Parviz Yahaghi

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Parviz Yahaghi (پرویز یاحقی) was a distinguished Iranian composer and violinist. He was born in Tehran in 1936 and died in Tehran in 2007.

His birth name was Parviz Sedighi Parsi. He was musically educated primarily by his uncle Hossein Yahaghi, a violinist and violin teacher, and adopted the Yahaghi name. During his youth he was exposed to many highly professional musicians in Tehran who were friends of his uncle. A notable visitor at his uncle's house was the violin teacher, composer, and musicologist Abol-Hassan Saba, who is credited with introducing improvements in violin playing technique in the Persian tradition. Saba published a two-volume training manual for the violin in 1944-45. Starting from about 20 years of age Yahaghi was employed for many years as a musician with the Iranian government-financed radio station. His ability in playing violin, his compositions, and his musical director's role made him a central figure in Persian music during his lifetime. In the 1960s and 1970s he composed hundreds of pieces both for violin and for celebrated singers in Iran such as Banan, Diva Marzieh, Delkash, Pouran, Elahe, Homeyra, Mahasti, Dariush Rafei, Homayoonpour, and Iraj (Hossein Khajeh Amiri). These compositions were often produced in connection with the long-running musical radio program Golha. His creative style of playing has influenced almost all Iranian violinists of his time. Yahaghi's violin is tuned in a way that gives more resonances and drones to the sound, compared to standard European tuning, and he uses a number of different tuning schemes.

Yahaghi had already resigned from the government radio station a number of years before the arrival of 1979 political revolution in Iran and he set up a recording studio of his own in Tehran of considerable size. In the wake of the revolution many of Yahaghi's friends and associates departed from Iran and did not return. But Yahaghi stayed. His wife, Homeyra, who was a singer, moved permanently to the USA without him. (The revolutionaries outlawed female solo singing, though women were free to continue to play musical instruments and to sing in choruses.) Yahaghi was arrested, interrogated, and released by the new regime. During the 1980s with the war between Iran and Iraq going on, he was invited by the regime to compose music, particularly patriotic music. He declined. But the official authorities came around to viewing him with such esteem that after his death his violins and other musical instruments, his recording equipment, and many other items were appropriated as national and historic property.

Parviz Yahaghi's most widely distributed recordings outside Iran is, perhaps, the five-volume "Persian Melodies" collection (five compact discs). The four-volume album "Violin Melodies" is the same thing as the first four volumes of Persian Melodies. Other albums by Yahaghi currently in print include "Toreh" in two volumes (i.e. two compact discs); "Tooba" (a.k.a. Tobi) in two volumes; "Taravat" (in two volumes); and the three-volume set headlined "Iranian Classical Music" whose three volumes are called Ashk & Tulu, Yad, and Faryad; and other albums by Yahaghi in print include "Kimia", "Mehr", "Mahtab", and "Raaz & Niyaz".[1] These albums don't contain any overlap in recorded material with themselves or with the Violin Melodies collection, although at times one hears some recurring themes being reworked and replayed. All of the albums are instrumental only (no singing) and monophonic only.

Additional instrumental music featuring Yahaghi is available from the Taknavazan Collection. This collection consists of forty compact discs of Persian traditional instrumental music, featuring the violin on the majority of the tracks (the kamancheh features on about a third of the remainder). Yahaghi plays violin on at least one track on at least 25 of the 40 compact discs (and the discs have four tracks each, typically).[2] The other violinists in the Persian tradition who are present in this Taknavazan Collection are Ali Tajvidi (علی تجویدی), Habibollah Badiei (حبیب الله بدیعی), Homayoun Khorram (همايون خرم), and Asadollah Malek (اسدالله ملک), all of whom were students of Saba in Tehran, and are similar to Yahaghi in aesthetics and technique.