The Persian dastgah
The dastgah is the modal system of Persian art music: a family of melodies, gushehs, that share a scale and are played in a set order, gathered with all the others in the radif and handed down from master to student. This page gathers what our sources say about it.
The dastgahs and avaz on the map of the modes →
A family of melodies
A dastgah is a collection of gushehs, melodies that agree in scale, tuning and intervals, set side by side by an inner logic of tradition; it begins with one gusheh and ends with the same. It is the standard system of Persian art music, set down in the nineteenth century when the music passed from the system of maqams. To call it a mode misleads: a dastgah is the name of the mode a piece opens with and keeps returning to, and also the name of the whole group of modes that tradition has gathered around it.1,2
Most theorists read the word as the place (gāh) of the hand (dast) on the neck of the tar and the setar: the frets were once called dastān, and names such as Segah and Chahargah point to where the hand stood on them.1,2
In Persian music, Hormoz Farhat writes, the word closest to maqam is māye, in growing use for what maqam means elsewhere; and until recently, Laudan Nooshin adds, some musicians still called a dastgah a maqam.3
From maqam to dastgah
Until Persian music parted from the Ottoman, music across the region was explained and taught by maqams; the parting probably began under the Timurids, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The change from maqam to dastgah went on from the middle of the Safavid era to the late Qajar, and some of the old maqams lived on as gushehs inside the new dastgahs.2,4
The word in its present sense goes back, in Mohsen Hajarian’s view, to the treatises of Aqa Baba Makhmur, a musician at the court of Fath-Ali Shah, who counted twelve dastgahs. The first written record of the division as it stands today is Forsat al-Dowleh Shirazi’s Bohur al-Alhan, printed in Bombay in 1904; it lists the gushehs of each dastgah but does not write them in notes.2
The radif is credited to Ali-Akbar Farahani, a tar master at the court of Naser al-Din Shah. His own has not survived, but his sons Mirza Abdollah and Aqa Hosseinqoli compiled and taught theirs, and Mirza Abdollah’s, passed to many students, is held the most important. Ali-Naqi Vaziri, trained in Germany and France, wrote the first radif in notes in the late 1910s, stretching Western notation to show the small intervals of the dastgah. No new dastgah has been devised since the nineteenth-century codification; in 2009 UNESCO entered the radif on its list of the intangible heritage of humanity.1,2,4
The radif
The radif is a collection of old melodies handed from masters to students by ear, generation after generation; each master’s reading has shaped it and added melodies, which may carry the master’s name. As its name says, it is an order as well as a collection: it sets the gushehs of each dastgah and avaz in a row, so that they can be learnt by repetition. A dastgah holds some 10 to 30 gushehs.4
Learning it takes years, and a master knows it well enough to play any part of it at any moment. Students often merged the radifs of several teachers into their own, so the radif was never wholly fixed; since the 1970s the radifs of masters such as Ali-Akbar Shahnazi, Nour-Ali Borumand and Abdollah Davami have been kept on tape.4
In the 1960s many of Iran’s musicians and singers were Jewish; with their emigration to Israel, North America and Europe, the radif went abroad too.4
Darāmad, owj, forud
Nearly every radif opens each dastgah with one or more gushehs called darāmad, the opening; it sets out the base mode around the dastgah’s first note, to which the music keeps returning. Only Dashti has none, and begins with a gusheh called Hajiyani. The darāmad at the start and the forud at the end are what a dastgah is known and named by.2
The gushehs that follow climb, in much the same order in every radif. In Chahargah: the darāmad on the first degree, Zabol on the third, Hesar on the fifth, Mokhalef on the sixth, Muye on the fourth, Maghlub and Mansuri on the eighth. The high gushehs are the owj, the summit, usually a fourth or a fifth above the darāmad, and often the most important: Shahnaz is the owj of Shur, played with the most fire.2
At the end come one or more forud, the descent: gushehs that bring the music back to the first degree, or back home from another dastgah. The darāmad and the forud keep to the dastgah’s own notes; gushehs such as Hesar and Muye bring in others, and through them a performer passes to another dastgah.2
Seven notes, and those that change
Each dastgah has seven basic notes, and several variable ones for ornament and modulation. Some notes have a role: the finalis, where phrases close; the āghāz, the beginning, where an improvisation usually starts; the ist, the stop, which ends phrases other than the last; the shāhed, the witness, a prominent note around which a gusheh turns; and the moteghayyer, the changeable, a note heard in two forms used in turn. When the music moves between gushehs the shāhed moves, and a new space opens.1,4
The steps are of four kinds: the major second, about 200 cents; the neutral, about 150; the minor, about 100; and the augmented, about 250. Counted across all the dastgahs’ scales, the major second comes 32 times, the neutral 17, the minor 11 and the augmented 3. Laid one over another the scales need at least 15 pitches to the octave, though each dastgah uses seven. The koron, a half flat, writes the notes in between.1,2
On the exact sizes the sources disagree: the author of Microtonal Theory, who sets several readings side by side, writes that his many sources all disagree. He finds few tetrachords, dang: Mahur and Dashti, of whole and half tones, which match the Arabic Ajam and Nahawand; Shur, with neutral steps, like Bayati; and Chahargah, near Hijaz but distinctly Persian.5
Seven, twelve, or five
Most texts today count seven dastgahs, and with them five avaz, songs, that belong to two of them: four to Shur and one to Homayun.1,2
- The seven dastgahs
- Shur شورSegah سهگاهNava نواHomayun همایونChahargah چهارگاهMahur ماهورRast-Panjgah راستپنجگاه
- The avaz of Shur
- Bayat-e Tork بیات ترکDashti دشتیAbu Ata ابوعطاAfshari افشاری
- The avaz of Homayun
- Bayat-e Esfahan بیات اصفهان
Others count twelve, the avaz among them: Jean During, played in six or seven scales; Hormoz Farhat, chiefly because their forud differ, as Bayat-e Esfahan’s from Homayun’s. Bruno Nettl sees Bayat-e Kord, born of Shur, becoming a dastgah of its own. Fewer is held too: Mohammad-Reza Shajarian believed there are five, and Dariush Talai has traced them all to four basic māyes. By their intervals, the seven fall into four or five groups.2
Shur is called the mother of all dastgahs, since several avaz branch from it and it is felt in Nava and Segah too; Hormoz Farhat and Dariush Safvat dissent, and hold Chahargah, with its two matching tetrachords, the principal one.2
Free and measured
Gushehs are of two kinds: those with no fixed meter, and those whose meter is part of what they are, such as the kereshmeh and the chahar-mezrab. The free ones still follow the meters of verse: the rhythm of the radif is shaped by Persian poetry, and takes three forms, symmetric, asymmetric (lang) and free. Traditionally a performance runs in five parts: pish-darāmad, chahar-mezrab, avaz, tasnif and reng.2,4
Beside the Arabic maqam
Navid, writing on Oud for Guitarists, set the dastgahs beside the maqamat, for cultural exchange rather than full analysis, as he says himself: Mahur and Rast-Panjgah beside Ajam; Shur and Abu Ata beside Bayati, Abu Ata the closer, called in Persian Dastan-e Arab, the Arab melody; Segah beside Sikah, and the same as the Arabic Iraq; Homayun beside Nikriz in feeling; Bayat-e Esfahan beside Hijaz; Chahargah beside Hijaz Kar, with half flats where Hijaz Kar has flats.6