Persian classical music is organized around the radif — a vast repertoire of short melodic pieces that constitute a complete modal and melodic education. Turkish Ottoman music carries one of the world's most complex theoretical systems into living performance.
THE PERSIAN RADIF
Persian classical music (musiqi-ye assil, "original music") is organized around the concept of the radif (literally "row" or "order") — a canonized collection of several hundred short pieces (gusheh-ha, singular: gusheh) organized into seven dastgah (modal systems) and five secondary modes (avaz). The radif is not a repertoire of complete compositions but a vocabulary of melodic motifs, gestures, cadence patterns, and characteristic movements associated with each dastgah.
A musician who has learned the radif has internalized the entire tonal language of Persian classical music. Improvisation in the classical tradition (avaz) consists not of spontaneous invention but of fluent navigation through the gusheh-ha — selecting, combining, and extending the established motifs in response to the mood of the performance and the responsiveness of the audience.
The dastgah system uses its own system of interval organization, related to but distinct from both Arab maqam and Western scales. The dastgah Shur, for example, uses neutral (three-quarter-tone) seconds that are not found in Western equal temperament. The dastgah Chahargah uses a scale with augmented seconds in two places simultaneously.
Jean During, at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in France, has produced the most thorough acoustical and theoretical analyses of the Persian dastgah system available in Western scholarship.
THE INSTRUMENTS OF PERSIAN CLASSICAL MUSIC
The santur (hammered dulcimer), tar (long-necked lute), setar (smaller long-necked lute), ney (end-blown flute), kamancheh (spike fiddle), and tombak (goblet drum) constitute the core ensemble of Persian classical music. The ney in particular is an instrument of enormous symbolic weight in Persian poetry: Rumi's Masnavi opens with the ney as a metaphor for the soul separated from its divine origin, crying out in longing. The cultural and philosophical resonance of an instrument is inseparable from its musical function.
The late Shajarian — Mohammad Reza Shajarian — is considered the greatest Persian classical vocalist of the twentieth century. His recordings of the radif, with commentary, are used in Iranian conservatory training.
OTTOMAN CLASSICAL MUSIC
Ottoman classical music, developed at the Ottoman imperial court from the fifteenth century onward, represents one of the most sophisticated theoretical and compositional traditions in the world. The Ottoman system of makam (distinct in some details from the Arab system) was documented in theoretical treatises by Abdülbaki Nasır Dede, Rauf Yekta Bey, and in the twentieth century by Hüseyin Sadettin Arel, whose systematization became the basis of Turkish State Conservatory training.
The forms of Ottoman classical music — the peşrev (instrumental prelude), saz semaisi (instrumental piece), şarkı (song), and the large-scale vocal-instrumental suite called the fasıl — were codified over several centuries. The fasıl follows a fixed ordering of makam-related pieces: a taksim (improvisation) establishes the makam; a peşrev opens the suite; vocal and instrumental pieces follow in prescribed rhythmic modes (usul); a closing saz semaisi ends the formal sequence.
The Mevlevi sema ceremony — the whirling ritual of the Mevlevi order of Sufi dervishes — is inseparable from Ottoman classical music. The ayin (the complete musical program of the sema) is a large-scale composition for voices and instruments in a specific makam, lasting over an hour. Dede Efendi (1778–1846) is the supreme composer of the Ottoman classical tradition; his ayins and şarkılar are still performed in conservatory settings today.
TURKISH FOLK MUSIC AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO ART MUSIC
Turkey has two parallel musical traditions that have largely developed separately: the art music tradition described above, and a vast folk music tradition (halk müziği) documented systematically by Béla Bartók (who collected Turkish folk songs in 1936) and, from the late 1930s, by collecting trips of the Ankara State Conservatory and Ankara Radio, later continued by the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT, founded 1964). TRT's folk music archive is one of the largest collections of its kind in the world.
The most distinctive instrumental tradition within Turkish folk music is the bağlama (also called saz) — a long-necked lute played by aşık (troubadour) poets. The aşık tradition combines poetry, music, and improvisation in a form that has more in common with Persian classical poetry than with Western song forms. Great twentieth-century aşık figures such as Aşık Veysel represent a living oral tradition dating to at least the sixteenth century.
THE QANUN, OUD, AND TANBUR IN PRACTICE
The Ottoman tanbur — a long-necked lute with movable frets that can be repositioned for different makams — represents one of the most sophisticated instrument designs in world music. The frets can be adjusted, and master players fine-tune their placement to the intonation of the makam they play. The qanun (in Turkish: kanun) uses small metal levers (mandals) under each course of strings that raise the pitch by a configurable microtonal amount; a Turkish kanun has up to seven mandals per course, allowing the player to access dozens of microtonal pitches without retuning the strings themselves. This mechanical solution to the demands of microtonal performance is unique to the qanun and represents centuries of incremental refinement.
ARMENIAN AND AZERBAIJANI TRADITIONS
The Caucasus region — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia — sits at the geographic and musical intersection of Persian, Turkish, Russian, and Byzantine Christian musical worlds. Armenian sacred music (sharakan) maintains a chant tradition tracing back to the fifth century and the work of Mesrop Mashtots. Secular Armenian music centers on the duduk, a double-reed wind instrument with a distinctively melancholic timbre that has become internationally recognizable through film scores (Peter Gabriel's score for The Last Temptation of Christ, the work of Djivan Gasparyan). Azerbaijani mugham — the modal classical music of Azerbaijan — was inscribed by UNESCO on the Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Its modal system is closely related to the Persian dastgah and the Ottoman makam, but its formal organization and ornamental practices are distinctively Azerbaijani.
KURDISH AND ALEVI MUSICAL TRADITIONS
The Kurdish people, dispersed across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, maintain musical traditions that share elements with Persian, Arab, and Turkish music while retaining a distinctive Kurdish identity. The dengbêj tradition of Kurdish epic singing is one of the oldest oral poetic traditions in the Middle East; dengbêjs (sung-poets) carry historical and political narratives across generations in an unaccompanied vocal style of extraordinary expressive intensity. Alevi music — the music of the Alevi religious minority in Turkey — uses the saz (bağlama) as a sacred instrument; the deyiş repertoire of Alevi spiritual songs by poets such as Pir Sultan Abdal and Aşık Veysel is performed in cemevis (Alevi places of worship) and constitutes one of the most distinctive religious-musical traditions of Anatolia.
THE SUFI MUSICAL UNIVERSE
Sufism — the mystical dimension of Islam — has produced an extraordinarily rich musical tradition across the Islamic world, despite the suspicion with which orthodox jurists have sometimes regarded musical performance. The Mevlevi tradition of Anatolia, the Chishti tradition of South Asia (whose qawwali music is discussed in later lessons), and the Tijani and Qadiri traditions of West Africa all use music in their spiritual practices. Rumi's Mathnawi, the great thirteenth-century Persian-language Sufi poem, opens with the image of the ney crying out in longing for its origin — a foundational metaphor in which musical instrument, breath, soul, and divine connection are inseparable.
LISTENING PRACTICE: IMPROVISATION WITHIN STRUCTURE
The concept of improvisation within a modal system — whether Arab maqam, Persian dastgah, or Turkish makam — differs fundamentally from Western jazz improvisation over chord changes. In modal improvisation, the musician is not navigating a harmonic progression but exploring the melodic and expressive territory of a mode. Listen to a taksim (Turkish modal improvisation) and notice how the musician: establishes the tonic; explores the characteristic melodic gestures of the makam; moves through different registers; creates a sense of arrival without resolving to a chord.