What A Night

On the 15th of June,2018 at Russia world cup, Iran and Morocco football teams played against each other and in the 95th minute, Aziz Bouhaddouz, Moroccans player scored an own goal with header. Moroccans own goal was latest own goal scored in the history of world cups that brought three sweet points for Iran national team. If an Iranian remembers that night, Its definitely reminder of a beautiful memory. But that night was not like that to me. That night all Iranians were celebrating in streets. Me and my friends were dancing in one of Zanjan's streets as well. Suddenly I saw the girl whom I was in a secret relationship with that we just knew about. She was hand in hand with a boy and coming toward me. She noticed me when we couldn’t evade saying hello. When greeting, I kept dancing because of the situation I was stuck in. I didn’t express a trace of the sorrow I experienced at that moment. After my girlfriend and her new boyfriend left, I went home and cried for the end of the relationship which was my biggest delight at that time. And maybe the only person who cried that much was Aziz Bouhaddouz, defender of Morocco's team. this hurtful story was always with me and I was looking for a story to share the feeling of facing a great sadness in a happy situation in a moment with others.
This strange connection between happiness and sadness is exactly what is in the heart of a kind of Iranian folk music (Koucheh Bazari).
A music that originates from Bazaar, local markets and streets and its main audience was proletariat and middle class.
Iranian music scales have notes with "half semitone" Intervals in addition to half step intervals. Therefore it transfers a wider emotional spectrum than western scales to the audience, like sorrow. So that we can see a kind of sorrow in all Iranian music pieces. At least I think so and as my idea, as intervals between notes in an scale get closer, the feeling transferred to the audience gets sadder. Like the difference between how Minor and Major scales feels.
I think the grief resulting from listening to a piece is caused by three factors; Tone and timber, scale and lyric. And strange point about Koucheh Bazaari music is while the three factors are causing the grief, because of the rhythm, it is known as happy music in Iran.
The lyrics are mostly about one sided love, missing and such tragic things and singer performs the lyrics with a sorrowful tone in Iranian scales and people are still dancing with this seemingly happy songs in their celebrations. Since most of this songs were performed in Bazaar and kabaretts and less published through albums, they didn’t last long and had short life. After the revolution of 1979 in Iran and closing the kabaretts, bars and cafes, this music genre almost died. Today only small part of this music genre is heard in Iranians celebrations.
"What a night" is result of my struggle with the mentioned memory and "Koucheh Bazaari" music (that is a part of Iranian music history) and eventually strange connection between sadness and happiness.