Prélude Naghmeh 1
This is the first piece of my Persian Classical Music fusion project I finished. Persian music (like Indian music, etcetera) has a lot in common with jazz, but the main difficulty is the use of quarter-tones. I have employed blues techniques, power chords and such things to be able to write music for a Western instrument (piano) in combination with authentic Persian instruments, in this case the Ud or Oud, depending on your preference; it is a string instrument, traditionally played with the tip of a bird's feather.
In Western music, we basically have two "tastes," major and minor, which we perceive roughly as happy and sad. In Persian music there are more flavours. The music is arranged in scales, or modes as I like to call them, the dastgah. In those modes there are sets of melodies, the Gusheh. In this case we have Navah Naghmeh, a pure melodic minor scale with one difference: a quarter-tone at the sixth step. That's the reason you will not see an Eb or E in the piano accompaniment.
Listen to an mp3 of my computer playing this song:
