Journal of Art and Civilization of the Orient

The Evolution of Contemporary Iran’s Musical Vocabulary in the Context of East-West Civilizational Interaction

https://doi.org/10.22034/jaco.2026.556515.1502
Volume 14, Issue 52
Summer 2026
Pages 36-45
Journal of Art and Civilization of the Orient

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Mansoor Habibdoost

Department of Music, Faculty of Art and Architecture, University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran

Abstract
Music is considered not only as an art but also as a cognitive and cultural system with an ancient history, and Iran, as one of the centers of Eastern civilization, has played a fundamental role in the formation and transmission of musical knowledge. In the contemporary period, with the introduction of theoretical concepts of Western music into the Iranian educational system, some of the specialized vocabulary of this art has undergone transformation, and the coexistence of two different linguistic areas, namely vocabulary derived from old sources and terms derived from European languages, is seen in contemporary Iran’s musical literature. The main question of the research is whether the introduction of these new terms has been accompanied by some kind of conceptual and semantic transformation. And the secondary question is whether Iranian musicians have adapted them to the lexical structure of the Persian language in the direction of East-West civilizational interaction? The present study, with an interdisciplinary approach, examines the path of evolution and integration of some important musical terms in the educational sources and scientific discourse of Iranian musicians in the contemporary period and will consider some historical sources to reveal East-West civilizational interaction in contemporary Iran’s musical literature and the role of musical vocabulary as an indicator of the dynamism of Iranian civilization in the face of Western-influenced musical modernity. In this path, the method of historical study of sources, extraction of frequent words, discourse analysis of concepts, and examination of linguistic power relations based on the theoretical frameworks of Bourdieu, Barthes, and Agawu are used to examine both the historical layers and the cultural-civilizational implications of words. Finally, it will be clear that the musical terms of contemporary Iran provide an example of multicultural life and creative digestion of Western civilization in the context of this Eastern civilization.

Keywords

Musical Vocabulary
Eastern Civilization
East-West Cultural Interaction
Iranian Music Education System
Musical Modernity
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