Nur-Ali Borumand

Nur-Ali Borumand , also Nour Ali Boroumand , ( Persian نورعلی برومند Nūr-ʿAlī Borūmand * 1905 in Tehran , Iran ; † January 20, 1977 in Tehran), was an Iranian musician and music theorist who played tār , setār and santūr . He is considered one of the most important mediators and preservers of Iranian classical music in the 20th century.

Life

Borumand was born into a wealthy Tehran family who originally came from Isfahan . His father was a jeweler and music lover who, however, did not make music himself, but regularly invited musicians to perform in the family home. Except for two uncles on his mother's side who appeared as amateur musicians, none of his relatives made music. Music, like painting, was one of the things that were constantly present in a cultivated household. The boy met many of the most famous musicians of his time during the performances, including the composer and long-necked lute player tār Darvīš Khan (1872–1926), the santur player Soma Huzur and Hossein Khan, who played the spiked fiddle .

Borumand's teacher Darvīš Khan, actually Ǧolām Ḥosayn Darvīš

ʿAlī-Naqī Wazīrī with the sound tār

With seven years Borumand, started the goblet drum zarb to beat. It was obviously a common practice that young musicians were allowed to provide rhythmic accompaniment to the melodic compositions ( radīf , plural radīf-hā ) on the zarb . As Borumand said, when he was 13, his father gave him the choice of studying calligraphy or music. Borumand chose music lessons from Darvīš Khan and over the next three years learned his compositions and playing styles. Each master ( ustād ) has his own style in which he develops the wealth of forms of the radīfs . The student adopts this style strictly at first and later develops his own improvisation techniques, which move within the set framework of the radīfs and the modal structures ( dastgāh ) on which they are based. The private lessons with Darvīš Khan took place twice a week and lasted half an hour. Darvīš Khan used a teaching method that was unusual at the time and only later became popular. Those students with roughly the same level of training sat together in a lounge, where they could hear how each of them received his instruction from the master on a certain melody sequence ( guscheh ) one after the other in the adjoining music room . Gusheh is a titled component of a dastgāh , which is perceived as a real melodic motif rather than a simple modal structure. Later, each student should teach the others the guscheh they had just learned . The lessons were aimed more at imparting the musical basics and not so much at the playing techniques of an instrument. Darvīš Khan taught the lute tār, which he considered to be the real national instrument of Iranian music.

At the age of 16 Borumand was sent to Berlin for further education, where he lived with a family of doctors and graduated from high school at the age of 22. During his stay in Germany he did not care about Iranian music, which seemed to him incompatible with the European way of life. Instead, he took piano lessons for two years and began to take an interest in Western classical music, especially Mozart . After returning to Tehran for a year in 1928, he turned completely back to Iranian music. One of his teachers was called Mūsā Maʿrūfī, a traditionalist and student of the late Darvīš Khan. There was also ʿAlī-Naqī Wazīrī (Ali Naqi Vaziri, 1887–1979), who had returned to Iran in 1923 after spending five years in Berlin and Paris. Wazīrī was a tar player, music theorist and appeared as a innovator of Iranian music, which he sought to combine with European music. Borumand took Tar and Setar lessons for a year from Musā Maʿrufi, a teacher in the vicinity of Wazīrī, but asked him to only teach him the older, traditional compositions and to dispense with their notation based on the Western model.

Following his father's wish to learn a somewhat “more practical profession”, Borumand returned to Berlin in 1929 to study medicine. After six semesters, when he had just finished his physics course , a misfortune happened that forced him to drop out of his studies immediately. In both eyes came off the retina , whereupon he went blind permanently. In 1935 he went back to Iran and settled in southern Tehran. While he last dealt with Western classical music while studying in Germany, he now concentrated entirely on the Iranian musical tradition. At the same time he taught the German language at some schools and universities, which he spoke very well.

Instead of the tār , he now mainly played the somewhat more delicate long-necked lute setār and the trapezoidal dulcimer santūr . His Santoor teacher was Habib Somāʾ (1901-1946), son of Soma Huzur, who had performed in his parents' house. Somāʾ has been teaching since 1938. He is considered to be the last great santur virtuoso in the playing tradition that was maintained during the Qajar era . For the next twelve years Borumand occupied himself with Somāʾs compositions and those of other musicians, including until 1958 with the singing style of Seyyed Hossein Taherzadeh, although Borumand did not sing himself. From all this, Borumand developed his own style of music-making, which, according to him, was essentially based on his old teacher Darvīš Khan and his student Mūsā Maʿrūfī.

Until 1965 Borumand lived largely withdrawn except for the lessons he received and gave. He did not give any public concerts. The turning point came at a time when there was a return to the Persian tradition among cultural workers and a decision was made at the University of Tehran to establish a course in Iranian classical music. The head of the music department at the time, Mahdī Barkešlī, invited Borumand to teach radīf as the leading teacher . Borumand began to teach a class twice a week in the traditional teacher-student relationship method he himself had been trained to use. In 1967 he taught for a few weeks as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois . From 1970 until his retirement in 1974 he held a full professorship in Tehran. It was not until 1975 that he gave up his previous position against recordings of his concerts and allowed the Ministry of Art and Culture to record radīfs performed by him on the tār . This first quasi “official” sound documentation contains, among other things, 15 guschehs from the dastgāh shur , which Borumand had recited in the same order in 1968 - recorded by his student Bruno Nettl during a teaching unit.

effect

By the late 19th century, Iranian classical music was on a slow retreat associated with a general decline in national cultural tradition and increasing westernization. Music has been religious since the Middle Ages and singing dominated in the poetic form of the Ghazel . In the radīf, the instrumentalist repeated the units initially sung in a separate section. The radīf was not written down, but passed on orally from the teacher to the student by the teacher singing or playing a phrase and the student faithfully repeating it. Borumand's first teacher Darvīš Khan divided his students into three grades. Over a total of about ten years, he imparted a more comprehensive understanding of a radīf at each stage .

According to Borumand, the musical repertoire was largely fixed in the 19th century and hardly allowed personal freedom. Under Darvīš Khan and his contemporaries at the beginning of the 20th century, the formal framework began to loosen up. Darvīš Khan had studied with the French A. Lemaire, who came to Tehran in 1868 as a teacher of European military music. An influential advocate for a connection between Iranian and European music was ʿAlī-Naqī Wazīrī, who introduced new forms of melody based on the old scales ( dastgāh ). Borumand rejected such a mixture out of theoretical considerations, nor could he come to terms with the writing of Persian music in Western notation, which was practiced by some musicians from the 1920s / 1930s. Borumand did not want to separate the music from its cultural environment, which is why he had dealt exclusively with western classical music in Germany and only with his own musical tradition in Iran.

Borumand's decision to study medicine was not only due to his father's wishes. In the 19th century, professional musicians were usually employed by one of the royal houses. There they performed in small ensembles at events to entertain their patrons and traveled across the country with his company. They had little personal freedom and had to ask permission if they wanted to perform in front of other audiences. Professional musicians had a low social reputation, they were considered unreliable and always in debt. Borumand, on the other hand, preferred, as an amateur who lived on his fortune, to have the freedom of choice when and for whom he wanted to make music. For him, the ability to improvise music could only go hand in hand with personal freedom. In this respect, he embodied the Iranian ideal of an independent musical personality.

When he was appointed lecturer at Tehran University in 1965, he did so at a time when interest in Iranian classical music was growing again and only a few of the masters of the traditional style from the early 20th century were still alive. Borumand saw himself as the keeper of tradition throughout his life. Just as he had accepted the innovations of Darvīš Khan in his youth, he later insisted on maintaining traditional teaching methods and playing styles, which included precise memorization, and judged musicians who played sheet music that this gave them inner access to Music is missing.

Borumand did not like performing in front of more than a handful of listeners and was cautious about the public notoriety he had gained in his final years. At the same time he felt it was his duty to teach in order to preserve the music and pass it on to posterity. Ustād Borumand, who was called Nour-Ali Khan by his friends, was considered a great music theorist and the most important guardian of the radīf of traditional Iranian music of his time . He saw himself as the only link to the masters of the 19th century. Many well-known musicians who have been tutored by him approve of this role to this day. There were other musicians who were more critical of his conservative attitude. Since Borumand hardly allowed sound recordings of his performances, he can only be heard on a single record release in which he accompanies a singer on the tār . His Iranian students included the singer Mohammad-Resa Shajarian (* 1940), the Tar and Setar players Mohammad Reza Lotfi (* 1947), Hossein Alizadeh (* 1951) and Dariusch Talai (* 1953), as well as the Santur player Madjid Kiani (* 1941). The ethnomusicologists Jean During (* 1947), Bruno Nettl (* 1930), Gen'ichi Tsuge (* 1937) and Margaret L. Caton received lessons from him.

literature

• Bruno Nettl: Nour-Ali Boroumand, a twentieth-century master of Persian music. In: Gustaf Hilleström (Ed.): Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis III ( Musikhistoriska museets skrifter 5. Festschrift for Ernst Emsheimer ). Musikhistoriska museet, Stockholm 1974, pp. 167–171
• Bruno Nettl: Borūmand, Nūr-ʿAlī. In: Encyclopædia Iranica .
• Bruno Nettl: On Nour-Ali Khan. In: Ders .: The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts . University of Illinois Press, Champaign 2003, pp. 179-181
• Jean During: The Radif of Mirzâ Abdollâh. A Canonic Repertoire of Persian Music . Mahoor Institute of Culture and Art, Tehran 2006, in particular pp. 5, 292 f. and 309

Web links

• Bruno Nettl: Learning from the Ostad. persiansantoor.com
• Dr. Nour Ali Boroumand . tebyan.net (photo)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Darvish Khan. radiodarvish.com
2. ^ Ella Zonis: Classical Iranian Music . In: Elizabeth May (Ed.): Musics of Many Cultures: An Introduction . University of California Press, Berkeley 1983, p. 274
3. ↑ Vaziri, ʿAlī-Naqi . In: Encyclopædia Iranica.
4. ↑ Carol M. Babiracki, Bruno Nettl: Internal Inter Relationships in Persian Classical Music: The Dastgah of Shur in Eighteen Radifs. In: Asian Music, Vol. 19, No. 1, autumn - winter 1987, pp. 46-98, here pp. 47, 53
5. ↑ Margaret Caton: Performance Practice in Iran: Radīf and Improvisation . In: Virginia Danielson, Scott Marius, Dwight Reynolds (Eds.): The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Volume 6: The Middle East . Routledge, New York / London 2002, pp. 135, 138
6. ^ Margaret Caton, in: Garland. P. 139.
7. ↑ Bruno Nettl, 2003, p. 180.
8. ↑ Bruno Nettl, 2003, p. 179.
9. ↑ Iran I. Edited by Alain Daniélou . (Series: A Musical Anthology of the Orient ) Bärenreiter Musicaphon BM 30 L 2004, Unesco Collection. Published around 1962; Bruno Nettl, 1974, p. 171, footnote 7
10. ↑ Bruno Nettl, 1974, pp. 167-171