Thursday 28 April 2011

"Fire in the Chest" by QAMAR-AL-MOLUK VAZIRI

QAMAR-AL-MOLUK VAZIRI (Waziri), commonly referred to as Qamar, the stage name of Qamar-al-Moluk Vazirizāda (1905-1959). She was a popular, pioneering Persian mezzo-soprano, much revered for her mastery of the repertoire of Persian vocal music (radif-e āvāz) and her sensitive rendition of taṣnif or through-composed metered songs (taṣnif, tarāna).

Qamar’s mezzo-soprano voice had a wide expanse; it was powerful and lyrical, accurate and sensitive, faithful to the traditional values and emotive. The tone of her voice was elegaic and plaintive, the qualities she had learned in singing the moving lamentations at religious ceremonies as a young girl. She was respected among musicians for her mastery of the modal vocal repertoire of Persian music and its various modal segments, and her nuanced declamatory delivery of them. Qamar also excelled in her execution of all the ornamental refinements of āvāz, known as riza-kāri, and was particularly noted for her extraordinary ability in performing of the taḥrir, a falsetto break between higher and lower notes in the melody line of the āvāz, a signal trait of Persian traditional music.

As a vocalist, Qamar was respected for her musical as well as her pioneering spirit as a vocalist in public concerts as well as her progressive social and political tendencies and legendary compassion for the poor and the powerless and her generosity to them. She was the first Persian vocalist to perform in public without the socially and religiously sanctioned dress code for women, the first recording artist, and the first female vocalist to sing and record highly charged political songs such as Abu’l-Qāsem Āref’s Constitutional Revolution song Mārš-e jomhuri.  (From Encyclopædia Iranica)




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