78 The EconomistOctober 17th 2020
W
hen he becamefamous—when, as he sang the opening
words of his best-loved song, Morgh-e Sahar, “Dawn Bird”,
the crowds would start clapping and leaping to their feet—Mo-
hammad Reza Shajarian credited his musical achievements to his
father. That seemed unexpected. His father had been a qari, a recit-
er of the Quran, in their local mosque in Mashhad, in Iran’s north-
east. He had taught him from early childhood which letters had to
be leaned on, which treated lightly, which melodiously prolonged.
But singing itself, in the classical Persian style, was something his
father declared haram, forbidden. So it was in secret that, from the
age of 12, he began to study the music that became his life.
Other singers might have perfect pitch, but soon they would be-
gin to waver. In his prime he could sing for 40 minutes, clearly and
without stumbling on any of the quarter-tones and the 12 modes
(the equivalent of the West’s major and minor keys) which are the
hallmark of Persian classical music. Each mode might have as
many as 40 melodies associated with it; he had to memorise all of
them, so that at any request or movement of the heart he could sing
as required. It was he, not the players who might accompany him
on the long-necked tar and the shake-drum, who chose both the
mode and the lyrics—usually the mystical works of the medieval
Sufi tradition, Hafiz, Rumi and Attar, as well as modern pieces. The
sound he aimed for was the ringing clarity of the tar: one of his
chief teachers, Jalil Shahnaz, was a tar-player rather than a singer.
And the core of his music, as he sat cross-legged onstage, was in-
tense concentration not just of mind, but of his whole human
awareness. He thought, he said, of people’s longings.
Over the years he captured the country’s soul. He sang on na-
tional radio both against the shah’s torture machine and that of the
mullahs who, in 1979, overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty. Gradually he
became a bridge between those who stayed in the country, strug-
gling through, and the huge Iranian diaspora. “Dawn Bird” hadfirst roused the crowds campaigning for a constitution in the early
20th century; but under the shah and under a pseudonym, so as
not to embarrass his father, he made it his own.Flightless nightingale, rise out of your cage,
sing for the freedom of the human being...
Oh God, oh universe, oh nature,
turn our dark evening into dawn...
Oh fiery sigh! start a flame in this cage...He was also the haunting radio voice of the Rabbana prayer that
called Iranians at dusk to break their Ramadan fast: “Oh Lord, ac-
cept this service from us, Thou the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing...”
The mullahs were divided about him. After Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini banned Persian instruments and songs, he sang public-
ly only in the gardens of Western embassies in Tehran. But when
war with Iraq broke out in the early 1980s and Persian nationalism
needed boosting, the regime gave him space on the airwaves. He
often claimed to be non-political, but the songs he chose were rich
with allegory: the themes of “night” and “winter”, meaning oppres-
sion, or the simple longing for truth that burned in Rumi and Ha-
fiz. More blatant messages came through, too. His first album after
the revolution was “Bidad”, “Injustice”, based on a poem by Saadi; it
spoke of a wonderful land reduced to a shambles. “Dawn Bird” was
a plea for freedom from start to finish. Iran’s history for four de-
cades, he said, was all there in his songs.
It seemed to him that the Islamic Republic’s severity and Per-
sian identity could not fit together. The rules of his intricate musi-
cal system, for example, also made room for free-flowing interpre-
tation, improvisation and searching. In 2000 he released “Night,
Silence, Desert” with a Kurdish musician, Kayhan Kalhor; it was
full of melodies he had found in villages on his travels round Iran.
He devised new instruments, mostly variations on the tarand dul-
cimer, in an attempt to broaden a traditional orchestra’s range. If
musicians let themselves be trapped in ancient formats, he told a
newspaper, they would no longer speak for their times.
His political dissent took longer to become explicit; until the
Green revolution of 2009, after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
engineered a second term. When the protesters were shot and
beaten up by security forces, he sang “Language of Fire”:Put your gun down...
come, sit, talk, listen.
Perhaps the light of humanity
will get through to your heart too.The protesters were denounced by the regime as “dust and trash”.
He considered himself, therefore, the voice of dust and trash. At his
concerts he insisted that the house lights stayed up so that he
could see the audience’s faces: the women openly weeping, the
men pretending to clean their glasses, all as raptly still as he was,
but with energy flowing as a wave between them. Every concert
ended with “Dawn Bird”, as rose petals showered down on him.
Since he could no longer bear to be a voice on state media, ex-
ploited to back up the republic’s propaganda, he asked to be taken
off-air. In return, he was banned from all public performances and
recording in Iran. He was not arrested—that would have caused too
much uproar—but nor did he slip into oblivion. Though he stayed
in Iran, quietly doing calligraphy and Japanese gardening, he took
his concerts abroad, singing in packed venues in Europe and
America. Meanwhile, at home, his music was still everywhere: on
cassettes in cars, on cds and the internet. And when they could no
longer hear him on live radio singing the Rabbana prayer, Iranians
played his recordings of it defiantly from their windows.
His voice never lost that mystical lilt he had learned from his fa-
ther. His last public appearance was at the grave of Rumi in the
Turkish city of Konya. Its commercialism repelled him. How much
closer he was to the great poet when he sang of flying up to God, the
Beloved, like a bird; or like the dust beneath the people’s feet. 7Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Iran’s favourite singer, died on
October 8th, aged 80The bird of freedom
Obituary Mohammad Reza Shajarian