What Can Radif Music Teach Us About the Elements of Emergent Strategies and Complex Social Movements?
The most creative people tend to see freedom even in restraint. It wasn’t what Kaveh Haghtalab felt when he was nine, living in Iran, beginning to learn the story and practice of Radif music on kamancheh with the same teacher who had taught his mother, brother, and father.
Radif is the basis of Persian music, described by UNESCO as “the traditional repertoire of the classical music of Iran that forms the essence of Persian musical culture. More than 250 melodic units, called gusheh, are arranged into cycles, with an underlying modal layer providing the backdrop against which various melodic motifs are set.
“Most musicians during and before the Ghajar period played in the king’s palace or at ceremonies because the kings cared a lot about art and music, but Radif music wasn’t only limited to the court of kings,” says Haghtalab. Learning the way of living through these expressive sounds, passed down through oral history, study, and improvisation, underlie his musical works and relations to friends and family.
Far from the patronage that created the masterworks of Western art, the profoundly spiritual patterns condensed into and derived from Radif music underlie every part of Persian life for every class of people. It is a sonic fractal rippling out across the organization of society.
The modalities to understand emergent strategies, a social organizing practice derived from Adrienne Marie Brown’s book of the same name, draws much inspiration from the literal and figurative patterns of nature: fractals, spirals, generational knowledge, cycles of growth and decay, and a little something called the wavicle.
Seven primary modes called dastgāh are fractals within the larger patterns emanating from any Radif. Dastgāh is thought to be “a collection of discrete and heterogeneous elements organized into a hierarchy that is entirely coherent though nevertheless flexible.” Within that organization is a collection of musical melodies and gushehs. In a song played in a given dastgah, a musician starts with an introductory gusheh, then meanders through various gushehs, evoking different moods for any day or life.
Closed gushehs are the open gushehs, which had been closed by a pattern. For example, a specific melody, a specific poetic rhythm, or a specific rhythmic pattern used for performing an open gusheh creates a closed gusheh. “The tone is observation; a note oversees everything. You go in circles around it and then come back to it.” It is a fractal and spiral because the gushehs always return to the starting point.
Decay and rebirth are universal. This music is a connection point for all people who understand it, which is why it was seen as a service to those of the upper class and lower class, played by dedicated artists who seek to reveal divinity in their own lives through the immediate generation of sound. But this, of course, takes time.
Working in traditional form, Haghtalab says, “I grew up with it. It was like learning how to talk. I didn’t like to practice. I was just doing.”
While it seems contrary to the nature of this epic form, with its precise fractals and spiraling repetitions, Radif is very much about living and breathing the practice, so one does not consider practice at all. This is emblematic of another key metaphor weaving through Emergent Strategies: The wavicle. The wave-particle duality suggests that all objects exhibit both wave and particle forms, like a higher and lower nature; being too certain of one thing can make you less sure of something else. This helps us to move away from false binaries, valuing doubt and the unknown.
When Haghtalab reflects on the ebbs and flows of his musical journey in Iran, “we don’t really have practice… here [ in New York] practice is very technical with the point of becoming better… it’s quantifiable. With Radif music, it is a spiritual practice. You don’t count how many times you pray. It’s about what is in your heart. You must spend time with it, be constantly inspired by it.”
The human desire for certainty and our current generational obsession with needing to know what will happen next can sometimes trap us in stagnancy. The wavicle principle asks us to value uncertainty, understanding, process, and outcome equally.
The variety of tools we utilize to express our progression in emergence often leads us away from our original intention, but the departures only deepen our love and understanding of what is driving us.
When Haghtalab was still in Iran, he remembers discovering his friend’s garage band. Well, it was in a basement, but he got to experience the expressive chaos of teenage angst spilling out over fretboards. There was no one on drums, so he gave it a try. “I couldn’t stop tapping for three months. I had to try to get good because the sound was so different. I would play in the dark because I felt uncomfortable sharing what I was doing. After months of lurking around with a drum pad, he came home with a drum set one day. “My whole family was so surprised. My dad was a drummer and never told me he never thought it was important.”
Any family is an ecosystem of ethics and commitment, sometimes fraught when it feels like a culture is disappearing internally and externally. The struggle to adapt and integrate tradition evokes a renewed respect from younger generations willing to be transformed in the service of the work, whether the work is the life of an artist or the art of living. The principle that underlies emergent strategies organizing is the need to look to the smallest building blocks to understand and shape larger systems. Andrea Ritchie’s book Practicing New Worlds (part of the Emergent Strategies series) writes, “The key is to find the pattern that will produce the system you want to create.”
Haghtalab also reflects on this in the context of his life’s duality. “For a while, I neglected traditional music, but it is especially present with me here in the United States, especially now that my dad passed away.”
In addition to his many contemporary and traditional music projects, Haghtalab provides lessons and performances at Pardis for Children, a student-centered supplemental school inspired by different aspects of Iranian culture. It keeps him present with the community that drives his practice and brings him back to the beginning of the transcendent pattern: every single child is smallest subsystem of human society.
“These very young people are absorbing, and it is honest and raw… I see how the music is. On the days I bring the kamancheh, they all become dead silent, sometimes for 7 or 8 minutes. They will get distracted during a song on the guitar after just a minute. With kamancheh, they become hypnotized.”
Enraptured by the transcendental magic of repeating patterns the students can’t even put into words, these young people marvel at Kaveh and the Kamancheh week after week, seemingly so temporary in expressing these basic ideas of Persian music in drop-in classes. But ideas need not be more permanent to be lasting. Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions, the building of an ecosystem. Education, adaptation, and modern cultural deconstruction are all part of the lives of artists striving to create synergy between their passions and what is needed for them to support their lives.
The wisdom of emergent strategies in traditional Persian music and the story of its musicians serve a need in our society and indicate a way out of the past and into a more collective future.
