Modern Developments: Tradition Under Pressure

The modal music traditions of Turkey and Iran entered the 20th century as living oral cultures — transmitted by ear, sustained by patronage, and largely undocumented in any standardized notation. Within a few decades, political revolution, nationalist ideology, and institutional reform would force both traditions through a transformation more abrupt than anything in their long histories. What emerged was not the same music, though it was not entirely different either. The story of modern developments in Middle Eastern modal music is, at its core, a story about what survives when a tradition is pulled from its original context and rebuilt inside new institutions.

The 1932 Cairo Congress

Attested In March 1932, King Fuad I of Egypt convened the Congress of Arab Music in Cairo — a three-week gathering that brought Arab and Turkish musicians together with Western scholars including Bela Bartok, Paul Hindemith, Curt Sachs, and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel. Delegations came from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, and Turkey; the Turkish contingent included Rauf Yekta Bey and Mesut Cemil, son of the legendary Tanburi Cemil Bey.

Attested The central question was whether to standardize Arab tuning to 24 equal quarter-tone steps per octave — a proposal that would have imposed a fixed temperament on traditions whose expressive power depended in part on flexible, context-sensitive intonation. Some delegates, notably the Egyptian musician Muhammad Fathi, also advocated integrating Western instruments into Arabic ensembles.

Attested The congress produced no binding resolution on temperament, but its debates crystallized a tension that would define the century: how to document, teach, and theorize a modal tradition without flattening the very subtleties that made it what it was. The event also generated an invaluable archive — some 360 performances were recorded and released by His Master's Voice, preserving a snapshot of regional practice that scholars still draw on.

Turkish Republican reforms

Attested In Turkey, the pressure was not scholarly but political. Ziya Gokalp, the ideologist whose writings shaped early Republican cultural policy, had argued that Ottoman classical music was Byzantine in origin and that only Turkish folk music represented the authentic national genius. His framework gave intellectual cover to a series of state actions that struck directly at the tradition.

Attested On November 2, 1934, following a speech by Ataturk to the Grand National Assembly calling for music that complied with "general rules" — meaning Western tonal principles — the state banned alaturka music from radio broadcast. The ban extended to public spaces and, at least on paper, to private gatherings. The Presidential Symphony Orchestra, established in 1924, received active state support; pianos, trumpets, and saxophones were distributed to cultural centers across Anatolia.

Attested The broadcast ban lasted roughly two years before being quietly relaxed, but its consequences extended far beyond its formal duration. Unable to hear Turkish classical music on domestic radio, listeners tuned to Egyptian and other foreign stations — a pattern that, as Martin Stokes has documented, helped create the audience for the arabesk genre that would explode in popularity from the 1960s onward.

The conservatory replaces meşk

Attested The deeper structural change was institutional. The meşk system — direct, face-to-face, ear-based transmission from master to student, documented in Cem Behar's study Aşk Olmayınca Meşk Olmaz — had sustained Ottoman music for centuries. The Republic replaced it with conservatories modeled on Western institutions. The Istanbul Conservatory was reorganized in 1926 as a Western-style school; the Ankara State Conservatory was established in 1936 with the German composer Paul Hindemith's direct involvement, emphasizing Western classical training.

Attested What was gained was clear: standardized curricula, notation-based pedagogy, and a framework that could produce graduates at scale. What was lost is harder to measure. The meşk relationship carried subtleties of intonation, ornamentation, and seyir that notation could not fully encode. Signell's fieldwork in the 1970s documents the gap between what the theory (by then the Arel-Ezgi-Uzdilek system) prescribed and what master musicians actually played — a gap that the conservatory, by its nature, tended to narrow toward the notated version.

TRT and the standardization of repertoire

Attested The Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), established in 1964, held a monopoly over broadcasting until commercial stations arrived in the early 1990s. For Turkish classical and folk music, TRT's monopoly meant that its repertoire committees effectively determined which pieces were performed, in which versions, and in which makams. Practice Musicians who wanted airtime conformed to TRT's standards; pieces that did not fit the approved repertoire were simply not broadcast. The result was a de facto canon — useful for preservation, but narrower than the living tradition it claimed to represent.

Attested TRT's monopoly also shaped what it excluded. After the 1980 military coup, arabesk artists were deliberately kept off national broadcasts, a policy that only ended when commercial broadcasting arrived in the 1990s. The irony was symmetrical: the state that had once banned traditional music now banned the hybrid genre that its earlier ban had helped create.

Persian music: reform, revolution, and preservation

Attested Iran followed a different but parallel path. Ali-Naqi Vaziri (1886-1979), one of the first Persian musicians to study in Europe, returned to Tehran in 1924 and undertook a systematic modernization of Persian music theory. He developed the sori and koron symbols for notating quarter-tone inflections, produced the first transcription of the radif in Western staff notation, and proposed a 24-tone equal temperament designed to accommodate Western harmony within Persian modes.

Attested Vaziri's reforms were consequential and contested. His students — including Abolhassan Saba, Ruhollah Khaleghi, and Javad Maroufi — shaped Persian music pedagogy for decades. But his theoretical framework, particularly the 24-tone temperament, was "heavily rejected from the 1960s onward" by musicians who argued it distorted the flexible intonation that defined the tradition.

Attested In 1968, Dariush Safvat (1928-2013) and Nur-Ali Borumand co-founded the Center for Preservation and Propagation of Iranian Music in Tehran. The center's mission was to document the radif tradition through high-quality recordings and systematic pedagogy before the oral chain was broken. Safvat trained a generation of musicians — including Mohammad Reza Lotfi, Hossein Alizadeh, and Parviz Meshkatian — who are now credited with saving traditional music from what some scholars describe as near-obliteration.

Attested The 1979 Islamic Revolution imposed new pressures. Pop music was prohibited for nearly two decades; women were banned from singing as soloists for male audiences. Classical Persian music, with its association with Sufi poetry and pre-Islamic culture, occupied an ambiguous position — tolerated more than pop, but never fully endorsed. Practice Restrictions eased gradually through the 1990s, and by the 2000s a new generation of performers was active both inside Iran and in the diaspora.

UNESCO and the radif as heritage

Established In October 2009, the Radif of Iranian Music was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (inscription no. 00279), described as "the traditional repertoire of the classical music of Iran." The inscription recognized what Bruno Nettl and others had long argued: that the radif is not merely a collection of pieces but a pedagogical framework, a repository of melodic models (gusheh), and a living link to centuries of practice. Attested Multiple versions of the radif exist — those of Mirza Abdollah, Mirza Hossein-Qoli, Nur-Ali Borumand, and Dariush Talai among them — reflecting a tradition that accommodates variation within structure.

Tensions and continuities

Practice The fundamental tension that the 1932 Cairo Congress identified has not been resolved — it has simply moved to new arenas. Conservatories teach makam and dastgah through notation, but master musicians still insist that the tradition cannot be fully captured on paper. Digital tools offer new possibilities: software can model microtonal tuning systems, and applications like Meshk provide interactive environments for practicing makam and dastgah with accurate intonation. But whether a student learning from an app experiences the same transmission that meşk provided is an open question.

Attested Fusion genres continue to emerge — from Turkish arabesk to Iranian jazz-classical hybrids — and each generation negotiates the boundary between preservation and innovation differently. The revival movements of the late 20th century demonstrated that these traditions possess remarkable resilience. What remains to be seen is whether the institutions and technologies of the 21st century will prove to be vessels for the tradition or substitutes for it.