Conference Agenda

This paper examines a central paradox of Iranian musical modernity: “tradition” became a fixed, authoritative object through the reforms that claimed to rescue it. I locate this transformation in a specific institutional moment. After returning to Iran in 1923, the musician, theorist, and reformer Ali-Naqi Vaziri founded the country’s first modern music school and, in 1925, presented a widely publicized series of lectures and concerts that recast Persian music as a systematic body of knowledge—teachable, and newly situated in public life. Against this backdrop, I focus on the radīf, the modal repertoire of Persian music, which in the late Qajar period functioned as an embodied, lineage-based practice transmitted through apprenticeship and realized in improvisation. Though partially codified in the nineteenth century, it remained a flexible mode of musical knowledge rather than a stable canon.

Beginning in the 1920s and accelerating under the early Pahlavi state, the radīf underwent a decisive epistemic reconfiguration. Through the adaptation of staff notation, the production of pedagogical manuals and graded curricula, and the emergence of new concert institutions and listening norms, radīf materials were reorganized as a bounded repertoire and elevated as the foundation of a national musical tradition. Drawing on close readings of Vaziri’s published lectures and theoretical writings alongside early conservatory materials and instructional texts, I show how this reformatting transformed a lineage-based practice into an archive of knowledge.

I suggest that in this process the radīf came to function as a kind of “sacred text” of modern Iranian music: a stabilized past that helped authorize new forms of pedagogy, theory, and cultural legitimacy. Rather than opposing tradition, modern musical subjectivity in Iran was shaped through its canonization. The radīf became a central framework for theorizing modality, a source of compositional authority, and a standard through which other repertoires were interpreted and hierarchized. By foregrounding the institutional and epistemic work that rendered the radīf “traditional” within a historically specific context, this paper approaches Iranian musical modernity as one instance of a broader global condition in which the authority of the past is not simply inherited but actively produced through modern regimes of knowledge.