythmic patterns, to formulate, expand and diffuse the notation for the tombak, and to originate new types and genres of tombak playing: the tombak solo, duet and group tombak. I emphasize the role of tombak players, equally important to other musicians and yet neglected,in the history and the aesthetic development of Iranian music. I examine the traditional role of the tombak as an accompaniment instrument from the late Qajar period until the present day, and explore how the new genres fit in contemporary Iranian music, and in particular, the dynamic development of the tombak solo, as a genre in search for its own "independent" identity. Developing this theme, my intention is to relate the dual nature of the tombak, as both an accompaniment and a solo instrument, to the identity of the contemporary tombak player. In this frame of reference I analyse the music profile of the urban professional tombak player, who is depicted as interacting in a wide web of socio-musical relationships which have professional, personal and intimate aspects. In addition, I investigate how the socio-cultural context affected musical creativity and the status of musicians in general, and the tombak player in particular, before and after the Revolution. This ethnography is based on reflexive experience and interpersonal interactions in the course of ethnomusicological field research in Tehran, where the multiple voices of living individuals have ultimate significance in understanding the music culture of the contemporary tombak players in Iran