RAST MUSICOLOGY JOURNAL | Special Issue 2019, 7(2) RAST MUSICOLOGY JOURNAL | Special Issue 2019, 7(2) Original Research Wright, O. (2019), Persian perspectives: Chardin, De la Borde, Kaempfer, Rast Musicology Journal, 7(2), s.2050-2083. Doi:https://doi.org/10.12975/pp2050-2083 Persian perspectives: Chardin, De la Borde, Kaempfer Owen Wright* Corresponding Author: *Music, School of Arts, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Thornhaugh Street, London WCIH 0XG,
[email protected] Abstract Less well explored than the material supplied by European observers of Ottoman musical practice, that relating to the Safavid realm is nevertheless instructive, both for the glimpses it gives of music as a social activity, especially in Isfahan, of the instruments used, and for what it reveals about the attitudes of the observers. The contributions of two of the most perceptive seventeenth-century European commentators are surveyed here, together with the attempts of an eighteenth-century encyclopaedist to grapple with a Persian theoretical text, reflecting a nascent concern with indigenous theory as Enlightenment thinkers develop an interest in exploring the music of other cultures while at the same time becoming more self-confident in their assumptions of European musical superiority. Keywords persian music, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, orientalism Within the thickening humus of although the Ottoman Empire was still postcolonial re-evaluations of the cultural not, in the nineteenth century, subjugated entanglements between Europe and the and subaltern, increasing recognition, and wider world is a particular layer concerned exploitation, of its military weakness and with the various musical traditions of the the parlous state of its economy meant Middle East.