The Pattern of Scansion of Poetry in Davami’s Vocal Radif

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Associate Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature, University of Shahr-e Kord, Iran.

Abstract

Before this study, no independent research has been published about how systems of scansion work in Iranian song, and if a few minor and incoherent cases are found, they are limited to general references, or discussions about the relationship between music and poetry without specific references to the concept of "scansion of poetry". In this article, by examining the Davami vocal Radif, the pattern of poetry scansion in Davami Radif is introduced and analyzed.
The samples and musical examples in this article have been selected from the audio collection of Abdallah Davami’s vocal Radif and its notation by Dariush Talai (1398). This article is based on the theory of Omid Tabibzadeh (1382) about the meter of Persian folk poetry. Tabibzadeh considers Persian folk poetry to be of the accentual-syllabic type and he analyzes the meters of folk poetry by using the three concepts of line, half-line, and feet. In his theory, feet and half-line indicate the position of junctures or scansions in folk poetry. Based on Tabibzadeh’s idea, during declamation or reading of folk poetry, the scansions depend on the meter of the poem that this depends on the number of syllables and the position of the accents. Therefore, none of these scansions follows the semantic and linguistic boundaries of the words and phrases, but all of them depend on the meter of the poem.
Davami, in the scansion of poetry, is more subject to its folk declamation style. Folk declamation of Persian classical poems imposes the meter of folk poetry on these poems. Therefore, the place of the scansion of poetry is determined according to this folk meter. This way of scansion, rather than depending on the meaning of the poem, is subject to the accentual-syllabic meter of the poem as a formal feature. For this reason, in Davami’s songs, we often encounter offbeat scansions that divide a word or phrase into two or more segments, regardless of the meaning. In conventional approaches to the relationship between music and poetry, this type of scansion is considered incomplete. But the proposed pattern in this article can simply justify all these offbeat scansions. In other words, these scansions are the result of Davami’s songs following of the folk meter of this poem. This pattern has also influenced the formation of the melody of his songs. Many melodic parallels in Davami vocal Radif are formed with a specified meter segment that are set in one or more feet. In this article, the types of these parallels have also been named and introduced and need to be followed up and completed in future research. It seems that this pattern can be considered as a new approach against the current meaning-oriented approaches, in the relationship between music and poetry.

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References

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Journal of Fine Arts: Performing Arts & Music
Volume 30, Issue 2
July 2025
Pages 31-42

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