Introduction

About the Book

The book you are about to begin presents 12 lessons on Oud techniques for Persian music; techniques and details of ornaments and embellishments necessary to play if one wants to sound as authentic as possible in Persian Music, as is with most of the music in the Middle East. These lessons would work best with students who have passed the elementary stages of playing the Oud and know the basics, like picking down and up correctly, moving with ease through strings of the Oud, different fingerings and tetrachords/scales on the instrument.

With these 12 lessons, Oud learners can develop their skills and appreciation for Persian music, through techniques in both hands for ornaments, along with how to apply them to some of the well-known Persian Classical pieces. Eventually, it would lead to a better understanding and therefore a better performance of the music. In fact, without these details, what you play would never sound Persian enough.

This book of 12 lessons can also serve as a practical guide to those learning Oud as a second instrument or in a different style or genre of music; in case they have an interest in the Persian version and would like to learn how embellishments work in Persian melodies, to give it the so-called Persian accent, and how we usually transcribe them in Persian sheet music.

Lessons in this book are separated by each technique. The performance of each technique is presented after the introduction and the notation in each lesson.

Finally, for every technique, there is a sample piece –or an excerpt of a piece- selected from the repertoire of Persian Classical music that shows how that technique is applied in performing a musical phrase. To infuse the musical sense and get closer to the original sound of the piece, techniques other than the lesson itself are also performed. Learners can easily use the symbol list at the beginning of the book to check on each ornament and its lesson accordingly. The lessons are set in a usual pedagogical order, going from the easiest to the most difficult from 1 to 12, but you can jump to any if you feel like to or need.

The Oud used here is an 11-course Oud (5 doubles and a single bass) with the usually called Arabic tuning as follows: