This paper examines a strand of Black music history in southern Iran from the late Qajar to early Pahlavi era, focusing on the entanglement of slav ery, abolition, and the agency of Black musicians in shaping religious and non-religious music across public and semi-public spaces. Framed by the contemporary resonance of loud, collective, male-only dammām drum ming during Muharram and Safar in Bushehr, it considers how this his tory is narrated today by local performers and scholars, and how these narratives intersect with, or diverge from, historical accounts. I draw on historical accounts in which the presence of Black people is most often de scribed through musical moments. These sources reveal how music linked to marginalized communities circulated between religious and non-reli gious settings, often inhabiting liminal positions—between sound and si lence, freedom and unfreedom, visibility and invisibility—especially in the years immediately after abolition, when former slaves navigated new so cial and economic roles. By rereading these fragmentary sources alongside contemporary oral histories, I discuss an alternative way of thinking about the past of this collective music, one that bears the history of life in a port city shaped by the Indian Ocean slave trade and layered with geopolitical upheavals. The paper concludes by returning to the present-day dammām drumming of Bushehr, which endures not only as an audible trace of the past but also as a vessel for its silences, erasures, and the shifting bound aries between what is remembered and what is forgotten.

This paper examines the mid-twentieth-century Iranian radio program Golha (1956–1979) as a project of mediated modernity that challenges dominant colonial and developmentalist narratives of tradition and modernity. Scholarship on Middle Eastern music has often framed modernity as rupture—an inevitable displacement of classical forms by media, nationalism, or Westernization. By contrast, Golha demonstrates a distinctly Iranian model of balanced modernity in which radio functioned not as a vehicle of cultural erasure but as a mediating instrument for ethical continuity.
Conceived by Davud Pirnia, Golha embedded Persian classical music within poetry, interpretive commentary, and disciplined listening practices. Rather than popularizing or folklorizing art music, the programs cultivated what I call an ethics of listening—an aesthetic formation grounded in moderation, relationality, and care. Central to this formation was the emergence of the “unseen feminine voice”: female announcers whose disembodied yet authoritative presence reconfigured sonic gender without relying on visual visibility. Here, femininity operates not as identity politics but as epistemology—a logic of balance and receptivity that structures the relationship between music, poetry, and listener.
Drawing on decolonial theory and feminist ethics of care, I argue that Golha anticipates contemporary debates on decolonizing archives and media by modeling sound as relational rather than extractive. Its recent digital revival through the Golha Project extends this ethic transnationally, transforming archival practice into shared stewardship. By centering listening rather than spectacle, Golha offers ethnomusicology a case of modernity without rupture, authority without domination, and mediation as resistance.

This paper examines the social aesthetics of reng, a precomposed instrumental form in Iranian dastgāh music, and its gradual decline since the late twentieth century. Historically associated with dance (raqs), reng functions as a lively piece in duple or triple meter at moderate to fast tempos in Persian classical music (Farhat 2004, 22). For centuries, reng’s connection to dance embodiment, courtesan culture, and theatrical entertainment contributed to its lower artistic status under Islamic rule. During the early twentieth century, however, the modernist reforms of the Pahlavi era and new developments of Iranian art music elevated both the musical complexity and cultural standing of reng. It emerged as a respected independent composition, valued for rhythmic vitality and stylized syncopation, and frequently concluded prominent vocal genres such as tasnīf or an entire dastgāh performance (Azadehfar 2011; Zonis 1973). The compositional innovations of master-musicians, including Ali-Naqi Vaziri, Abolhassan Saba, Ruhollah Khaleqi, Darvishkhan, and Faramarz Payvar, further consolidated its pedagogical and performative significance. Despite these developments, reng entered a new phase of decline in the late twentieth century. Through analysis of selected musical examples, this study traces this fading to broader socio-cultural transformations: emergent waves of traditionalisms enhanced by orientalist discourses of spirituality, the marginalization of the popular 6/8 idiom (shish-o-hasht), and cultural reforms intensified after the 1979 revolution. I argue that shifts in social aesthetics, embodied ideologies, and reconfigured identities have decisively shaped the fortunes of reng in contemporary Iran. This study contributes to the broader debates on music, aesthetics, and cultural transformation.