Ali - Naghi Vaziri

(Tar Soloist, Composer and Theorist)

By Pejman Akbarzadeh
www.parstimes.com/persianmusicians.html

The history of the introduction of Western music to the Persians (Iranians) goes back to the mid-19th century when the government invited a few musicians from France and Italy to create military bands, on western models, in the capital city of Tehran.

Such activities continued seriously with the arrival of Alfred Jean-Baptist Lemaire, who was sent from Paris to Tehran especially for this purpose.
Lemaire not only expanded the existing bands, but taught piano, theory, harmony and composed some pieces for piano inspired by Persian music. Lemaire's pupils' activities were not limited to teaching and the promotion of Western art music in Persia; they tried to combine Western music techniques with traditional Persian music in which for centuries nothing new had evolved. In this connection and in the history of 20th century Persian music, the appearance of Ali-Naghi Vaziri is the most important event.

Vaziri was born in Tehran, Persia in 1887. He had his first lessons on the tar (a traditional Persian instrument) by his uncle at the age of 15, and a few years later studied Western music theory under Yavar Agha-Khan (a music instructor at Tehran's Polytechnique, "Dar-ol-Fonoun") and under a priest at the St. Louis School in Tehran. At the same time he continued practicing the tar intensively and finally succeeded in transcribing the radif (the repertoire of Persian classical music) according to the performance of Mirza-Abdollah and Agha Hossein-Gholi (prominent tar soloists in that period).
In several books and articles it has been mentioned that this transcribed radif had been lost and that only the "chahargaah" mode had survived, which Vaziri presented to the Persian National Music Conservatory Library. However, many years later Moussa Ma'rufi (tar soloist, professor of the National Conservatory and a pupil of Vaziri) announced in "Iran's Music Magazine" (Vol.11, No. 10, Jan. 1964) that this radif had been made available to him by Vaziri, based on which Ma'rufi had prepared a complete version of the radif.
After working with Mirza-Abdollah and Agha Hossein-Gholi, Vaziri practiced the radif orally with Montazem-ol-Hokama. In 1918 he went to Europe, where he continued studying the piano, composition and voice in Paris and Berlin.

On his return to Persia (Iran) in 1923, Vaziri established a private music school. Because of Vaziri's new methods in teaching, after a short time many students left his school. Alongside teaching, he gave lectures and Persian music concerts in the new style, established a "Musical Club" and attempted to revive traditional Persian music with the so-called scientific method.

At that time women were not allowed to attend such programs, but Vaziri succeeded in receiving the officials' permission to form two classes for young girls in his school. His own daughter, Badri, was a tar player, ballet dancer and writer, educated in Switzerland and Belgium.
In 1928 Ali-Naghi Vaziri became the director of the Tehran Conservatory of Music, and in 1934, due to conflict with the Persian (Iranian) court, he was discharged. A few years later, in view of his research in the fields of art history, concord of poetry with music and the prosody of Persian poetry, he was selected as professor at the University of Tehran.

After the September 1941 events, when Reza Shah was exiled to Johannesburg, Vaziri again became director of the Conservatory for five years and, in collaboration with Rouhollah Khaleghi, established the "Novin Orchestra" at Radio Tehran.
With a change in the Cabinet, Vaziri was dismissed again in 1946 and until the end of his life (1979) he no longer appear on the music scene and worked merely as a university professor.

Vaziri's techniques in the playing of the tar caused the next generation of tar players to develop their style in performance. According to music critic Parviz Mansouri, "He was the first tar player in the history of Persian art music to add "firmness" and "power" to the sweet style of previous players of this instrument."
On the one hand, Vaziri loved Persian music so much that he was unable to accept having the extremist advocates of modernism put it to rest on the pretext of its age; on the other hand, since he loved to modernize Persian music, he was persistent in adapting his knowledge of Western music to Persian music.
Professor Hormoz Farhat, composer and musicologist, writes, "In the course of the twentieth century, three separate theories on intervals and scales of Persian music have been proposed. The first of these, put forward in the 1920s by Vaziri, identifies a 24-quarter-tone scale as the basis for Persian music... Vaziri's quarter-tone theory, which is arrived at by way of a further division of the western equidistant 12-note chromatic scale, is entirely irrelevant to Persian music. It is an artificial creation devised to make possible the adoption of a kind of harmonic practice, based on western tonal harmony. It would be difficult to accept Vaziri was not aware of the fact that Persian music makes no use of the quarter-tone and that intervals other than the semi-tone and the whole-tone are not achieved through multiples of the quarter-tone. He must simply have believed in the desirability of their being adjusted to correspond to an equidistant quarter-tone scale so that a kind of harmony may be imposed upon the music. Clearly, he did not propose to do this in order to destroy the music, but, as he saw it, to advance its possibilities into the realm of polyphony. He and many other Middle Eastern musicians of the early twentieth century regarded a monophonic musical tradition as intrinsically inferior. Their aim was to make the necessary adjustments so that polyphonic writing could be admitted into their music, and understandably they took western music as their model."

Training such musicians as Rouhollah Khaleghi, innovation of symbols in Persian melody notation, translation of Western musical terms into the Persian language, writing several methods, books and articles about classical music of Persia have been some of his services.

Vaziri died on September 9, 1979, at the age of 91.

The Most Famous Compositions:
Disheveled Girl (for tar), Rope-Dancer (for tar), Message to Cyrus (for voice and orchestra), O ! Motherland (anthem) , Sportsman March, Golrokh Operetta, Mother (for children), etc.

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Bibliography

- Akbarzadeh, Pejman. "Persian Musicians" (Vol. 1). Navid-e Shiraz Publications, 2000.
- Alizadeh, Hossein. "The Process of Modernity in Persian Music." Book of Mahoor (Vol. 3), Mahoor Institute of Culture and Art, Tehran, 1993.
- Farhat, Hormoz. "The Dastgah Concept in Persian Music." Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.
- Khaleghi, Rouhollah. "The History of Persian Music" (Vol. 2). Ebn-e Sina Publications, Tehran, 1956.
- Mansouri, Parviz. "Vaziri, a Turning Point in the History of Persian Music." Roudaki Monthly, No. 12, Tehran, October 1972.
- Sepanta, Sassan. "Outlook on the Music of Persia". Mash'al Edition, Tehran, 1990.