Yara Elmjouie for Tehran Bureau 

Alone again, naturally: women singing in Iran

Music and theatre directors are in a tug of war with hardliners who find women singing solo too provocative
  
  

Iranian female vocalist
Azadeh Ettehad, from the band “Accolade,” sings in an unauthorised stage performance in Tehran, Iran. January 2013. Photograph: Vahid Salemi/AP Photograph: Vahid Salemi/AP

A shabby downtown apartment, its air conditioner jutting out of a cracked front window, isn’t where you would imagine Iran’s foremost sopranos to be honing their craft. But behind its storied walls their coach, Austrian-trained opera director Hadi Rosat, may well be rewriting the rules for women singing solo in Iran. What’s more, he began in the dog days of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s conservative presidency.

Since the Revolution of 1979, restrictions have been placed on women singing. These first prohibited all singing but evolved into a ban on women singing solo in front of men who are unrelated to them. Conservative clerics say women’s voices have the potential to trigger immoral sensual - or kinetic - arousal.

Rosat has had many brushes with the authorities. His group was ejected from the 2012 Fajr music festival because his work, Puccini’s theatrical opera Gianni Schicchi, featured an uninterrupted two-minute solo by Shiva Soroush. In the sample video he sent earlier to festival organisers, Rosat had shown his cast singing in an innocuous choir, with no solo and no acting.

But Rosat is not one to give up, saying he spends 95% of his time lobbying for permits from the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance, which must authorise all artistic productions even before any tickets can be sold. His persistence had Gianni Schicchi on stage at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall just months later, although Soroush’s solo still threatened to upend his efforts.

After their first show, a reporter from a conservative news outlet alerted Ahmadinejad’s culture ministry. Reps showed up the next night to shut down the production. Rosat protested. “Didn’t I ask you to come and watch the rehearsals?” he told them (they hadn’t). “Assume tonight is your last, and that you’ll wave goodbye to the stage and go home,” they responded.

“They hadn’t been aware of what an opera was,” says Rosat, whose work was Iran’s first proper theatrical opera since the revolution. The ministry had simply taken him at his word when he assured them it wouldn’t be subversive.

It might have ended there. But the officials watched the show in its entirety, after which Rosat got on stage to explain. He carried authorities through the legal crucible he had to overcome to obtain his permits and praised the culture ministry for authorising his opera “on the basis of trust”.

Perhaps Rosat’s passion moved them. Maybe the solo wasn’t as inflammatory as they had imagined. When the cast got word of their special guests that night, they arranged for a background singer to murmur inaudibly over Soroush’s voice so it wasn’t as off-putting to the officials. Whatever it was, in a sudden turn of fate, officials approached Rosat and the cast backstage to congratulate them. They even asked Rosat for more tickets so they could bring their families the next night.

“They understood there’s nothing dangerous about opera,” Rosat says. “They realised that I’m not here to disrupt anything, that we performed a work of art that doesn’t pose a threat to anyone.”

In a sense, Gianni Schicchi was the straw that broke the camel’s back. “For solo-singing women, the road has been opened,” Rosat says. “[Today] they are doing it without any problems; none of them faced the obstacles I did.”

Women began singing in the theatre – and sang peek-a-boo solos

You’d be hard pressed to find documented examples of women singing solo in post-revolutionary Iran. Searching the Iranian media won’t yield much because female solo-singing, when it has occurred, has usually gone unpublicised. None of the write-ups of Rosat’s Gianni Schicchi seriously addresses the uninterrupted solo that moved some in the audience to tears.

But in post-revolutionary Iranian theatre women have been singing solo for years, long before Gianni Schicchi and long before last year’s election of moderate president Hassan Rouhani. One vocalist recalls a performance by Hannah Kamkar, who sang a Persian tasnif (ballad) completely solo, albeit from behind a black curtain, in Ayat Najafi’s 2000 play Sleepy Noon (Nim Ruz-e Khab-alud). As word of mouth spread, people bought tickets just to hear her. A playwright cites Sadegh Hatefi’s 1991 work Boar Toothed (Dandan Goraz) in which Marjaneh Golchin sang a solo.

Playwright and director Pari Saberi’s works have also featured bouts of female solo-singing. And since Rouhani’s election, numerous theatrical productions - including Rosat’s Farsi rendition of The Sound of Music, Hamid-Reza Naimi’s Faust and Socrates, Mohammad Rahmanian’s The Last Days of Esfand, and Diana Adama’s recreation of Mozart’s Magic Flute - have made waves for their substantive solos by female vocalists.

In the Islamic republic, however, it’s often difficult to say what qualifies as a “solo” and what doesn’t because many supposed solos are variations on choral singing. Jargoned in Iran as ham-khani or “co-singing”, it’s exactly what it sounds like: to brush aside the red tape, women have over the years sung together with other men and women to mask their own voices. “The goal is to make it so the woman’s voice isn’t detectable,” says one concert organiser.

Background

Decades after the revolution, faint memories of women who grew to be national pop stars still course through Iran’s veins. Within the intimate confines of Tehran’s elevator shafts, you might hear the melody of Haydeh’s Goleh-Sang echoing between floors. Or, perhaps you’ll recall a cover band at a packed Shiraz restaurant waiting for a government delegation to leave the premises before performing an instrumental version of a Googoosh classic, to the raucous applause of a post-revolutionary generation that knows the lyrics all too well. And you might have read about the Islamic republic diehard that, though madly in love with his country’s ruling Ayatollah, must admit: he has a soft spot for Homeyra’s arresting voice.

In the 1970s, these three stage-named women singing western-styled pop-- Haydeh, Googoosh, and Homeyra - were regulars on Iranian airwaves and household names among the urban youth. They booked stints at garishly lit cabarets on Lalezar Street, sang for state TV’s Rangarang, and even entertained for birthday parties at the palaces of the Shah.

But at some point after the Islamic revolution caught fire, they departed their homeland. State TV’s new managers didn’t take too kindly to them. “Googoosh… Haydeh and many other singers have no longer any place in radio and television,” they wrote in a press release.

Indeed, all state-media broadcasts of music, regardless of their Iranian or western origin, were banned. The Revolution’s leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa forbidding music altogether, advocating it be “eliminated” in favour of other pastimes - “something else that’s educational,” he pleaded. And then, with words alone, Khomeini barred Iranian women from singing in public, a move other big-name clerics did not oppose.

Iran’s newly empowered leadership was equipped with a drive to transform a society whose denizens, said Khomeini and others, were becoming increasingly “west-toxified”. So, paying musicians was declared illegal, as was the sale of musical instruments. Cafes, cabarets, bars, concerts, and discos were closed down and outlawed. Revolutionary vigilantes enforced the rulings, occasionally travelling to villages with historically rooted musical traditions to make their leader’s decision known.

A few short years later, in the throes of the Iran-Iraq war, Khomeini backed down from his original decision to outlaw all music, citing as permissible the eulogistic hymns sung at the funeral of his co-revolutionary Ayatollah Morteza Motahari. Others recall his lack of
objections to the broadcasting of patriotic and religious hymns on national television.

Western classical instrumental music eventually returned to hotels and restaurants, where the works of Bach, Chopin, and renowned Iranian composer and pianist Javad Maroufi again enchanted guests. And once more, after the UN-brokered ceasefire ended the eight-year war with Iraq, Khomeini in 1989 took another major step to seemingly undo what he had done, lifting the ban on the sale and use of musical instruments. Perhaps he would have continued untangling the knot he had tied in 1979, but later that year, Ayatollah Khomeini passed away.

It was during the post-Khomeini era that cultural restrictions relaxed in earnest. Under the presidency of pragmatic conservative Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, traditional music was given the green light and came to be sold legally on cassette. It acquired further legitimacy after a 1992 speech by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader. In the face of what Khamenei called the “western cultural onslaught”, traditional music was deemed an authentic Iranian production.

Traditional music ensembles like Dastan, Khonya, the Kamkars, Ham-Avayan, and Shams emerged. Post-revolutionary Iran’s first concerts were held, some of them in cultural centres built by Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi. Music classes were again legal. Traditional vocalist Parisa, who sang hijab-less before the revolution, was invited back to Iran to teach another generation of Iranian women at the centre for preservation and dissemination of Iranian music. But Parisa and other Iranian women were still barred from publicly singing solo in concert and in front of mixed audiences.

Women singing in public, and the peek-a-boo solo

When reformist president Mohammad Khatami seized the reigns in 1997, the situation improved. Helped to power by a generation of baby boomers thirsting for change, the chronically smiling Khatami kicked cultural liberalisation into overdrive - by Islamic republican standards, that is. Concerts were instituted where women could sing in front of other women. Western classical music was again taught at Tehran University, and a record number of permits for albums and concerts were issued by a culture ministry headed by the reform-minded Ataollah Mohajerani. Whereas pop music had been illegal — listening to it in your car constituted an offence - certain kinds of domestic pop and concerts were now authorised, a move that spawned pop phenomena like Benyamin and the group Aryan.

The “co-singing” movement picked up steam under the relaxed social atmosphere of Khatami’s presidency, when women singing at all was still a hot-button issue. The winds of change awakened an experimental spirit of singers toying with one of the Islamic republic’s most enduring taboos. “It wasn’t easy back then [to sing solo] - they took issue with it and harassed singers,” says a classical vocalist who wanted to be identified as Faranak. “But in the end, with government connections and what have you, it was possible for these kinds of things to happen.”

These were days when no one had a camera-phone and YouTube didn’t exist. State TV didn’t - and still doesn’t - film performances. Meanwhile, the performers themselves made sure culture ministry minders were out of sight. If government officials did drop by, adjustments were made on the fly to turn women’s solos into choral performances. And journalists knew writing about solo-singing not only brushed up against their own red lines, but also threatened the performers they were covering.

So female “singers would do their thing in complete media silence,” says a traditional vocalist who asked not to be named. It’s why she decided to stay in Iran while others, she says, broadcast their voices on foreign satellite networks so they can flee the country as asylum seekers or allow their fame to extract them from Iran. She wants to prove - especially to those from more conservative backgrounds - “that a woman’s voice is not provocative”.

In the late 1990s, a choir led by Faranak’s former music instructor organised public concerts that managed to get around the constraints. “I remember when I saw one or two of his concerts, it was clear - women sang solo,” she says, even if it might have involved attempts to “fool the authorities”.

The supposed deception she’s referring to is often no more than one’s “co-singers” quieting down - sometimes to the point of being nearly inaudible - to highlight a female voice. It’s still a highly common technique in both theatre and even public concerts. But instead, what Faranak’s instructor likely did was employ a familiar but more audacious tactic: injecting brief moments of genuine female solo-singing throughout an otherwise co-sung performance, a kind of peek-a-boo solo.

A piece might open with co-singing, only for the choir to then slip into absolute silence as a woman’s voice emerges to sing uninterruptedly solo for a short while, after which she is rejoined by her fellow co-singers.

Faranak recalls the instructor being coy when another student asked their instructor how he managed to get a woman’s un-chaperoned voice out in the open. “Well, we do what we must to make things happen,” he said. Her teacher had friends in high places, she surmises.

At a recent concert by traditional music ensemble the Kamkars, Saba Kamkar navigated a powerful soprano number as her co-singers briefly went silent, only to join in moments later. In Pari Saberi’s latest play Delightful Garden (Bagh-e Delgosha), a female soloist can be heard singing for a moment’s time, after which she is joined by a deathly silent male murmur for the remainder of the piece. Fatemeh, who has filmed two independent documentaries on solo-singing by Iranian women, remembers when vocalist Afsaneh Rasaii released her album Looking at White Waters in the Khatami days: “There were some parts where she sang solo, and [a man’s] voice was still in the background, but it might have disappeared for 30 seconds, and then her voice would be heard [solo].”

Peek-a-boo solos appeared to no longer require “connections”, and directors applying for permits to authorise their work might not even detail the extent of the female solo-singing, if at all, given how brief and unpredictable it is. It harkens back to a recurring theme in the Islamic republic’s cultural tug-of-war: artists chip away at taboos and then raise the stakes, provoking conservatives to shift their ire toward the latest cultural transgression.

That’s not to say the women’s singing movement hasn’t been dealt any setbacks. After Ahmadinejad came to power, there were more cancelled concerts (even women-only concerts), more frequent surprise censors at theatre performances, and more anecdotes of conservative officials in the audience being outraged by the women singing on stage. Women’s voices on co-sung albums were more likely to be drowned out by men. But that didn’t stop women from singing. After all, Gianni Schicchi was first performed in the final months of the Ahmadinejad administration.

It’s not co-singing’

When director Mohammad Rahmanian returned to Iran in 2013 following five years of self-imposed exile, he directed a play called Old Songs. But it was his follow-up, The Last Days of Esfand, that had Tehran talking.

A musical featuring western pop from Abba and Mary Hopkin to Amy Winehouse and Frank Sinatra, Esfand stars Ashkan Khatibi and female lead Ghazal Shakeri. Together, the two perform solos and duets alongside three co-singers in the background. Here, “co-singer” is the term director Rahmanian stresses in an interview with Mehr News intended for domestic consumption. That, however, doesn’t do justice to Esfand, or the other productions that have featured solo-singing women in Rouhani’s time.

“It’s not co-singing,” Khatibi says. Technically, he adds, co-singers in a choir parrot the lead singer, but in complementary octaves. The co-singers in Esfand do regularly sing along with Shakeri as any proper choir would. But then, say, at the beginning of the Hopkin number Those Were the Days, they fall completely silent and allow Shakeri to open the piece with a brief, unequivocal solo. On other occasions, they might hum so lightly as to be imperceptible. “It’s as if they’re instruments,” Khatibi says. Granted, Shakeri doesn’t sing any of the numbers entirely solo from start to finish as Soroush did in Gianni Schicchi, but there are many brief peek-a-boo solos when the choir dims down to an almost inaudible volume.

For director Rahmanian, the minutia behind solo-singing isn’t what defines his work. “Never before has western pop been performed, nor has a woman stood in place [apart from the cast] with a microphone in front of her, and sung,” he says. “It was practically a concert in a play.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Esfand would have been authorised were it pitched as a concert rather than a theatrical production.

Still, if there are potential troublemakers in the audience, the cast have made ad hoc adjustments to the play. This means on some nights, Shakeri’s voice has been less noticeable - less “solo” - than others, with co-singers taking on a more prominent role.

“We would tell her to sing more quietly, or not to sway as much behind the microphone,” Khatibi says (the latter might resemble coquettish dancing, another potential offence).

Rouhani’s deputy culture minister Ali Moradkhani - highly regarded among many musicians for his open-minded outlook - was present the first night of the performance, and did not protest, Rahmanian says. Did he clap? “I assume so,” he replies.

Outside the realm of theatre, women singing solo in public concerts,
emulating what Soroush did in the theatrical production Gianni Schicchi, is a different ball game. Some say that there has never been a moment when an entire piece was sung solo by a woman in concert. But there may be one documented exception.

In Khatami’s second term in late 2003, France-based Iranian opera singer Darya Dadvar was invited to Iran to perform two pieces at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall: Schubert and Gounad’s Ave Maria and later a piece by Antonio Vivaldi, both in Italian. World-renowned Armenian-Iranian composer Loris Tjeknavorian conducted the Tehran Symphonic Orchestra, and for both pieces a choir of sopranos sang alongside Dadvar to make sure all was in line with regulations.

But one vocalist on-stage with Dadvar at the time says she and others on-stage were instructed not to “co-sing” but to do something else entirely. For significant parts of the performance, they were asked to merely “move their mouths to feign singing” so the only voice reverberating in Vahdat Hall would be Dadvar’s. And it worked. In December of that year, Dadvar sang solo again in a production Tjeknavorian had been working on for more than two decades - The Tragedy of Rostam and Sohrab, based on Ferdowsi’s epic, The Shahnameh. This time, she sang in Farsi. This has led some to credit Darya Dadvar with being the first woman to sing solo in concert in the Islamic republic.

Lyrics, language and provincial licence

State TV forbids showing musicians in the act of playing instruments, hijabs are almost always picture-perfect, and many of the Rouhani administration’s statements deviate too heavily from conservative canon to warrant broadcast. When Channel Three played a sanitised version of Where The Wild Things Are a few years ago, they excised Karen O’s humming from the background music, instead looping the instrumental parts. So it should come as no surprise that women have never been shown singing on national television.

“You might hear [women singing solo] in films and theatre, but state TV isn’t likely to broadcast it, unless it’s like a lullaby, for example,” says Fatemeh, the filmmaker. While women singing lullabies has become a normal affair in film and theatre since the Khatami era, the same could not be said about television. Or so it was thought.

A weekly historical TV series, Mokhtar-nameh, raised some eyebrows in Ahmadinejad’s time because the closing credits featured a woman from Bushehr, in southern Iran, humming a local lullaby. The series did not face any major objections, and it’s unclear if that was because of its religiously themed content, the lack of lyrics, or the provincial character of the vocals.

Bushehri women are known to sing solo in passion plays decrying Imam Hussein’s martyrdom in AD 680. In fact, Iran’s many ethnic minorities -Kurds, Azeris, and Lors, to name a few - have enjoyed rich musical traditions throughout history. This reluctance to upset ethnic groups, dating back to the opinions of Ayatollah Khomeini, may explain the government’s continued leniency.

“Generally, when we’re talking about folk, ethnic, and local music, that’s when the restrictions ease,” Fatemeh says. The same goes for dress: TV, she says, is more willing to show an ethnic Lor in her traditional garb, even if that might entail more exposed hair and forearm than it would tolerate from urbanites.

“Regarding music, this might also apply,” she says, mentioning languages like Kurdish or Azeri. “Perhaps not on state TV, but in film. If in a movie, you hear the voice of a woman who is singing folk music [in a language other than Farsi], yes, that movie will get a permit.” In a recent documentary about residents of the city of Sardasht in Iranian Kurdistan still suffering from the effects of chemical weapons attacks in the Iran-Iraq war, a Kurdish woman sings a local melody, solo, as the credits roll.

Some believe Farsi, the official language of Iran, is the root of the problem. Farsi might be more widely understood, and so more likely to inspire spectators to get out of their chairs and dance, sparking the kinetic arousal that cultural conservatives find abominable. That may be why operatic singing is more tolerated. “Opera isn’t considered provocative to them because you don’t clap to it,” says Ashkan. “Nor is it sexual.”

Marzieh, a seasoned playwright well-versed in the art of obtaining culture ministry permits for her work, is still grappling with why “if a woman sings [solo] in an opera, it’s [considered] very different from a woman singing traditional music.” Or how ballet and modern “western” dance are tolerated in theatre, she says, but not their Persian counterparts.

“In Iranian theatre, you can do modern dance as a woman, but Iranian dance with - you know, ‘ding da da, ding da da’ - with teasing and coquettishness, you can’t do that. It’s the same way in music.”

Rouhani’s winds of change

By the time Rosat took his second major work on stage in October 2013, a Persian-language rendition of The Sound of Music, the culture ministry had come to know and trust him, even as it underwent staff changes called for by President Rouhani’s incoming administration. “The issue had become personal - it was like, oh, okay, Hadi Rosat is doing it,” he says.

But The Sound of Music (Ashk-ha va Labkhand-ha) featured more than one fully-sung solo. Farhnoush Rahimi and Rosemary Essapour, who played Maria and Mother Abbess respectively, sang numerous solos on stage, in Farsi, without humming, co-singing, or any other technique normally employed to avoid stepping on hardliners’ toes.

But the road to women singing solo isn’t as well-paved as Rosat would like to believe.

Despite having co-singers on stage, The Last Days of Esfand received an order from a Revolutionary Court after its 20-day run preventing it from being performed again. And female soloists still cannot apply for permits to hold their own public concerts as independent musical artists. Some still worry their productions will be shut down, which is why intermittent humming, co-singing, and peek-a-boo solos still persist.

If Iran’s nuclear negotiations end in an agreement, they might afford President Rouhani the necessary political capital to undertake his promised domestic reforms. Those in-the-know have heard rumours of what that might entail for Iran’s vocalists, including an attempt to legalise solo-singing in all capacities once and for all. One cites a composer who is already recording tracks for a female solo album, to make sure he’s the first to the market should the ban be lifted. Another has heard the Rouhani administration wants to introduce singing, for men and women, into universities as an academic major for the first time.

Rouhani administration officials have already proven to be of a “very different” breed than their predecessors, says Marzieh, who has word that one of the president’s culture ministry official wept as he watched a recent play of hers (which happened to feature short peek-a-boo solos). “Censorship of theatre has decreased significantly since Rouhani took office. Ahmadinejad’s officials only looked at things through an Islamic lens, but these people are educated, enlightened, and they’re even touched by a play. The censors that used to come before would come watch a play and keep their distance, as if the entire work was flawed.”

“The ambience has changed rather than any one thing changing,” says Khatibi. “The lack of trust - that hard, strict wall between artists and politicians - has been eliminated.”

Among the Iranian intelligentsia these days, there’s a sense that women can now sing solo. This writer has lost count of how many conversations have begun with “so I hear female solo-singing has been legalised?” But it may be a bit alacritous to say the practice is now “legal”. Female solo-singing has happened. But it also hasn’t. There have been caveats - what with language, lyrics, different media, co-singing, humming, and peek-a-boos impacting just how “solo” a performance can be. What can be said with more certainty is that it’s happening more frequently than before, with authorities continuing to turn a blind eye to the practice in Iranian theatre.

For an Islamic republic that once banned music outright and denounced women singing in public, these are changing times. Rosat, meanwhile, is on the lookout for a strong female vocalist for his next work: the Engelbert Humperdinck opera, Hansel and Gretel.

  • This story initially ran without a byline

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