Iran Amplified – One Hundred Years of Music and Society

Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society, the first edited volume on music in modern Iran, presents a cross-genre collection of compelling scholarship, musician narratives, and primary sources. This groundbreaking volume, seizing on this burgeoning academic field, offers historiography and critical examination of music’s significant role in social and political mediation in Iran spanning the twentieth century. It also investigates central analytical vectors such as Islam, gender, media technology, alterity, transnational flows, and diasporic communities. As demonstrated at critical moments in Iranian history—from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911 to 1960s and 1970s Third-Worldist activism, the 1979 Revolution, the Iran-Iraq War, the 2009 Green Movement, the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising and beyond—music has played a pivotal role in mediating and expressing social and political discourses. Music has also been significant in coalescing sentiments and subjectivities throughout seemingly quieter periods of nation-building during the Pahlavi era, the post-WWII period of Great Power machinations, the cosmopolitan 1970s era, and the post-war reconstruction period of the 1990s. This timely volume, compiled by two leading readers of Iranian culture, finally affords music its important place in the scholarship of modern Iran.