Shahnemeh by Adverse Camber at Perranporth Memorial Hall

An enthralling evening of music and storytelling from Persia presented by Adverse Camber at Perranporth Village Hall on Carn to Cove Saturday 17th March 2018 

I only had a vague knowledge of the epic poem The Shahnameh (the Book of Kings)   as a critical work in Persian/Iranian culture......but the evening in Perranporth Memorial Hall  that Adverse Camber presented their show of the stories and the music of that world brought all sorts of insights, exotic worlds and memories.  The hall was thronging ...evidently Persian storytelling a subject to draw Cornish audiences on a cold March evening.  

Two performers,  Xanthe Gresham Knight, a storyteller, and Arash Moradi, musician conjured the exotic and dazzling world of the Persian Book of Kings.    The stories were collected and written over thirty years  at around 1000 AD by the poet Ferdowsi and the epic poem consist of 50000 lines of verse in rhyming couplets (distychs) in Farsi.   The audience is drawn in as partners into telling the exotic stories of the great God Ahura-Mazda and the heroes of the Persian princesses and heroes:  Rustam; Zal; Rudabeh; the mythical bird the Simorgh;  Tahmina, Rakhsh - the Horse of Rustam; Sohrab, Bizan  of Iran and Manizeh of Turan;  The Demons and Shapeshifters.

Encouraged by Xanthe to mime  bow-and-arrow movements, the audience were  roaring like lions (but gently) , strutting like huge warriors on their steeds.  The  heroes seem remarkably adept at either sneaking into bedroom chambers of  colluding princesses, or coming across them bathing naked with their companions undiscovered by the Shah himself.  Not stories that one associates with today's Iran or Afghanistan more reminiscent of the Arabian stories of 1000 and 1 nights.    The heroes have almost giant status  and eventually Rustam, his horse Rusht  and his son Sohrab enter the picture and the tragic death of Sohrab at his father's hand in single combat on the battle field. 

The music was a constant rhythmic atmospheric experience.  And visually exciting, the performer cross- legged with the Daf the handrum (to my eye and ear a tambourine without the bells) held vertically.    Bells   or mini-gongs are also used (by the storyteller) and distinctive plucked string Shurangiz and setar are the main tonal accompaniment.  These all add to the authentic  backdrop to the stories which were both distinctive, simple and compelling.

Arash Moradi, the musician, speaks hardly a word during the performance except to respond to the occasional rhetorical question from the firebird that is the exotic Storyteller.  Arash is from a Kurdish Iranian family where the traditions of Kurdish  music in the Sufi tradition  are handed down from father to son and largely today celebrated privately.  His own father Ali Akbar Moradi is the celebrated tanbur (Kurdish lute) player .  Arash did not play the tanbur but he did play two other lute - like instruments a 6 string (3 +3 sympathetic strings) shurangiz and the smaller bodied setar both these instruments.    This is  and opportunity to hear Kurdish  Maqam music which plays a central role in the Iran's music heritage - if not celebrated in the Muslim traditions.

Arash also played the aforementioned   "Daf"  a large hand-played frame drum covered with goat or deer skin and equipped with dozens of metal ringlets on the inside of the frame. The combination of the sounds created by the metal ringlets together with the rhythmic patterns played on the skin give this instrument a truly mesmerising and unique effect. Daf is the principal percussion instrument in Kurdish music and also in Sufi-style music played in Sufi-houses across Iran. In major Sufi processions it is played in unison by dozens of players while chanting prayers. Daf was introduced in to the ensembles of the classical Persian music by the living daf legend Bijan Kamkar.

The tanbur is closely associated with the story of Rustam....he was said to have discovered the first hanging in a tree....so music and culture part of the heroic accomplishments of the great paladins. 

The performance was accompanied by (what I afterwards) discovered is a jewel of a publication programme introduced by Naomi Wilds, setting the scene giving comprehensive background to the Shahnameh.  Beatufilly produced and highly informative this is rural toruing programme of a very superior kind.    I was saddened to see that Xanthe's own pacifist convictions have led her to tone down some of the more nationalistic sentiments of the Shahnameh.  Surely bowdlerisation should not be making a comeback in these times when freedom of speech is under pressure.   Should we be so precious as to accept  censorship of classical texts because they do not meet contemporary values..... for me that plunged a dagger into the authenticity of the evening.....or questioned whether this shaping of our understading of foreign cultures by intermediaries is inevitable or to be challenged.

Footnote

Romanticisation of the story has a long history

The story of the warrior paladins Sohrab and Rustum  I was familiar with (though I had no idea it was taken from the Shahnameh)  from the narrative poem that Matthew Arnold wrote which was a favourite of one of the most the influential English teachers I had at school Francis Pearson.   (Incidentally Francis Pearson subsequently became headmaster of Truro Cathedral School)    The poem is long and it wallows in an exotic wash of glorious names and grandeur of the heroes of yore.  Arnold himself only had second hand knowledge of text (despite studying Greats at Oxford) so it was quite an achievement to simulate also in rhyming couplets

Here are the last few stanzas about the Oxus of Arnold's poem.  the last line remained in my memory from schooldays

But the majestic river floated on,

Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight, and there moved,
°878Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian° waste,
Under the solitary moon;—he flow'd
[p.28]°880Right for the polar star,° past Orgunjè,°
Brimming, and bright, and large; then sands begin
To hem his watery march, and dam his streams,
And split his currents; that for many a league
The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along
 885Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles—
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had
In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,
A foil'd circuitous wanderer—till at last
The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
°890His luminous home° of waters opens, bright
°891And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars°
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.