Avanegar: A History of Music Transcription in Iran. 2022. Produced, filmed, and edited by Behrouz Jamali, 60 minutes. DVD. Washington DC: Dimension Media.

Abstract

Avanegar is an educational film that outlines the history of musical transcription in Iran. The film begins in the thirteenth century and makes its way to the twentieth century outlining the important figures and documents regarding the transcription of music in Iran. In this regard, the title Avanegar is quite a fitting as it means “transcriber” in the Persian language. Mohsen Mohammadi, scholar of Iranian music, both compiled the research for the film and narrated this history on camera.1 While the film is narrated in Persian, English subtitles and the depiction of rare historical documents makes the film both accessible and informative to a wide audience. Staff notation today is an inseparable part of music in Iran. Today, within the local classical tradition staff notation plays a seminal role both in pedagogy and creative practice alongside the traditional oral methods. Avanegar tells both the story of the earliest encounters of Iranian music with notation methods, as well as the subsequent adoption of them by various musicians. The films’ narrative of musical transcription in Iran is broken up into four broad parts that provide overviews on: (1) medieval musical transcriptions in the Islamic World from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century; (2) European travelogues and songbooks collections on Persian music from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century; (3) the adoption ofWestern notation by Iranian musicians in the first half of the twentieth century; and (4) the musicological transcriptions by Iranian musicologists in the post-WWII period. The opening section features the thirteenth century transcription methods of Safi al-Din al-Urmawi. While not examples of staff notation, Mohammadi explains how these early transcriptions mark the earliest attempts in the Islamic world to document melodies on paper, using letters to represent pitch and numerical values to designate duration. A transcription from Safi al-Din’s original manuscript is displayed for audiences unfamiliar with these documents. Subsequently, medieval Islamic scholars Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (the thirteenth century) and Abd al-Qader Maraqi (the fifteenth century) are introduced through their works that used this method. The continuation of this method is traced to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Ottoman courts to the figure of Demetrius Cantemir (d.1723). A strength of this section is its discussion of the