The latter part of Mohammad-Rezâ Shah’s reign had a disastrous impact on Persian classical music, one with significant political implications for the Pahlavi regime itself. With the shah’s fast pace of modernization and importation of everything Western, classical Persian music became a victim of Western and Western-style pop music. As Westernized pop music became dominant, traditional music lost its appeal. Viewed as a sign of Western penetration and “illicit” activities, pop music was rejected by the religious and traditional sectors of the society. After the revolution, the clerics banned pop music and replaced it with revolutionary music. Pop music went underground. Old cassettes of popular music were sold on street corners illegally, and pop musicians had to either retire or flee the country. The majority of those who left the country ended up in Los Angeles, a city with the largest concentration of Iranians outside of Iran. Soon, artists in Los Angeles began producing tapes smuggled back to Iran. Iranian pop music imported from Los Angeles was labeled muzik-e los angelesi —a form of pop music with happy themes geared for dancing and partying. As the clerics consolidated their power, they found certain kinds of music helpful in promoting ideological unity and nationalism, especially during the mobilization for the Iran-Iraq war. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance began promoting revolutionary and epic songs as well classical Persian music with mystical themes. Islamic arts were encouraged and promoted throughout the society. A new cadre of musicians and singers more comfortable with the new Islamic culture emerged. Some of the old musicians, who had adjusted their expectations to the new situation, started to produce new works. The Fajr Festival of Music was established, new music halls were built, and public musical performances by male musicians were encouraged. In the past two decades, hundreds of new educational and analytical books on scientific music and music instruction have been produced and published. Attention to music, both by professionals and the public, has been phenomenal. Numerous private music schools have sprung up in most major cities and young people, including women, are rushing to these schools to learn various instruments. As for professionals, their productivity has been quite extraordinary: numerous concerts are offered to the public, thousands of CDs and cassette tapes of new music are produced, and many books on music are published annually. Like many other aspects of life in twentieth-century Iran, classical Persian music has been under pressure by the modern Western music and musical instruments. The larger tension of modernity and tradition has influenced this art and divided many musicians and their followers to opposing camps: those who continue to produce music by traditional musical rules and instruments, and those who favor music produced by the modern instruments. The classical music often attracts cultural elites and educated segment of the population who views music as an art. The popular music is more successful among the younger generation that treats music as entertainment. While music scholars are engaged in a debate about “tradition” versus “modernity” in music, younger generation of musicians are already bridging the gap between the two. Many do not see a need for viewing these two as mutually exclusive. Though traditional musicians were averse to using modern poetry, recent albums by master vocalists like Mohammad Nuri, Mohammad-Rezâ Shajariân, and Shahrâm Nâzeri have lowered this resistance. A genre of music combining both traditional and classical instruments has also emerged. Today, Persian music is widely listened to in neighboring countries like Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, and some Arab countries in the Persian Gulf. For some time, it has gained some popularity in the “World Music” scene as well—a development not unrelated to the presence of large communities of Iranian immigrants around the world, especially in the Western countries. Children of Iranian immigrants abroad have begun experimenting with newer, richer, and more diverse forms of music mixing Iranian themes with the modern Western musical genres.
