ABSTRACT
At the heart of this book lies a desire to understand how Iranian classical musicians think and talk about creative practice, the creative process itself, and the relationship between the two. In particular, as already discussed in Chapter 1, I seek to interrogate the notion of ‘improvisation’, and the implicit or explicit binaries which the term sets up with its Others: composition and ‘non-improvised’ performance. From the start of this research it seemed to me that the discourse of improvisation, whilst usefully highlighting the creative licence of the performer, tells us relatively little about creative process, instead arguably providing a veil of mystique which potentially obfuscates the highly structured and compositional nature of the music. Clearly the discourse of improvisation only works in relation to the central linchpin of the radif. And yet, as soon as one probes beneath the surface, the ostensibly neat relationship between learnt radif and creative performance turns out to be far more complex than the accepted orthodoxy might suggest. Having considered the discourses through which musicians and scholars have framed ideas about creativity, in this chapter I turn to the music ‘itself’ and examine more traditional forms of performance practice, drawing on examples from an unpublished extended study of dastgāh Segāh, with some reference to dastgāh Māhur. 1 Following this, Chapter 5 considers changes within the classical music since the Revolution of 1979, focusing on two musicians who are developing new forms of improvisational practice that move away from traditional allegiance to the radif and challenge dominant discourses concerning the relationship between improvisation and composition.
