Sociological researches on Iranian music usually focus on the musical events that took place in Pahlavi era onwards or take on as their points of departure the social events that occurred after the constitutional revolution of 1905. There is good reason for this particular approach since the most challenging questions about Iranian music start with their relation to major social changes in contemporary Iranian society or western music that all appeared after the constitutional revolution of 1905. Yet musical practice in prerevolutionary Iran and in that particular social context had its own characteristics. Special combination of different social forces in Iranian society led to a particular form of cultural and artistic production, especially music. The authors of this research have specified different main social groups in Iranian society of Qajar era who had a defining role in shaping this social context: sufies, clergies, culturally influential families, and Qajarian court. In this research, the authors tried to locate a distinctive cultural discourse in Qajar era formed within this specific configuration that is based on the so-called "Hall and Qal" discourse. By recognizing this discourse, we could use it to understand the sociological situation of artistic production of music in Qajar era. Investigating this social structure also will help us understand better the musical practice that was current after the constitutional revolution in Iran, when so many deep social changes in Iranian society disrupted the old way of artistic production. Therefore, we would be able to understand the specific reaction of artists who worked within the framework of artistic production in Qajar era against different artistic agendas put forwarded by other artists.
In order to do that, after explaining the sociological context of music production in prerevolutionary Iran we will analyze one of the first and most important musical debates of this time period in an article named “Fatwa-ye man” by Aref Qazvini. Aref Qazivi entered a debate with Ali-Naqi Vaziri and challenged the way Vaziri was trying to cope with Iranian music. This particular debate has a special place in Iranian contemporary art history since centers around different approaches toward art making. Thus, using sociology of emotion’s and music sociology’s approaches will help us trace back Aref’s approach to music according to the aforementioned social structure of music making in prerevolutionary Iran.
The present research is an interdisciplinary study that draws on sociological insights for grasping artistic practices. Our main conceptual framework is based on social symbolic interactionism school in sociology that has evolved in many years from early thoughts of George Herbert mead to Howard Becker's groundbreaking works in sociology of art in 1980s to recent works of Tia DeNora in music sociology. The main concern in this school is the way people act and react by recognizing each other's actions through symbols. Drawing on this tradition, and also using the idea of "music in action", Tia DeNora defines the concept of affordance to show the actual workings of music in social contexts. Originally based on psychological theory of Gibson, affordance in the context of music sociology means the way music can provide means to special social actions. In addition to theory of social interactionism, we also have used the theories of Jonathan Turner in the field of sociology of emotions to analyze the sociological origin of different emotions such as shame in this context. Our conceptual methodology of this research is based on historical sociology and, since we are concerned with the case of Aref Qazvini's reaction to Ali-Naqi Vaziri's critique of him, follows the case study method. According to this method, data is gathered from various historical documents of this period, such as memoirs, newspapers, journals. Along this method, in order to analyze the main document of our concern, i.e. Aref's "fatway-e man", content analysis technique is applied based on Norman Fairclough method.
Our research shows that before the constitutional revolution of 1905, the Hal discourse dominates the cultural activities of Iranian musicians. This cultural discourse, which encouraged a specific form of artistic knowledge along with a special social relation between the teacher and pupil, was best suitable to special social context of Qajarian era. Centering on the internal feelings and, sociologically speaking, lived experience, the Hal discourse is opposed to the Qal, which means relying on arguments and utterances generally. According to Hal discourse, one should feel not talk about his/her experiences. This is the case until the deep social changes of post-revolutionary Iranian society transformed the previous social context. By spreading different newspapers all over the society and new technology of telegraph, people began to discuss everything and put forward necessary changes in various aspects Iranian culture including music. Consequently, in post-revolutionary Iran musical discourse of Hal faces its opponent, i.e. Qal. That is arguments about music and its relation to society took hold of public sphere of Iranian society. This is where Aref, as someone being brought up in the culture of Hal, takes on an emotional mobilization in response to the new cultural discourse that centers on Qal instead of Hal.