Present Past: Notes From The Life Of A Persian/American Composer (2019)
Present Past is “a selective mémoire,” as the author, well known Iranian musicologist and composer Hormoz Farhat, calls it. His rich life is divided into four distinct phases: being born in and growing up in Iran; studying and later teaching in the United States; returning to Iran during the boom of the seventies; and finally escaping the tumultuous 1979 Iranian Revolution to Ireland, “a country that we love and admire, a green and gentle land with warm and charming people,” where he taught and still lives. The author was born in Persia during the transformative years of the nineteen thirties and forties. He remembers Reza Shah’s forceful reforms and secularization, the upheaval of the Second World War, the Allied invasion and later, the Shah’s abdication.
Present Past: Notes From The Life Of A Persian/American Composer (2025)
A Persian translation of Present Past by Tahmineh Farhat was published in 2025.
The Dastgah Concept in Persian Music (1990)
The tradition of Persian art music embodies twelve modal systems, known as dastgahs. Each dastgah represents a complex of skeletal melodic models on the basis of which a performer produces extemporised pieces. The dastgahs revolve around unspecified central nuclear melodies which the individual musician comes to know through experience and absorption. It is a personal and elusive tradition of great subtlety and depth. Through extensive research, including interviews with leading musicians and recording over one hundred hours of music, Hormoz Farhat has unravelled the art of the dastgah. In his study Professor Farhat analyses the intervallic structure, melodic patterns, modulations, and improvisations within each dastgah, and examines the composed pieces which have become a part of the classical repertoire in recent times.
Articles
Farhat, Hormoz (2012). “An Introduction to Persian Music” (PDF). Catalogue of the Festival of Oriental Music. Durham: University of Durham.
Lawergren, Bo; Farhat, Hormoz; Blum, Stephen (2001). “Iran”. Grove Music Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.13895. ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0 (subscription, Wikilibrary access, or UK public library membership required)
7 articles in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: MacMillan, 2001).
Farhat, Hormoz (1 January 1998). “Music”. Iranian Studies. 31 (3/4): 561–570. doi:10.1080/00210869808701932. JSTOR 4311189.
“The Evolution of Style and Content in Performance Practices of Persian Traditional Music”, in: Muzikoloski Zbornik (Musicological Annual) XXXIII (Ljubljana, 1997).
“Western Influences on Persian Music”, in Muzikolski Zbornik (Musicological Annual) XVII (Ljubljana, 1991).
Ten articles in Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. E. Yarshater.
“Scales and Intervals: Theory and Practice”, in Irish Musical Studies, ed. Gerard Gillen and Harry White (Blackrock County Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990).
The article on Iran in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: MacMillan, 1980).
64 articles in the Persian encyclopaedia Daerattomaaref (Tehran: -e Farsi, 1976).
“Old and New Values in Changing Cultural Patterns”, in Iran: Past, Present and Future (Aspen Institute, 1976).
Hormoz Farhat 