The Khorshid Orchestra in the ancient Iranian city of Isfahan has dropped all its female musicians, claiming that many audiences don’t want to see them on stage. A manager told the Bahar newspaper that excluding their current female musicians from concerts in small towns meant that the number of performers left over was increasingly small.

Under the heading ‘Iranian Women’s Music Terminated’, the report pointed out that in the Azeri, Kurdish, Bakhtiari, Ghashghai and Boyer-Ahmad regions, women have been playing traditional instruments alongside men in festivals and cultural gatherings for thousands of years, and until now there has never been any suggestion of excluding them. In southern Iranian cities female musicians are often in the majority. The article added that under the current regime, female musicians may not make recordings, neither may they be photographed playing an instrument.

Khania Music Group founder Pari Maleki told the newspaper: “Officially speaking, women may no longer play a role in Iranian music. It seems that the government was unable to find a weaker section of society to victimize. The audience for women’s music is not huge, and there is little we can do to promote it. Consequently composers are not that keen to write new pieces, and female musicians have to keep performing the same ones.”

Before she died a few years ago, renowned Iranian diva Khatere Parvaneh said her only wish was to be allowed to record a single tape of the many songs she had sung over the years, to send to her grand-daughter abroad.

Shahrzad News