Saba’s Mirza Abdullah or Mirza Abdullah’s Saba?

Finally, the Radif of Mirza Abdullah, as narrated and penned by Abolhasan Saba, which had been rumored to have been found among the remaining documents of Faramarz Payvar, has been published. The first volume, which includes the Dastgah-e Homaayoun, has been meticulously edited, collated, and published in a worthy and prestigious manner by the “Payvar Foundation.” The rest are also expected to be published. As is customary these days, and particularly for the Payvar Foundation and Kherad Art House as well, a fitting celebration was held for the book’s launch, with some of the most distinguished and renowned individuals invited to join in the festivity.

The gathering was adorned with many enthusiasts, students, and musicians, indicating the event’s significance. But what is this significance? Is it as the three distinguished speakers of the program (Hossein Alizadeh, Dariush Pirniakan, and Majid Kiani, all associated with the revivalist movement and therefore intimately familiar with Mirza Abdullah’s Radif) suggested in various ways that the importance lies in Saba himself and his musical actions? Is it because of the proximity of the time these Radifs were notated, placing them among the primary texts of Radif notation? Is it because, unlike the other famous narrator of Mirza Abdullah’s Radif (Noorali Khan Borumand), Saba was not only directly a student of Mirza Abdullah but also a highly creative and influential musician of his time, not just a Radif expert? Is it because the text was written only slightly more than a decade after Saba’s training under Mirza Abdullah (late 1280s to early 1290s), suggesting a higher likelihood of accuracy? Or is it because it provides an opportunity to compare two different narratives of the Radif recorded several decades apart? In short, does this text hold musicological historical importance? Given the timing of Saba and Esmaeil Khan Ghahremani’s lessons, does it reveal transformations and changes in the Radif from Mirza Abdullah himself? Do the strategies and approaches employed by the editorial team in critically editing the text teach us something new about our music and musicology and pave the way for other researchers of Radif or set a standard for publishing other rediscovered old notations?

All in their speeches, and the organizers in their actions, emphasized the tremendous importance of discovering and, more importantly, publishing such a significant historical document. But why are these few notations by Saba considered historical and important? What does Saba’s Radif of Mirza Abdullah have that surpasses all the other Radifs published so far? These and many other questions that can be raised afterward highlight the numerous aspects of the value and significance of a reference text in our music history. This text, thanks to its own merit and through meticulous detail, can pose many questions and open our eyes to new perspectives on reference musical texts.

Beyond these crucial questions, which are all valuable in their own right, there was something in the program that deserves our attention and interpretation, perhaps answering the question of how Saba’s notation of Mirza Abdullah’s Radif (or any similar document) can return to the musical practice stage in an era where this Radif holds near-complete authority in educational settings, in an age where the Radif has become a reference text and solidified beyond formal education.

The duet performance by Bahar Amrollahi and Houshang Ebadi of parts of the Dastgah-e Homaayoun from this Radif was a kind of shocking break. We have seen similar examples of educational or non-educational performances of a specific Radif before (although mostly in recordings rather than live performances) and often in artistic contexts, it has been seen as a sign of a lack or absence of creativity. But the presence of such an experience in a program unveiling an important historical document places its performance and approach in a specific position. The interaction of the two musicians (and perhaps the unnamed designer, who was likely one of the two musicians or someone else) with the text of a few sections of the Radif was like viewing it as a work of art. They interpreted the text/work especially in terms of dynamics, the tempo of performance, and fleeting moments of texture and sound color, like the fleeting passing of a spring cloud. The phrases of Mirza Abdullah’s Radif were played as a well-prepared duet and, particularly, the colorization of the tools formed the texture. On one hand, the variations in volume and sound register — partly due to the reality of changing instruments from Tar (the instrument on which Saba based his notation) to Ney and Qanun — in conjunction with phrasing, and on the other hand, the fluidity of tempo, turned what was played into a particular type of performance of this Radif; a contemporary performance.

Until now, such texts were often performed for educational purposes without any artistic embellishments. Despite the fact that in most cases it was “really” impossible to access any “original,” there was this notion and it was accepted as an indisputable truth that in such performances, one must be faithful to an original or a primary expression. Such an approach was often found dry and devoid of creativity by many creative musicians and was left aside in artistic performances. What did they do instead? The prevailing claim about their work was that they had internalized the relations of the Radif as templates for creation and could create new melodies based on them. They created phrases that, depending on their stylistic affiliation and creativity, were often recognizable as known units of the Radif (phrases and sentences and …), none of which were specifically copied from any particular Radif text, or at least created with a significant amount of changes compared to the known texts. This approach is known in a range of artistic variations on Radif texts to bedahang-sazi¹ based on the overall relations of the Dastgah.

But now, with all the contexts mentioned, under a program for a new narrative of the most important Radif reference text of the past five decades, a performance stands before us that both in terms of phrases and … has used a specific text as its basis and in some aspects has distanced itself from it in a way that does not resemble either the school-based or the melodic/bedahang-sazi approach. This is nothing but an artistic performance of the Radif as an interpretable work. Such a performance, in addition to showing one of the ways of dealing with such texts and passing through their potential rigidity, also poses a question in connection with Saba. And that is whether today’s discovery of the text and its position has made Mirza Abdullah belong to Saba or Saba to Mirza Abdullah? To see the difference, it is enough to compare the situation with the time when Borumand presented his narrative of the same Radif. Of course, considering that Saba, unlike Borumand, is not the one presenting it himself, but our contemporary understanding of Saba is the one presenting this new perspective, and the current aesthetic situation forms its context. Reinterpreting the Radif as a finished work makes Mirza Abdullah belong to our contemporary reading of Saba and in this way opens a window in the rigidity. And perhaps if it becomes widespread, it will show another stage in the evolution of the Radif.

Besides all these, is it conceivable that another action on the same text does the opposite and returns Saba to the embrace of Mirza Abdullah? That is, does Saba being the notator, with all the historical and stylistic characteristics by which we ultimately know him, influence the extent to which we consider such an interpretation permissible to present in such a marked position? In other words, how much of the validity of such interpretations is related to the contextual background and how much does “being Saba” form part of this context?

1. The term “bedahang-sazi” is a combination of the words “improvisation” and “composition” and has been previously suggested as a translation of “comprovisation.” It refers to a type of musical creation that is neither purely improvisational nor purely pre-composed. The prevailing belief in today’s Iranian musicology is that the main pattern of creation in our classical music is not pure improvisation but “bedahang-sazi.”