Study of Tahrir Patterns in Radif of Iranian Classical Music – According to Mohammadreza Shajarian Performance

Tahrir is an important aspect of Avaaz, in the Iranian, Arabic, and Turkish music area. Mohammad Reza Shajarian is a famous Iranian Avaaz singer. In recent years Mohammad Reza Shajarian in addition to teaching many students directly at his master classes has some strong indirect impact on many other Avaaz learners who are at their beginning or even middle pass of becoming a skillful Avaaz performer. His spectacular and famous style of performing Avaaz has inspired many students who try to imitate his style by listening to his recorded and published tracks. Subject to the great influences of Mohammad Reza Shajarian on Iranian contemporary performance of Avaaz, investigating both qualitatively and quantitatively his style could help us better understand and analyze of Radif and provide a basis for performing Avaaz. According to a lack of written and published references in the Middle East musical archives, the author at the first step, selects some of the sections based on his vocal analysis of them. In the second step, providing documents based on selected sections and by using statistical methods, research for testing the claimed hypothesis is conducted. In this article based on provided transliteration samples, a correct classification of different categories of Tahrir’s and their patterns is presented. The most important parameter for this classification is melodic shapes in Iranian Tahrir. Moreover, techniques for Tahir also influenced the classifying process. Indeed different genres of Tahir results in different classes. Tahrir’s are classified in 7 different types: 1- dual combination 2- emphasize – slow down 3-Quadro Tahrir's 4- of five Tahrir's 5-triplet Tahrir's 6- dual with pedal 7- melismatic strong emphasis. Then the hypothesis of “The less the types of Tahrir, the high the patterns” is evaluated and confirmed. Based on the mentioned classification, quantitative research is conducted through which, and by using descriptive statistics, different types of Avaaz are analyzed. This hypothesis could be considered as one of the main basis for distinguishing different styles of performing Avaaz. According to the author’s analysis, usually, there are not many different techniques in performing Avaaz, and most of the time they have the same types but using different above-mentioned categories, different figures are provided. Providing the mentioned categories, quantitative research is conducted. At first different parameters are defined by the author and then these parameters are quantified separately according to the final statistical population. After gathering data based on the described method, they are analyzed by using descriptive statistics, and then analytical results are provided.  Although the poem is the structure of an Avaaz and Tahir is a complementary layer, in this research the authors only focused on Tahrir’s and poem, style of performing a poem and its influence on the process of shaping Tahir is excluded in this paper and could be investigated in further researches. At last, according to the amount of melismatic or Tahrir’s, structured or unstructured, numbers of different used Tahrir’s and result of using Tahrir based melodies specifically for some Gooshe’s, the general architecture of Tahrir’s is investigated.