Iranian Piano
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Iranian Piano (Persian Piano or Persian tuned piano) is the techniques in tuning, playing and composing for piano, developed by Iranian musicians throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The first Piano arrived to Iran in 1805, in a cargo of gifts, which also included portraits, furniture and clocks, sent to the Persian Shah, Fath Ali Shah Qajar by Napoleon Bonaparte. It didn't receive attention as a proper instrument by the Iranian musicians at that time, was treated as a decorative object and forgotten where it was placed at the corner of a hall in Golestan palace. In 1866 for the first time a French company started selling pianos in Tehran, and this gradually increased the popularity of the instrument among Iranians. At that time one of the courtiers asked the renowned musician, Sarvar-ol-Molk, to go to his house and examine his newly purchased Piano. Sarvar-ol-Molk, who was a master Santoor player, found out that piano is similar to Santoor and works with the same logic. He then tuned the instrument based on the quadritone system of Dastgahs so that Persian songs could be played on it. Thrilled by Savar-ol-Molk's discovery, princess Esmat-od-Dowleh decided to learn the instrument as well. As it was inappropriate for an aristocratic women to be directly taught music by a man, she sent her black bondwoman to learn it from him, and each session bondwoman transferred to her what she had learned that day. The second person to learn the instrument was prince Azod-od-Dowleh, the son of the deceased king Fat'h Ali Shah, who was then 47. Towards the end of the nineteenth century an Iranian form of playing the Piano was formed. In this style left hand mainly played the octaves, bases or simply doubles the voice of the right hand. It also found its own innovative types of tunes, namely Rast-Kook and Chap-kook, which made the instrument compatible with the traditional scales.
Alfred Jean Baptiste Lemaire (1842-1907), then the Director of Music in the Persian army, was the first to compose Persian music for piano based on the classical European rules. He primarily drew upon the Iranian form of playing the Piano, but, with incorporating classical composing methods of harmonisation and variation, broke free from it at the same time. Such integration sounded uncanny and unauthentic to the Iranian musician and in their works they had tried to stay away of that. Lemaire's book, titled Avaz et Tasnif Persans, covered four of Dastgahs published in Paris and was enthusiastically received in Europe.
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