Iranian Music and Popular Entertainment: From Motrebi to Losanjelesi and Beyond (Iranian Studies)

What a pleasure it is to write the foreword to this long-awaited volume, Iranian music and popular entertainment: from Motrebi to Losanjelesi and beyond. I find it to be an important breakthrough volume in the field of ethnomusicology on a number of levels. In this study, highly respected ethnomusicologists GJ Breyley and Sasan Fatemi address a class of musicians and public entertainers, the motreb, who have nearly been erased from history, focusing on the generally ambiguous and negative public attitudes in Iran toward them. They write in depth about this class of public performers, attempting to recuperate their presence and their popular musical and entertainment production and its meaning in Iranian society. In doing so, they go against the traditional approach to the topic by either the avoidance of writing about the motreb or writing about them in a disparaging fashion. That disparaging writing, often done by Iranian intellectuals and music historians, has attempted to consign them to the historical trash bin, condemning their music as “imitative, repetitive, diluted, and sensual.”