Conference Agenda

In his landmark tome, Music in the Balkans, Jim Samson remarks that with the exception of Dimitar Nenov (1901-1953), European modernism did not make a mark on musical life in Bulgaria between the World Wars (Samson, 2013). After the devastation of the Balkan Wars and the First World War, many musicians in the newly independent nation were busy returning to the work of building institutions and professional life. There was hardly a classical tradition from which to break; in the standard historiography, the “first generation” of Bulgarian composers, such as Dobri Hristov (1875-1941), were largely concerned with forming choirs and arranging folk songs according to Western European harmony, while the second, led by Pancho Vladigerov (1899-1978), which came of age in the 1920s, integrated these folksongs into larger symphonic forms. This Southeastern pocket of Europe—confined, as historian Maria Todorova has noted, to the reputation of the most rural, backward, and “Balkan” of Balkan nations—was out of step with the rest of the continent, striving to replicate the long nineteenth century within a few short years of the twentieth.

And yet, many of the new Bulgarian intelligentsia had all the experiences constitutive of modernism. Many had studied abroad in Russia, Vienna, or Istanbul, most were multilingual, and all had the experience of accelerated modernization that left sharp epistemological ruptures. In this paper, rather than seeking modernism in Bulgarian music of the 1920s and 1930s, I turn to music in Bulgarian modernism of that period. I provide close readings of fiction, critical sketches, and philosophical essays in modernist periodicals such as Plamuk (The Flame) and Zlatorog (Golden Horn), arguing that specific repertoires and concepts of music, ranging from Western classicism to futurism to folk song, served as key intellectual resources for Bulgarian modernists. Concepts of realism, expressionism, and impressionism that these intellectuals worked out through discussions of music, in turn, shed new light on how music may be defined as part of artistic modernism in the broader project of Balkan modernity.

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.