KIRN AMرادیو ۶۷۰
درگذشت استاد محمدرضا شجریان را به تمام دوستداران ایشان تسلیت میگوید
An Iranian singer whose voice was regarded as one of his country’s national treasures — and who then ran afoul of the regime — has died. Mohammad Reza Shajarian, a master performer who was hailed as one of NPR’s 50 Great Voices of all time, was 80 years old. He earned the title of ostad — master — and was beloved for his commanding voice that could cry with haunting pain and soar with deep soul.
Shajarian’s son and protege, the singer and tonbak drum player Homayoun Shajarian, wrote on Twitter Thursday afternoon in Farsi: “The soil of the feet of the Iranian people flew to meet the beloved.” He also posted an empty black square on Instagram.
Shajarian was born in 1940 in the Iranian city of Mashhad, in the country’s northeastern province of Khorasan. Beginning at age five, he learned Qur’anic recitation from his father.
By age 12, he was learning the rigorously structured repertoire of Persian classical music and its ancient songs. His professional career began in 1959 at Radio Khorasan; he went on to sing for Iranian state radio and television, and to teach at Tehran University. His repertoire encompassed love songs and the mystical works of such great medieval Persian poets as Rumi and Hafez as well as overtly political songs and more contemporary lyricists.
The chaos of the Iranian Revolution transformed Shajarian’s path, as it did for so many others in his country. In September 1978, after the Shah declared martial law across Iran, governmental forces fired on a large protest in Tehran’s Jaleh Square; at least 100 people died.
In the aftermath of that day, which became known as Black Friday, a group of Iran’s leading classical musicians, including Shajarian, wrote a protest letter to the government, cutting their ties to state radio. As scholar Nahid Siamdoust writes in her 2017 book Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran, the letter was submitted in Shajarian’s handwriting. His willingness to address what he perceived as injustice, in the letter or — either openly or through carefully constructed allegories — in his songs, eventually dictated the course of his life.
In the same revolutionary period, Shajarian was one of the founding members of an influential group called the Chavosh Culture and Arts Society, a group of classical musicians who soon began writing revolutionary and protest songs; one that Shajarian became particularly associated with was called “Tofangam-ra bedeh“: “Give Me My Gun.”
Decades later, the singer told Siamdoust that he didn’t consider himself a political person, except “in defense of humane ideals and the homeland.” Even so, once Ayatollah Khomeini and his regime came into power, Shajarian’s songs were co-opted by the state media — and he chose to withdraw from the public eye for three years following the revolution.
In 1985, after Shajarian’s re-emergence, his album Bidaad caused a stir. In post-revolution Iran, even the title carried multiple layers of meaning. Bidaad is a melody within the core Persian classical repertoire; in Farsi, the Persian language, the word itself also means “injustice.” But the separate words bi and daad also mean “without voice.”
The song’s searching, melancholy lyrics were taken from the 14th-century poet and Sufi mystic Hafez, but also seemed to address the plights of Iranians in the new Islamic Republic. “This home was the land of companions and the kindhearted,” he sang. “When did kindness end? What happened to the land of companions?”
Shajarian’s subversive choices were subtle enough to pass through the hands of Iran’s cultural censors. Many of his other popular songs, like “Morgh-e Sahar” (“Bird of Dawn”), also bore veiled lyrics, but ones that his fans could easily understand.
One of his last Tiny Desk Concert