Avaz Music Will Help You Discover Emotions You Thought You'd Never Find

A History of the Ancient Persian Singing Style

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Photo by Farid Jebelli on Unsplash

Vocalizing Poetry

The ancient land of Iran has been the host of many famed empires, from the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the Mongolian Empire. The most notable inhabitants have been the Persian people. Persian culture has withstood and survived unmeasurable catastrophes over the millennia. Some elements of their culture that has lived on no matter the empire has been their art, architecture, and music.

The modal system that provides the base of Persian music is Dastgah. This system has a set of principles that all Persian music contains. The four principals are the following:

• A scale

• A motif

• A group of short pieces

• A recognizable identity

As you may imagine, this allows for a lot of flexibility and personalization. While Dastgah describes the composition and structure of Persian music, avaz represents it’s vocal style.

Steeped in Persian poetry for nearly 1000 years avaz music is heavily intertwined with the written art form. Some of the great poets where avaz is sung over include Hafiz, Nezami, Omar Khayyam, and Rumi. This cerebral and thoughtful underpinning of avaz helps the music feel focused and endlessly inspired. In addition to Persian poetry, avaz is also inextricably linked tahrir. Tahrir is a type of yodeling singing style based in the throught. It’s incredibly important for Persian singers to master tahrir and to make their own style within the vocal style. The more original and elaborate the tahrir, the better.

Like poetry, avaz can be free of structure and is led by emotion.