About Sedākhāne

Sedākhāne[1] is a space for documenting, analyzing, and reconstructing the history of folk music produced in different cities across Iran.

Sedākhāne attempts to look at Iranian folk music through the lens of the record industry’s history. This perspective reveals complexities, nuances, and different avenues to understanding “the history of Iranian folk music through the record industry”; a largely overlooked and obscured perspective. Sedākhāne focuses its efforts on the dedicated listening and uplifting of the voices granted through this perspective. The dated ideas and research related to “cultural heritage” have historically prescribed a gate-kept and confined mix of recorded folk music in Iran to our ears and minds. Grounding in the history of folk music production within the record industry, Sedākhāne seeks to intervene in these dated cultural heritage discussions and offer a richer, more expansive, accurate landscape of the history and geography of folk music in Iran, witness that landscape and take notice of its details. 

Beginning in the late 1950s, the focus of the record industry has shifted from the city of Tehran to the folk music centers in other cities across Iran, to which the “music production” relations were also extended. Roughly a decade later in the early 1960s, the musical dos and don’ts of the “cultural heritage discourse” also intensified in a significant way. The definition of folk music from the viewpoint of the cultural heritage discourse, and at the same time, the dynamism of the history of folk music production through the channel of the record industry, each presents a different approach to understanding folk music in Iran. If our understanding of the state of this music was based solely on one of these knowledge sources (record industry or cultural heritage), it would lead to the de-agency of some musicians while giving agency to others. 

Iranian folk music has been a site of contradictions and overlaps between the history of the cultural heritage discourse and that of the record industry. Although these connections and contradictions are quite substantial, they have been neglected at the same time. Over the past eighty years, the cultural heritage discourse has dominated the definition of Iranian folk music. In this overarching narrative, the question of the musicians’ agency from different regions of Iran in the matter of music production has been consistently marginalized. Reconstructing the history of folk music through the channel of the record industry may be the beginning of developing an awareness of power relations within the industry, shifting those relations in the understanding of folk music and forging new analytical and conceptual pathways to comprehending the recent history and contemporary status of this music.

With this vision, for the last three years, Sedākhāne has been developing a significant collection of Iranian folk music, including 2200 45-rpm records and 1700 cassette tapes from different cities of Iran. The historical scope of this collection within the history of the record industry is the period when the 45-rpm records and cassette tapes were in common use from the late 1950s to the mid-2000s, a critical period in terms of profound political, economic, social, and cultural transformations in Iran. While prioritizing and cultivating an understanding of the relations and practices within folk music production, Sedākhāne attempts to challenge and engage with the discourse of cultural heritage, as well as, explore research interests related to folk music; therefore, the essays, notes, articles, and, in general, activities of Sedākhāne largely focus on topics and issues related to “Iranian folk music production”.

The name “Sedākhāne” is derived from Lotfollah Mobasheri and his colleagues’ efforts in establishing the “Iranian National Sedākhāne^[1]” in the 1950s, where he intended, for the first time, and within the possibilities and limitations of his time, to take a more comprehensive approach  to the geography of Iranian music, folk music, and the issue of archiving.