“Afsaneh”: Recognizing a musical term in Persian poetry

Music, with a history of thousands of years among Iranians, both as one of the fine arts and as a practical art, has been present in various aspects of individual and social life. In addition to reflecting this presence, the long and close relationship between music and poetry has filled the collections of Persian poetry with musical terms, names of melodies, tunes, instruments, and composers. It is clear that over time, some new words and terms have become popular in this field, while some have remained obscure and eventually forgotten, and some others have undergone verbal or semantic transformation or fluctuation in their scope. On the other hand, a true understanding of the meanings and even receiving many artistic aspects of texts depends on mastering the different semantic features of words and the implications of terms. Undoubtedly, one of the important functions of writing commentaries on the works of the past is to explain the meaning of obscure words or the transformed meaning of a still-common word, and also to inform the audience of the idiomatic meaning of words and combinations that without mastery of them, the reader's understanding of the text is not possible or at least incomplete. Researchers have identified and introduced a large number of forgotten musical terms in the texts, but it seems that some of these terms are still overlooked. "Afsane" is one of these terms. In this study, using content analysis and descriptive-analytical method, the musical aspect of this term has been investigated and the artistic subtleties of a number of verses, which were hidden in the shadow of the forgotten idiomatic meaning of the word, have been revealed.