For years attempts have been made to isolate Iran, politically and socially from the global community. Weather its economic sanctions imposed by outside powers, or cultural and economic protectionism imposed from within, we see this isolation in many aspects of Iranian life. From within Iranian society, however, there has been a movement to transcend this isolation; from Khatami’s “Dialog amongst civilizations” to the two Iranian students, “bikers for peace”, who rode their bicycles around the world to show that Iranians desire peace and cooperation. Similarly, within the Iranian art scene a movement has flourished to promote mutual cultural understanding, and deconstruct the stagnant East-to-West binary. Christophe Rezai’s Nour ensemble is an attempt to do just this.
The Nour ensemble held the Vahdat Hall in Tehran for three nights from July 19th to the 21st. As I walked into Vahdat Hall on the eve of their last performance, I didn’t know what to really expect. I had listened to their album Alba the night before over and over, but it’s always more personal and revealing to witness music live. The performance consisted of a ten song repertoire from the album, combining Spanish Conductus (medieval sacred vocals), Gregorian Chants, Iranian and Kurdish avaz. The instrumentation was mostly Iranian with the addition of the duduk, an Armenian wind instrument, and the Afghani harmonium. For Rezai, what helps bridge Iranian melody with the Cantigas de Santa Maria is that, to some extent, medieval European music is influenced by Arabic musical traditions.
This Arabic influence was evident and very much in tact at the concert’s start with the song Santa Maria Amar. With Nour’s nine members on stage and the audience waiting in anticipation, Saba Alizadeh breaks the silence with three plucks of his kamanche, each emphasized with a long rest in between them. His utilization of ’silence’ as a key element in his solo is a quintessential Iranian motif. However, as the kamanche fell into a steady drone the oud solo rose to the foreground an Arabic atmosphere known as a taqsim was created. Their use of a taqsim in maqam-e Bayatti is very different from the Persian Radiff’s daramad in dastgah-e Shur, that the listener might expect. This ambient drone was a staple of Nour’s repertoire and found several manifestations throughout the night.
In the second song, Novus Annus, the harmony created by the choir often clashed with the microtonal scales of the Kurdish avaz. The melding of medieval European choir music with Mid-Eastern microtonal melodies was already attempted in Turkish Anatolia during the first half of the 19th century. Back then this experiment was met with mixed results due to a simple failure to achieve aesthetic appeal. That night at Vahdat Hall it was unclear whether Nour was able to consistently transcend this aesthetic challenge.
However, after the intermission in the song Uterus, the harmony created by the choir worked quite well with the Kurdish avaz solo, primarily due to the lack of microtones in dastgah-e Mahour. In fact this piece began with a beautiful solo on Ali Bustan’s shurangiz, sounding essentially more Persian. The most technical piece and best incorporation of the Radiff occurred in, Cunctissimus Concanentes, where dastgah-e Nava was clearly detectable amongst the harmonic background of the choir. But again in A que as cousas, a hybrid between the microtonal mode of dastgah-e Afshari and choir harmonies, a collision occurred between musical structures. Does this serve the mission of cross cultural understanding if it doesn’t appeal aesthetically?
In Kayhan Kalhor’s Ghazal you can hear the Radiff sometimes dancing and sometimes wrestling with the Indian Ragas, bringing both harmony and tension. But that night at the Vahdat Hall, the Radiff’s framework often clashed with the framework of the Gregorian chants or Conductus, and failed to either woo or stimulate the listener. When I heard dastgah-e Nava or Afshari being performed in this context I got an image of a wild horse being tamed. The element of wild suspense and risk were missing from the music, leaving only a very controlled Western atmosphere.
Despite these shortcomings the concert did have magical moments. The audience reacted with great pleasure to the encore, Villancico, where the Persian 6/8 rhythm and Mahour melody meshed perfectly with the medieval eastern European choir. The most uplifting part of the concert was in this last piece, where smiles were stretched across the musicians’ and the audiences’ faces.
Fusions can reflect different types of struggles and synchronizations, such as between the many identities of a widely scattered Iranian Diaspora, or between alien cultures and languages or simply between radically different styles of art. Many Ostads in New Delhi frustratingly struggle to maintain their modal system of Ragas untouched, or at least melodically visible. The same can be said of the many Ostads in Tehran who struggle to maintain the Radiff untouched. But in the past decade or so, Persian classical music has experienced a growth in fusion. Experimentation with a wide array of musical cultures has often built legitimate crossroads between various cultural styles and genres. The question that needs to be addressed here is what makes a musical experiment worth while?
In Iran artists such as Hossein Alizadeh, Masoud Shaari and Kayhan Kalhor have pioneered the way for successful fusion mixes with PCM. What these artists have in common is a willingness to take risks, a virtuoso talent and a knack for finding the harmony between the genres they fuse. The audience of Vahdat Hall that night, however, were treated to a far more controlled, reserved and isolated attempt at fusion. Nonetheless, it was a brave and beautiful performance which will probably be the beginning of a very new and beautiful attempt at building bridges.