The Nation’s Music: Discovering and Recovering the Dastgah

Chapter 7 (parallel to chapter 3 in part 1) examines technical writings about the radif-dastgah tradition. These writings tie the emergence of this system to new concepts of Iranian identity and Iranian national history. It examines writings of the three earliest people to describe the system and how they cast it as an Iranian music with a structure unique to Iranian culture. These writings show the role of national identity in creating the new need for a unique music system for the Iranian people rather than a universal music system, as the twelve-maqam system had been. It further demonstrates the logic of altering the original version of the system in order to make it seem as if it evolved out of the twelve-maqam system, as part of a rewriting of history to fit with nationalist narratives of Iran’s great history.