Iranian Classical Music

The Discourses and Practice of Creativity

Laudan Nooshin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351926232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Questions of creativity, and particularly the processes which underlie creative performance or 'improvisation', form some of the central areas of interest in current musicology. Yet the predominant discourses on which musicological thought in this area are based have rarely been challenged. In this book Laudan Nooshin interrogates musicological discourses of creativity from the perspective of critical theory and postcolonial studies, examining their ideological underpinnings, the relationships of alterity which they sustain, and the profound implications for our understanding of creative processes in music. The repertoire which forms the book's main focus is Iranian classical music, a tradition in which the performer plays a central creative role. Addressing a number of issues regarding the nature of musical creativity, the author explores both the discourses through which ideas about creativity are constructed, exchanged and negotiated within this tradition, and the practice by which new music comes into being. For the latter she compares a number of performances by musicians playing a range of instruments and spanning a period of more than 30 years, focusing on one particular section of repertoire, dastg?h Seg?h, and providing transcriptions of the performances as the basis for analytical exploration of the music's underlying compositional principles. This book is about understanding musical creativity as a meaningful social practice. It is the first to examine the ways in which ideas about tradition, authenticity, innovation and modernity in Iranian classical music form part of a wider social discourse on creativity, and in particular how they inform debates regarding national and cultural identity.

PART I
Musicological Narratives of Creativity

Chapter 1
Approaching the Study of Musical Creativity: Musicologies, Discourses and Others

In the Beginning: Creativity and Its Myths

In the darkness, something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing … it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it … Polly was finding the song more and more interesting because she thought she was beginning to see the connection between the music and the things that were happening. When a line of dark firs sprang up on a ridge about a hundred yards away she felt that they were connected with a series of deep, prolonged notes which the Lion had sung a second before. And when he burst into a rapid series of lighter notes she was not surprised to see primroses suddenly appearing in every direction. Thus, with an unspeakable thrill, she felt quite certain that all the things were coming (as she said) ‘out of the Lion’s head’. (C.S. Lewis 1989 [1955]:93, 99)

… the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress. (Lévi-Strauss 1969:18)

The passage describing the creation of the land of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia draws its symbolic power from a deep-rooted seam of signification in which music and creation are intimately bound together. Here, the song of Aslan the Lion serves as the prime agent of creation and Lewis traces a direct correlation between the song and the forms created through it. The extent to which the creative power of music serves as a rich source of mythic narrative is evidenced by the many creation stories which invoke music in some way. Claude Lévi-Strauss, that great scholar of myth, noted ‘the great number of myths that bear on musical creativity and [by] the veneration accorded to compositions and composers in many societies’ (in Blum 2001:186, who cites several examples of such myths).¹

The creative process is perhaps one of the most enduring mysteries of humankind. On the one hand, it has been argued that it is the ability to create that distinguishes us from other living beings, the essence of what it means to be human. On the other, as indicated by Lévi-Strauss, creativity has across various times and places been regarded as a symbol, and often a preserve, of the divine. In the highly influential book The Courage to Create, psychologist Rollo May suggests that the creative impulse can be understood as an aspiration to the condition of divinity and a challenge to mortality:

Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We have, strangely enough, a word for death. We know that each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we must also rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle – out of this rebellion the creative act is born. (1975:27)

Of all the arenas of human creativity, perhaps none has been more shrouded in mythology than music, which with its intangible and invisible presence has proved ‘the supreme mystery of the science of man’. From the Ancient Greek muses to the nineteenth-century divinely inspired genius, the ineffable connection between music and the other-worldly is found everywhere. In part, this has rendered taboo attempts at explanation, as though delving too deeply may destroy music’s essence. No doubt the absence of physical materiality has contributed to this, and more generally to the attribution of supernatural and magical powers to music. To quote again from Lewis, when the Lion’s adversary, the Witch, hears the song, she ‘felt that this whole world was filled with a Magic different from hers and stronger’ (1989:95).²

From a scholarly perspective, the mythical and often sacred qualities associated with creativity have long deflected attention away from questions such as how one defines creativity (or creativities?), whether the concept has universal significance, who is permitted to create, whether creativity is valued, and so on, as well as obscuring the relations of power inscribed in the creative process. General literature on the subject has tended to reflect a philosophical rift: between the idea of creativity as a mark of (divine) genius possessed by a few; and creativity as inherent to the human condition. Such positions reflect deep-rooted cultural paradigms which have also pervaded ethno/musicological discourse, as will be discussed. Following earlier advances in psychology and understanding of human cognitive processes, the 1950s and ’60s was a watershed period in scholarly attention to creativity.³ Whilst a detailed consideration of writings on the broad topic of creativity, including debates around definition, lies outside the scope of this book, the significance of this early work was two-fold: first, it began the process of demystifying what had long been regarded as sacrosanct; and, as a result, scholars began to question certain long-held assumptions and to situate creativity within the realms of the social and the everyday. A useful summary of the early literature is provided by Abt and Rosner (1970) who consider creativity in a range of scientific and artistic fields and draw interesting conclusions regarding similarities between creative processes in quite different arenas. With increased interest and research across a range of disciplines, many began to challenge the idea of creativity as the preserve of the few. Particularly influential was the theory of generative linguistics, first proposed by Noam Chomsky in Syntactic Structures in 1957, and which argued that the ability to use spoken language depends on a highly developed creative faculty.⁴ Following on by just a few years, one of the most comprehensive general publications on creativity, The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler (1964), similarly argued that creativity is innate to all humans. Also significant was a later publication by Robert Weisberg, Creativity and Other Myths (1986), who suggested that the cognitive processes involved in producing works of artistic and scientific ‘genius’ are not fundamentally different from those of ‘every-day’ activities such as problem-solving and speech. I will return to some of these ideas in due course.

This study seeks to explore creative processes in one particular musical tradition – focusing on musicians’ cognition, their verbal discourses, and their musical practice. It is both about understanding the creative process, and how the creative process is itself understood. However, this book is not just a study of Iranian classical music, but also a reflective critique of the conceptual and discursive frameworks which underpin ethno/musicological approaches to and understandings of creativity, and which operate dialectically in relation to lay concepts and discourses. As Cook observes, ‘both music and musicology are ways of creating meaning rather than just of representing it’ (1998:125–6) and Clayton goes further, ‘musicological discourse does not only comment on practice and experience … It also influences that very practice and experience … the work of musicology is not to describe musical facts but to be implicated in a wider discursive field’ (2003:59). The aim of this opening chapter is to explore the ways in which musical creativity has been historically approached and discussed within different areas of music study. Whilst it may seem curious to begin a book on Iranian classical music with a chapter focused primarily on ‘Western’ discourses, from the earliest period of my research I was aware of the significant impact of such discourses, both academic and lay, on creative practice in Iran, and particularly the role of binary thinking in relation to ideas about musical difference.⁵ Moreover, I am very mindful of the ways in which my own work has been shaped by such ideas, ideas which have remained largely unassailed through one of the most turbulent and self-questioning periods in the history of musicology. Thus, the specific discussion of Iranian classical music and local concepts of creativity is deferred until Chapter 2, and the reader is instead invited to consider how creative processes might be better understood by first interrogating our own terminologies and ideologies. I begin with the concepts and discourses of creativity within ‘mainstream’⁶ musicology and folk music studies, both of which impacted significantly on ethnomusicology in its formative years, before proceeding to examine how ethnomusicologists have approached questions of creativity. I then consider how these issues have shaped my own work, specifically the ways in which difference is imagined in relation to creative process in the Iranian tradition. Whilst the various approaches to creativity described briefly above differed in significant ways, they shared a relative inattention to questions of ideology and power, in which respect they were very much of their time. As I hope to show, such questions are fundamental to an understanding of musical creativity as social practice; indeed, the theme of power will continue in the chapters that follow as I examine relations of authority and alterity. Given the thrust of the discussion which follows, it seems pertinent to start with issues of power.

Difference, Alterity and Power: Ethno/musicology Meets Postcolonialism

And now we are at the heart of the great quarrel that, more than anything else, divides the folklorists and will continue to divide them for a good while to come: the problem of creation remains the theme of their liveliest, and sometimes most confused, argument … whatever the manner in which they express themselves, do the folk possess creative gifts, yes or no? (Brăiloiu 1984 [1949]:5–6)

Among the many insights that studying the musics of the world has offered ethnomusicologists and others working in cognate areas such as folklore studies, one of the most exciting has been a recognition of the creative nature of all music-making. And yet, as the above quotation from Romanian musicologist Constantin Brăiloiu testifies, it took some time for this recognition to emerge. Writing in the late 1940s on the eve of ethnomusicology’s birth, Brăiloiu sums up a debate which had exercised the minds and pens of folklorists for decades. For many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American folksong collectors, what most distinguished ‘art’ from ‘folk’ music was in the creative process. Brăiloiu ends his polemic with a question addressed to folklorists, but which could as easily have been directed to scholars of ‘non-Western’ music. And therein lies one of the central themes of this chapter: the extent to which musical creativity has been historically mobilized as a marker of difference. I will return to Brăiloiu and the folklorists below.

This chapter examines the ways in which ethnomusicologists and others have approached questions of musical creativity, focusing on the underlying narratives which have shaped discourses in this area. I use the term ‘discourse’ in its Foucauldian sense to indicate the ways in which language produces a particular kind of knowledge, a knowledge which represents and constitutes its subjects in specific ways. The idea that discourse and knowledge are deeply implicated in the exercise of power is one of the most enduring legacies of post-structuralist theorists such as Foucault and Derrida, and the convergence of these ideas in the writings of Edward Said arguably one of the most influential scholarly watersheds of the late twentieth century. Few academic publications can have had so profound an impact in such a range of disciplinary areas in the arts, humanities and social sciences as Orientalism did when it was published in 1978. Of course, Said was not the first to present a critique of Orientalist scholarship (see Halliday 1993:148), but his incisive commentary on its ideological implications proved both timely and explosive. Above all:

Orientalism exposed the intellectual and interpretive certainties of an earlier age for what they were: not the disinterested objective studies that scholars supposed, but a kind of political discourse that both grew out of and helped to constitute global relations of power. As a result, we are all conscious now that the pursuit of knowledge has political implications, as a form of domination, control and even subjugation. Knowledge and power are inextricably linked. (Donnan and Stokes 2002:6)

In the case of mainstream musicology, it was almost a decade before the radical changes of the mid-to-late 1980s created an environment in which scholars could respond to the challenge of Orientalism and the broad area of what became known as postcolonial studies. From the early 1990s, a number of musicologists began to explore both the Orientalist implications of their subject of study and of the discipline itself, as well as offering fresh critiques of Said’s work from a musicological perspective.⁷ In contrast, few ethnomusicologists at this time paid much attention to Said or indeed to issues of ideology and power generally, focusing instead on the task of ethnography.⁸ There were exceptions, of course, but in general ethnomusicologists in the 1980s and early ’90s were largely unreceptive to ideas emerging from the broad area of postcolonial studies, cultural studies and critical theory, and even from anthropological critiques of structuralism.⁹

There is an extensive literature on the work of Said and it is not my intention to revisit the arguments here.¹⁰ However, certain strands of the debate are pertinent to the current discussion, for example the charge that Said allows little space for agency on the part of ‘Others’ represented by European writers, and that he fails to examine the often implicated role of those represented. In general, many have called for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between ‘representer’ and ‘represented’ and a move away from the very essentializing discourses which Said himself criticized, by acknowledging different kinds of Orientalism (Stokes 2000:214) and even the possibility of a ‘benign Orientalism’ (Stokes 2002:168).¹¹ Notwithstanding such critiques (and Said’s later refinements), the significance of the central ideas remain. Above all, Orientalism was a wake-up call to the inescapably ideological nature of scholarly processes. The ideas explored in this bo...