The death of virtuoso Mohammad Reza Lotfi marks the end of an era.
Shajarian and Lotfi, Shiraz Art Festival, 1976 |
by
The
recent death of Iranian master musician Mohammad Reza Lotfi (1947-2014)
on May 2 at the age of 68 marks a crucial turning point in the history
of classical Persian music and its spectacular rise and fall as a
performing public art.
Lotfi
was a Tar and Setar virtuoso who had collaborated with prominent
Iranian vocalists Mohammad Reza Shajarian, Shahram Nazeri, and others
and along with a handful of other master musicians of his generation had
transformed Persian music from its slumbering, sedate and secluded
courtly and mystical milieu into a massive scale public and vastly
popular art form. It is impossible to imagine the social history of Iran
of the last half a century and through the thick and thin of a
cataclysmic revolution and a bloody war without thinking of the
definitive presence of classical Persian music as reconceived by Lotfi's
generation of master musicians.
Mohammad
Reza Lotfi was part of a generation of classical musicians who
exponentially expanded the public sphere upon which Persian classical
music found and performed itself. This proud possession of a rich and
diversified culture entered the public sphere in earnest in the course
of the Constitutional revolution of 1906-1911, and with the
establishment of Tehran Radio in 1940s and subsequently Iranian National
television in 1960s and the Shiraz Art Festival in the 1970s reached
its spectacular zenith.
Today
lovers of Persian music remember the young Lotfi and Shajarian and
their fellow musician Naser Farhangfar's confident and ambitious visages
from their legendary performance
of the tasking Rast Panjgah scale in Shiraz Art Festival in 1975. From
that iconic moment at the mausoleum of Hafez in Shiraz Persian classical
music began a long and loving rendezvous with contemporary Iranian
social history.
Persian music into public limelight
Lotfi
and his fellow masters Parviz Meshkatian (1955-2009) and Hossein
Alizadeh (born 1951) were chiefly responsible for pulling classical
Persian music out of its secluded and mysterious hideouts into public
limelight. Under their innovative and daring musicianship, vocalists
Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Shahram Nazeri dominated the scene of
classical Persian music like the Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo
of Iran. They were all the troubadours mapping and measuring the
emerging topography of Iranian cultural history.
It
was during the Iranian revolution of 1977-1979 that through the
instrumental role of musicians like Mohammad Reza Lotfi and his ensemble
classical music joined the revolutionary cause. During the stormy days
of the Iranian revolution of 1977-1979, Lotfi took the classical Persian
music directly into the heartbeat of the cataclysmic event and his by
now legendary "Shabnavard" became a hallmark of the revolution.
Lotfi
was also there during the Iran-Iraq war when his collaboration with
another towering vocalist, the young Shahram Nazeri, produced a musical
jeremiad for those bloody eight years of wasted lives. From the Shiraz
Art Festival of the 1970s through the Iranian revolution at the end of
the same decade and culminating in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s
classical Persian music was narrowly interwoven into an ever-expansive
public domain.
At
the same time, Lotfi and his fellow musicians were responsible for
turning the capabilities of Persian classical music to the iconoclastic
poetry of Nima Yushij (1895-1960) - an exceptionally difficult task.
Nima had pulled classical Persian poetry through a radical revolution in
its received prosody. Persian music had gone through no such formal
revolution. Politically progressive, socially conscious, and
artistically gifted musicians like Lotfi were eager and rising to meet
the challenge.
When in 1990 the leading Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou (1925-2000) severely ridiculed and categorically dismissed Persian classical music, Lotfi defended it and the debate actually brought the classical music into the main domain of public debate.
Lotfi
left Iran in 1986 and spent almost two decades of his life in the US.
He returned to Iran in 2006 but his return eventually dwindled into
irrelevance. Iran had drastically changed during these two decades and
Lotfi's public disapproval of his former colleague Shajarian (who was
now vastly popular across a wide spectrum of Iranians in and out of
their country) did not help his popularity.
Lotfi's musicianship
Meanwhile
his own cohorts, such as the other master musician Parviz Meshkatian,
openly expressed their disappointment of Lotfi's musicianship. Such
musicians as Alizadeh, Meshkatian, and Shajarian grew in their
popularity, while Lotfi never regained the magic of his earlier presence
after his return.
The disintegration of this generation of classical musicians was coterminous with a decidedly hostile environment the ruling regime had created for Iranian musicians. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei, is known for being critical of joyous and playful music from his juridical perspective, now made into the inhibitive mandates trying to legislate a rich and effervescent musical tradition.
The disintegration of this generation of classical musicians was coterminous with a decidedly hostile environment the ruling regime had created for Iranian musicians. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khamenei, is known for being critical of joyous and playful music from his juridical perspective, now made into the inhibitive mandates trying to legislate a rich and effervescent musical tradition.
Under
these circumstances many musicians left Iran and quite a number of them
ended up in Los Angeles catering to the whims of an expat community
increasingly indulgent in its nostalgias for a homeland that was no
more. Many serious musicians stayed in Iran, endured the calamities of
the censorial policies and performed in what ever capacity they could.
They would occasionally come out of Iran and perform with relative
freedom for the enthused expat gatherings.
Iranians
continue to love their musicians and keep the fluttering flame of a
magnificent aspect of their cultural heritage alive. But the death of
Lotfi marks the end of a palpable, effervescent and engaged musical
interlude when master musicians and an admiring public shared
unforgettable memories of their homeland in tumult. That esprit de corps
is no more. Inside Iran, the tightly controlled public sphere does not
allow for that spirit to return (or even for female vocalists to sing
freely) except under its own supervision and for its own propaganda
purposes.
Outside
Iran, Persian music is staged either as an ornamental museum piece for
the Oriental fantasies of foreigners and their "ethnomusicologists" or
else for the expat nostalgia of bygone years.
The
younger generation is drawn to the subversive pleasures of a new
generation of musicians like Mohsen Namjoo and Shahin Najafi. Banned
inside their own homeland, unconditionally loved or severely criticised
by their detractors, these younger musicians mark a vastly different era
when the simulacrum of the public sphere in the virtual space offers a
mere simulation of the real forces of history.
Via
Related Link: Mohammad Reza Lotfi
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