Word: persianism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Early in World War II the Shah of Iran wrote to his friend Franklin Roosevelt and asked him to recommend a composer who could set Walter Camp's "Daily Dozen" physical exercises to Persian rhythms for use by the Iranian army. The U.S. State Department knew just the man: Composer Henry Cowell, then doing a stint as music editor of OWI. Cowell polished off the job in a few days, saw thousands of his records pressed and shipped off to Iran to ease the deep, daily kneebends practiced by the Shah's sturdy troops...
Scored for Tar. The Minneapolis will also première Cowell's Persian Set, a haunting, eastern-flavored piece originally scored for twelve instruments, including the three-stringed Persian tar. Cowell was also able, in the past year, to work on a 13th symphony, write a two-movement piece with a "Japanese feel" titled Ongaku (music), and compose, on commission, a national anthem for the new state of Malay (it was rejected, along with entries by Benjamin Britten and others, in favor of a Malayan folk tune named Bright Moonlight...
...hooting tugboat nosed up to an odd-looking 4,200-ton contraption in West Germany's Audorf shipyards (on the Kiel Canal) last week, made towlines fast and headed to sea, outward bound for the Persian Gulf, 6,800 miles away. No ordinary barge, the contraption bristled with a 140-ft. derrick, a crane, a heliport, had air-conditioned quarters for 50 men. Built at a cost of $3,500,000, it was the most advanced mobile oil-drilling platform ever built, and a device that its owners, British Petroleum Co. and Compagnie Franchise de Petroles, hope will open...
This Elizabethan description of nomadic Persians (from Hakluyt's Principal Voyages) would have been accurate in the time of Herodotus (circa 484-425 B.C.) and was still accurate in A.D. 1926, when Persia's modern-minded Reza Shah Pahlavi began his reign, set about freeing the women of their veils, ordered the men into Western suits and decided that nomadic existence was "a blot on his progressive country." Harried by the Shah's troops, the nomadic tribes "settled," but in 1941, when Reza was forced to abdicate after the Allies moved into Persia, the tribes went back...
...sent to school in Switzerland; now he tries to give his people the best of both worlds, only to find-like so many other men of good will in the East-that such an attempt can easily lead to tragedy. When Ghazan gets wind of the fact that the Persian army is planning once again to resettle his people, he leads them into the uplands for the summer, and they resume their way of life-shearing their sheep, weaving cloth and dazzling-colored rugs. Ghazan knows that this summer idyl cannot last and that by fall he must lead...