Depth of content in Persian Music

 Kousha Nakhaei
 Student of World Music at York University

I first met professor Robert Simms (or as every one calls him Rob) at my first year lecture as a music major at york university a few year ago. He taught one of the most interesting and most intriguing lecture classes that I have ever taken. This was a course called "Musics and Cultures" which was a basic introduction to musical elements of the cultures of the world. It was in that class that I found out about Rob's interests in Persian music. In the following year I took more courses with him and got to know him a bit more as an ethnomusicalogist, performer, teacher and after all as a very friendy and down to earth person. When I told about Ghasedak and proposed an interview he accepted enthusiastically. I met him mid-May in his office in Winter's College at York, surrounded by instruments and books...

Ghasedak: [Thanks Rob for agreeing to do this interview with Ghasedak, the online magazine for Iranian university students.] Let me start by asking you to tell us briefly about your involvement and your experience in Persian music.

Rob Simms: I first heard Persian music when I was an undergraduate, and just listening to music from all over the world. At one point, it seemed necessary for me to listen to music from all cultures just to find out what was going on, and that’s when I first heard Persian music and it just appealed to me more than other things. I got the books and recordings I could to find out more about Persian music. When I finished my undergraduate degree in Winnipeg, I moved to Toronto to do my Masters at York. There’s not much of a Persian community in Winnipeg so it was hard to meet people, of course in Toronto there is a huge community, and I started meeting musicians and getting deeper and deeper into it.

GH: What appeals to you about Persian music?

RS: I think there is a depth there, a depth of expression and a depth of content. Other than that it’s really hard to say. It’s just my personal preference like why you like eating a certain kind of food. I just like it. I don’t know why.

GH: You’ve done research in Persian music as well as different musics in the area, in the Middle East as well as Africa. Is there any relationship between these?

RS: I was pretty much just following what I was interested in, music that I liked, and it happened to be these cultures. There are obviously signals in all this music [about my interest]. Some of them are related because they are neighboring cultures. The relationship between African and Middle Eastern music is there historically but it’s more tenuous than with Turkish, Arabic and Persian music obviously. the more I got into tuning systems  I saw interesting connections, but again between the West African music that I’ve researched and I perform, there is no conscious connection there. But certainly my interest in Maqam and Radif, the modes, is a conscious thing. What I find fascinating is that you have very similar structures but there are variations.  The variations are extremely important to differentiate the traditions, but as an outsider it was all equally new to me so I didn’t have any bias towards any one in particular, and I find it intellectually quite fascinating the way these modes correspond.

GH: I know you are a multi-instrumentalists, you play many different instruments, including some Persian instruments. Would you talk a bit about the instrumental, performance aspect of your studies?

RS: Yes. That’s the most important thing for me. Any study and research I’ve done has been to become a better performer, and understand these things more. So that’s really central for me.
Being a guitarist, which was the first instrument I played, going to ‘oud was a natural thing, and on the ‘oud you have the ability to go to Persian, Turkish, and Arabic traditions on that same instrument. So later I got into the setar. But I guess in terms of understanding these and playing them, it was Arabic music that I got introduced to first, and then Persian music later.

GH: So what other than ‘oud and setar do you play?

RS: It just depends on how you define playing. The ones that I feel like I have a good command over, and know some repertory and can improvise on are pretty narrow actually. I can make sounds on many instruments but the ones that I can actually play are oud, setar, and ney, for Middle Eastern music.

GH: What about Dotar?
  
RS: Yes, the Tanbour. I’d like to get a Dotar and experiment with that. For me the initial stages of research is to play, and to lift things off recordings, and I know enough about the right hand technique to get started on from seeing players. But the Tanbour stuff, the Kurdish stuff, the maqam tradition is in this case very different form the surrounding traditions. There are some correspondences but there are also some striking differences.
To back track, before I get into Middle Eastern music, I was playing Flamenco. It was easy of course to go from guitar, playing Classical music and electric guitar into Flamenco. And then from there I got to Middle Eastern music.

GH: Let’s go to your PHD thesis, which as far as I know, the subject of it was Shajarian. Shajarian is a very important cultural icon, culturally and in terms of identity; for me and for many Persians. It is really interesting to know what you have done. What was the research about?

RS: I wanted to find out how he worked with the radif, his relationship with the radif, his style. How his style differed from other people. I found for my own instrumental playing of Persian music I drew a lot upon his singing. Because I fell in love with his music and I listened to lots and lots of his performances before I decided to even do that paper. So I’d taken in a lot, and I found it useful to my own improvising. So when I’m playing ney or setar or whatever, I hear these melodies and that’s inspiring me to go in different directions, and that’s a very traditional way to work actually. There is vocal and instrumental radifs, and it’s interesting that the most important radifs are the instrumental ones, Mirza Abdollah’s, the oldest one. But I think at the bottom of it all is a vocal basis. It’s like Indian music; the instrumental music is based on a vocal model.

Shajarian is a good guy to emulate and to study just for one’s understanding of Persian music in general.

This was an analytical study, based on his recordings from different periods; early recordings from the 1960s and 70s to the middle period in the 80s. By the time I finished that was 96, so I think the last recording I looked at was maybe 92 or 93. Looking at how his style changed, what was different what was the same, looking at different versions of the same Dastgah, how he would perform it with Gushes he selected, and also motivic analysis. I could hear a lot of similar fragments and decorations in different Gushes. That’s very helpful as a performer to know what those are and to use them to generate music.

At the time I tried to contact him to get his collaboration, and of course he’s a very hard guy to try to get in touch with, I was unsuccessful. I talked to his brother in Los Angeles, who was quite helpful, but it didn’t seem like Shajarian himself was interested in the project. I finished the study after I realized he wasn’t really interested in collaborating at that point. I had to finish my degree so I just did it as is, and that was the main weakness of the study.
Later when he came for a concert, I gave him a copy of my research and didn’t hear from him for a few years. I gave one to Lotfi as well. Lotfi helped me in some ways too when he was in town for a concert here. He was interested in what I was doing. Then through some very funny circumstances I ended up meeting Shajarian and actually being able to talk to him about it. He was interested at this point. He’s just at a different stage of his career, you can see he’s branching out into different directions now, incorporating more folk music, promoting his son Homayoun. And he had a health problem that must have shaken him. Thank god he recovered from that. But I know from my own experience that psychologically it is a very jarring thing in the value and the way you think about life in general. Anyway there is a chance to collaborate with him at this point. I’ve just finished this Iraqi project so I’m thinking of what to do next. He invited me to get in touch with him. He lives in Vancouver for part of the year, and maybe we will do this thing properly after all. [This shows you that when you do research, there is a time to push and there is a time to let it sit. You never know when things are going to open up.]

GH: Shajarian is a very important figure socially in what he chose to sing in different periods. Did you get into that aspect of his work at all?

RS: A little bit. I mentioned the same things that you said; that he’s a cultural icon. He showed some leadership in a very tough period just by staying in Iran after the revolution, and by some recordings that he made at strategic times, how he donated time and concert proceedings to various causes particularly the earthquake in Gilan. I’m sure he’s doing stuff for the Bam, I’m not sure exactly what, but that would be very much in keeping with what he’s done in the past.

GH: You mentioned that Shajarian has been branching in into some more ‘innovative’ projects, some new forms, collaborating with Alizadeh. In a culture that has a rich tradition, innovation is a debate that is going on all the time. Did you touch on any of these in your paper?

RS: No, I finished that in 95 and by the time I defended it and graduated it was 96. So he hadn’t embarked on that direction at that time.

GH: You’ve been studying this tradition, what are your thoughts about innovation, ‘revolution in music’, modernization?

RS: I think we need people to do work on both sides, the conservative and preservation side of tradition and people to expand it, and indeed that’s happening. There is a continuum on artists from the very conservative side, conservatives, fundamentalists and traditionalists to avant-garde, and thank god for that because there’s a whole spectrum of activity. As you know the revolution helped traditional music to survive and be revived. There’s a whole generation of your age and older than you who were introduced, reintroduced and became very proficient at this music. The history of it is really complicated, but I think there is a very interesting spectrum of that going on right now and generally in Iran, politically too from what I understand, there is a continuum of opinions and attitudes going on though we don’t hear much about it. Probably Iran’s got a more democratic base than most neighboring countries. It hasn’t been realized in terms of the authority, bit it’s there.
        
GH: Now let’s go to your recent publication, your book on Iraqi music. It’s got an interesting timing with the political events happening. Can you tell us a little about this book?

RS: Well, there’s an interesting Persian connection there. When I first heard this music, I was first of all instantly attracted to it, but what fascinated me was that the more I got into it I realized that lot of this was very familiar to me in this music. The more I looked into it there were lots of correspondences with Persian music, on a structural level and on an aesthetic level. Iraq historically has always been in the middle of all these things. It’s a multicultural society to begin with, and geographically it’s always been sort of a center, St George station of all the activity in that part of the world, so it’s no surprise that the music would be of a syncretic nature, but it’s actually closer to Iranian music than it is to Arabic music; the performance practice, the structure, the way the repertoire is organized, and some of the melodies were actually deliberately imported by various singers who heard Dashti or Homayoun  and imported them, changed them a little, flavored to local taste and adopted them. And there’s other thing within the tradition of the Iraqi Maqam that are cognate to Persian modes, for example Hijaz-Diwan is pretty much a cognate of Bidad. There are lots of these correspondences and it makes you really wonder about the history of radif and everything with all these connections.

In the book, my interest wasn’t in the history. It’s more in the musical structure, it’s an analytical study. It’s like a telephone book of all these modes. It’s like we have collections of radif; Farhat did it and Jean During transcribed it and Bruno Nettle and Talaii. We have lots of these studies, we have lots of studies in Turkish music, Indian Raga, where you can look up a mode and see what the structure is. That’s basically what I did.

I was just shocked when I got interested in this music that nothing existed on it. Why didn’t some study of this nature exist within western ethnomusicology? Even in the Arab world there has not been a lot of knowledge of Iraqi music outside of Iraq, for whatever reason. I think there are some political reasons why this has been ignored by the west up to now. My hope is that my work will stimulate more work in that direction. It’s a preliminary study at this point. People will probably say it’s outrageous, it needs to be done properly, and then do it properly. I did the best I could, based on text sources and recordings. The actual musicians whose work I’m studying are all dead now. It’s more of a historical thing. Who knows what’s going on with this music right now! These people are just trying to survive. Look at the disaster there. So to talk about music, you know …! I’m sure life still goes on and people make music but it’s just not a priority right now.

GH: You’ve also been teaching this music, courses about Middle Eastern music and performance courses. Would you tell us about your approach in teaching?

RS: Because my interest is in the three main musical cultures, Persian, Arabic and Turkish, I tend to and like to refer to each one and combine them in some way. First of all for people to see the diversity, because as you well know, there is such an ignorance in general about the most basic things in the Middle East. As you know I don’t even like the term ‘Middle East’, so I talk a little bit about the politics and the history that goes into that. Music is a good springboard from which to explore these things. I’ve taught graduate courses and studies courses and a performance course. In the performance course I get a lot of Persian and Arabic students. This year I polled the class and I found that they are interested in learning each others’ stuff. I had enough students this year that I said, I can have a separate Arabic ensemble and a separate Persian ensemble, and most of them, the ones who bothered to respond, said that they wanted to learn about the other tradition as well. They didn’t want to be exclusive, and I found that really interesting, quite healthy actually.
When I taught Music of World Cultures, (whoever’s teaching that course can pick whatever area they want, depends on the instructor), and I spent a lot of time removing basic ignorances. I was very surprised but not totally shocked at the level of misunderstanding very basic things about history, geography, Islam, etc. So a lot of that course, even though it was about music, I felt like I was doing work that should have probably happened in grade 5 or 6. There is a reason for that. We’re ignorant about this part of the world, most of us, and it’s a deliberate ignorance to keep the world running the way it is, unfortunately. I think education has a big role in instituting change and young people are interested in these things, their minds are still open, it starts to shut down once you get older and you get set in your ways. At an undergraduate level, people’s minds are still open and they want to find out what’s going on. I found on the final exam that people weren’t too great on the musical stuff, but I think there was a bigger accomplishment made through just opening eyes and mind to some basic understanding. Nothing will happen until you make the effort to try to understand the culture and history.

GH: I think the same is true from the other side. I mean we didn’t learn a whole lot about the western culture in Iran, and in immigration and things, you really face your ignorances, and you have to try hard to face it.

RS: Right. I think the key to our time right now is to get beyond this regionalism, nationalism, whatever it is. We can’t afford to ignore each other anymore; we have to find out about each other. Unfortunately the way we find out is through military encounters, and then people learn “Oh, that’s where Basra is, and Najaf.” And this is the way we learn geography. It’s kind of sad. I think there is hope through education as a way of opening and raising people’s consciousness by showing things that are interesting and inspiring. So through music, when you take a music course or some thing you find interesting, philosophy or art or cooking, you find out things that are very appealing and that already makes a bond there and a respect and an interest to understand more, and to see some common humanity as opposed to “us and them”. The “us and them” thing is our biggest problem.

GH: Well, I don’t have any more questions to ask. Do you have anything else to add?

RS: No, I just think it’s great that this magazine is happening and that people are active and doing this kind of thing.

GH: Pleasure to talk to you, and thanks for your time.

RS: Thank you.

GH: Bye.