Key Figures in Persian Music Theory

Persian classical music as it exists today is the product of specific people making specific choices — about what to preserve, how to teach, what to write down, and how to explain what they heard. The dastgah system did not emerge from an abstract theoretical tradition; it was shaped by court musicians who codified an oral repertoire, reformers who tried to reconcile it with Western frameworks, and scholars who made it legible to audiences beyond Iran. This article traces the key figures in that chain, from the Qajar era to the present.

Mirza Abdollah (1843--1918)

Established Agha Mirza Abdollah Farahani was the elder son of Ali Akbar Farahani (c. 1821--1862), the court musician credited with organizing the Persian modal repertoire into a systematic, teachable form. After his father's early death, Mirza Abdollah carried that inheritance forward and expanded it into the most widely transmitted version of the radif — the canonical body of melodic models that defines Persian classical music.

Established A master of both tar and setar, Mirza Abdollah was as consequential as a teacher as he was as a performer. His students included Darvish Khan (1872--1926), who brought the radif beyond the royal court; Ali-Naqi Vaziri, who first transcribed it into Western staff notation; and Abolhasan Saba, who carried it into the conservatory era. His version of the radif — later recorded from memory by his student Nour-Ali Borumand and transcribed by Moussa Ma'rufi — contains approximately 470 gusheh across all twelve modal systems and remains the foundational reference for conservatory teaching today.

Attested Mirza Abdollah's contribution was not merely preservation. He is credited with broadening the emotional range of the repertoire, moving it beyond the predominantly mournful character of earlier court music toward a wider expressive palette. The radif that bears his name is not a museum piece but a reshaped tradition.

Mirza Hossein-Qoli (1853--1916)

Established Mirza Hossein-Qoli, the younger son of Ali Akbar Farahani, developed a parallel but distinct version of the radif. Where his brother's version became the dominant pedagogical tradition, Hossein- Qoli's radif followed its own lineage — transmitted primarily through his son Ali-Akbar Shahnazi (1897--1985), who later recorded the complete radif from memory, and published in notation by Dariush Pirniakan in 2001.

Attested Hossein-Qoli was among the first Persian musicians to have his playing recorded: he made gramophone discs in Paris in the 1890s and recorded again in Tehran in 1912. These early recordings, though limited in fidelity, provide rare documentary evidence of late-nineteenth-century Persian instrumental practice. The differences between the two brothers' radifs — in the number of gusheh per dastgah, their ordering, and their melodic detail — are not errors but the natural result of an oral tradition in which each master's rendering carries its own authority.

Ali-Naqi Vaziri (1886--1979)

Established Ali-Naqi Vaziri was the most controversial figure in twentieth-century Persian music. A tar player, military officer, and educator, he studied music in Europe before returning to Tehran in 1924 to pursue a sweeping reform of Persian musical practice and pedagogy. He directed the Tehran Conservatory of Music and taught at the University of Tehran, training a generation of students who would shape the tradition after him.

Established Vaziri's most lasting technical contribution was the invention of the sori and koron accidental symbols — notational signs that raise or lower a pitch by approximately a quarter tone, enabling Persian microtonal intervals to be represented in Western staff notation. These symbols remain standard in Persian music notation today. His instruction book Dastur-e Tar, first published in 1913, was the first transcription of the classical radif using European staff notation.

Attested His most contentious proposal was the adoption of a 24-note equal temperament — dividing the octave into 24 equally spaced quarter tones — as the theoretical foundation for Persian music. This framework made Western-style harmony applicable to Persian modes, but it also imposed a fixed grid on intervals that the living tradition treats as fluid and context-dependent. Farhat, writing decades later, rejected equal temperament in favor of approximate cent measurements, reflecting the flexibility that performers actually practice. Vaziri's reform remains debated: it made Persian music writable and teachable through institutional methods, but at the cost of flattening the microtonal subtleties that distinguish one dastgah from another.

Abolhasan Saba (1902--1957)

Established Abolhasan Saba was the bridge between the Qajar-era masters and the modern conservatory system. A student of both Mirza Abdollah and Darvish Khan, he became one of the most influential pedagogues in twentieth-century Persian music, teaching violin and setar and training students who would themselves become leading figures — among them Faramarz Payvar and Dariush Safvat.

Established Saba compiled his own version of the radif and played a central role in establishing Persian classical music within Iran's formal educational institutions. His first radio recording in 1927 helped bring the tradition to a wider public. He died at fifty-five, but his pedagogical lineage proved durable: the musicians he trained carried the radif into the second half of the century and beyond.

Hormoz Farhat (1928--2021)

Established Hormoz Farhat was the scholar who made the dastgah system analytically accessible to a global readership. Born in Tehran, he earned a doctorate in composition and ethnomusicology from UCLA in 1965, studying with Darius Milhaud and Lukas Foss. He subsequently held positions at the University of Tehran (1970--1978) and at Trinity College Dublin (1982--1995), where he chaired the School of Music.

Established His landmark work, The Dastgah Concept in Persian Music (Cambridge University Press, 1990; 2nd ed. 2004), remains the standard English-language reference on the subject. Farhat's approach was notable for its empirical restraint: rather than imposing a fixed temperament grid on Persian intervals, he measured pitches in approximate cents and described each dastgah's intervallic character as it is actually practiced, not as a theoretical system would prescribe.

Attested Farhat explicitly rejected both the 24-note equal temperament proposed by Vaziri and the 22-note Pythagorean system advocated by other theorists, arguing that neither framework captures the flexibility of Persian intonation. His insistence on describing the music as performers actually play it — with mutable pitches (moteghayyer) that shift depending on context — set the methodological standard for subsequent scholarship.

Jean During (b. 1947)

Established Jean During is a French ethnomusicologist whose work spans Iranian, Central Asian, Afghan, and Azerbaijani musical traditions. After completing a doctorate in 1975 on the history of Iranian music, he joined the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a research director and has taught at the University of Strasbourg.

Established His The Art of Persian Music (Mage Publishers, 1991), co-authored with Zia Mirabdolbaghi and Dariush Safvat, provided a comprehensive introduction to the dastgah system alongside Farhat's more analytical treatment. During also transcribed the radif as performed by Nour-Ali Borumand in the 1970s — a critical act of documentation, since Borumand was the principal living authority on Mirza Abdollah's radif at the time. During's broader contribution has been to situate Persian classical music within the wider ecology of Central Asian modal traditions, drawing connections that purely Iran-focused scholarship often overlooks.

Dariush Talai (b. 1953)

Established Dariush Talai studied with Ali-Akbar Shahnazi, Nour-Ali Borumand, and Abdollah Davami — absorbing the tar, setar, and vocal radif traditions from masters directly connected to the Qajar-era lineages. He has taught at the University of Tehran, the Sorbonne, and the University of Washington.

Established In 1992, Talai recorded Mirza Abdollah's complete radif on setar at the University of Washington, published in 1993--1994 — a landmark recording that made a full radif performance widely accessible for the first time. His analytical study A New Approach to the Theory of Persian Art Music (1993) proposed a structural framework for understanding the radif's internal organization, moving beyond the descriptive cataloguing of earlier scholarship toward a more systematic account of how gusheh relate to one another within and across dastgah.

Attested Talai's work represents a generational shift: where Farhat and During wrote primarily for Western academic audiences, Talai — as both a performer and a scholar trained within the tradition — bridges analytical rigor with the practitioner's understanding of how the radif actually functions in performance.

The chain of transmission

These seven figures do not exhaust the history of Persian music theory, but they trace its central arc: from the Qajar court musicians who shaped the radif as a teachable canon, through the reformers and pedagogues who brought it into institutional settings, to the scholars who made it legible to the wider world. Other essential figures — Nour-Ali Borumand, Abdollah Davami, Darvish Khan, Moussa Ma'rufi — appear throughout the companion article on the Persian radif. For the modal system these figures helped define, see The Dastgah System. For how Persian modal identity differs from Turkish makam theory, see Persian Modal Identity.