The Tar and the Voices of Iranian Women

Yalda Yazdani’s introduction to music was not accidental, it was part of her family and identity long before she was born, through an instrument pivotal to Persian music. 

“Music was part of my family before it was a part of me. I was born in Isfahan, a city where art and beauty are woven into every stone. My grandfather played the tar, my uncle played the tar, and my father, though not a musician himself, made sure I would find my own way to it. His support and encouragement were boundless. So I began, without knowing that the tar would become not just an instrument, but the beginning of a lifelong journey into the music and voices of Iran.”

The Tar

The tar is a plucked string instrument central to Persian classical music. Its name in Farsi simply means “string”, a root that traveled both east and west, giving us the sitar in India and the guitar in Europe. It developed in Iran in its present form during the 18th–19th centuries and is closely associated with the radif, the traditional repertoire of Persian music. The instrument is carved from mulberry wood, its resonating chambers covered with a membrane of lamb’s skin, its metal strings producing a sound at once bright and deeply intimate. 

“To learn the tar is to learn technique, and to absorb a philosophy of sound that prizes nuance and a deeply personal relationship between musician and melody.

The tar is itself an object of cultural memory, its carved mulberry wood body, its lamb’s skin membrane, its metal strings bearing the traces of every hand that has played it.”

“Between 2009 and 2021, I traveled across Iran,” writes Yalda, “from Shiraz and the Qashqai community, through Baluchistan and Kurdistan, to the Caspian coast and the shores of the Persian Gulf. I was following female voices and their stories.

Everywhere I went, women’s voices in particular carried an entire world: lullabies that were far more than songs for sleeping children — they were a woman’s most intimate space of expression, carrying longing, memory, and emotions that had nowhere else to go — working songs that kept pace with the harvest or the rhythm of weaving carpets, ceremonial music for weddings and mourning, ritual songs connected to healing and seasonal cycles.

In every community, women were not the margins of musical life, they were its living center. They kept these traditions alive through generations, passing them from mother to daughter with a quiet continuity that no restriction could reach. For these women, singing was not performance. It was endurance. It was resilience.

This became the foundation of my doctoral research at the University of Siegen, where I examined the situation of female singers in post-revolutionary Iran — how women navigated and continued their musical lives within a system that restricted their public presence. I completed this research in 2025. The more I looked, the more I found not silence, but extraordinary persistence. A strength that continued, loudly and proudly, across every region I visited.”

Alongside academic research and fieldwork, Yalda Yazdani has been curating and co-directing music festivals and documentary films in Germany since 2017. Her projects include Female Voice of Iran, Female Art of Crossing Cultures, Female Voice of Afghanistan, Female Voice of Kurdistan, Qashqai Female Voices, Ukrainian Female Voices, Female Voices United, and Female Voices of Resilience — Iranian Women Singing for Freedom. These projects bring together women from regions affected by conflict, social and political challenges, and war, creating spaces where their voices can be heard together through music.

Since 2026, Yazdani has been a Postdoctoral Researcher in Transcultural Musicology at Humboldt University in Berlin where she examines the experiences of Iranian and Middle Eastern musicians who have made their lives in Germany, exploring how migration shapes and transforms musical identity.

“Music holds communities together when so much else is under pressure. And when those communities migrate, their musicians carry that resilience with them. The role of musicians from migrated communities is enormous — not only in keeping traditions alive, but in what becomes possible when cultures meet. From this encounter, transcultural music projects are born — opening a space where different stories, sounds, and histories can genuinely meet."