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Persian tunings

Dastgahs can have many tunings; it has become common to name tunings after representative dastgahs featuring them. The following Persian tunings are provided to be used as the second argument of the \key command. Note that in practice not all tunings are used in all keys.

\shur‘Shur’ gushehs with natural 5th degree
\shurk‘Shur’ gushehs with koron 5th degree
\esfahan
\mokhalefsegah
\chahargah
\mahurthe same as \major but used in a completely different context
\delkashMahur

In dastgah ‘Shur’, the 5th degree can either be natural or koron, so two tunings are provided (\shur, \shurk). Secondary dastgahs ‘Dashti’, ‘Abuata’, and ‘Bayat-e-tork’ use \shur, the derived dastgah ‘Afshari’ uses \shurk. ‘Nava’ on G is like ‘Shur’ on D (a 4th apart). The tuning of ‘Segah’ is \shurk. Other tunings are \esfahan (‘Homayoun’ on C is like ‘Esfahan’ on G, a 5th apart), \chahargah, and \mokhalefsegah. For dastgahs ‘Mahur’ and ‘Rast-panjgah’ the same tuning \mahur can be used.

All the various modulatory gushehs in all dastgahs can be notated with these tunings, with the exception of ‘Delkash’ in ‘Mahur’, but traditionally the peculiar accidentals there are notated explicitly (however, persian.ly also defines a tuning \delkashMahur).

As an example, Chahargah in D can be input with the following. 

\include "persian.ly"

\relative c' {
  \key d \chahargah
  bk'8 a gs fo r g ak g |
  fs ek d c d ef16 d c4 |
}

[image of music]

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LilyPond Notation Reference v2.25.15 (development-branch).