Iranian Classical Concert with Saba Persian Orchestra
by admin ~ November 25th, 2007. Filed under: Uncategorized.
‘Shams’ – a violinist from Maroondah Symphony - has been arranging traditional Persian folk and art music, for a combination of traditional and western instruments. I was lucky enough to be invited to join.
It was really interesting music. I know a lot of western musicians will ape ‘Arabian’ music by noodling on the harmonic minor, but that actually isn’t the harmonic structure in Persian music. They use modal forms, but not derived in a western way. They also use 1/4 tones, which is especially prominent in the vocal part – the westeners had plain old tones and semitones on our scores.
We performed half the concert in a major modality – then the guitaresque instruments had to be re-tuned – and the second half of the program was minor modality. It wasn’t super difficult in terms of notes, but it is actually exhausting concentrating when reading, to constantly be stopping the hands from automatically falling into a conventional major or minor pattern. Some of the traditional instruments are just gorgeous – the dulcimer with the 1/4 tones created such a shimmering effect. Everyone was really nice to work with – they loved the double bass too – it doesn’t exist in traditional Persian instrumentation, so for them it was exotic.
The challenge in the repertoire was the time, which was not to be interpreted from the page according to a western understanding. It wasn’t swung in a jazz sense, but I think if it was analyzed, there would be a different kind of interpretation of values relative to pulse. It was very free, and pretty much had to be read in phrases with almost speech rhythms (but no words). I say that – but, there was a vocalist – of course, all the lyrics were in Farsi. So was the MC’s chatting, before and after the performance.
The event was sold out.
The Iranian Society of Victoria were extremely kind in presenting me [and all the performers likewise] with this laminated Certificate Of Appreciation, a beautiful letter of thanks, and a pair of La Premier movie tickets.
