Uneven Intervals and Musical Hubs: A Comparative Study of Māori and Persian Traditions

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"Fifty Years of Iranian Music, Vol. 1" (پنجاه سال موسیقی ایرانی – ۱))

Songs of the Māori (1959) - sung by Phyllis Williams (Kirimaemae). Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision. These are both 20th Century examples of hybrid forms that adapt conventional tunings to Western harmony.

Abstract This essay explores parallels between Māori chant and Persian dastgāh, situating both within their wider cultural networks. Part One examines how both traditions rely on uneven intervals, monophony, and gestural melody, resisting Western modal or scalar analysis. Part Two reconsiders the hubs of transmission — Taputapuātea in Eastern Polynesia and Isfahan in the Persianate world — as centres of elite ritual and intellectual exchange. Part Three investigates motivic organisation and regional distinctiveness, showing how both Māori and Persian music were elite motivic cultures sustained by restricted knowledge systems yet locally varied. Part Four considers the vernacular dimension, where the same gestural vocabularies infused everyday life, collapsing the divide between “folk” and “classical.”

Part One: Uneven Intervals and Gestural Melodicism

Mervyn McLean’s transcriptions of traditional Māori songs show narrow pitch ranges, often within a minor third, fourth, or fifth. These chants centre on a reciting tone, with oscillation around it. Intervals are uneven and fluid, sliding between semitones, and expressive power arises from timbre, repetition, and gesture rather than fixed scale membership. Māori chant thus belongs to a wider Eastern Polynesian continuum that values text and ritual declamation over abstract musical structures.

Persian classical music, as analysed by Hormoz Farhat, demonstrates a similar principle. He identifies five uneven intervals as the basic building blocks of dastgāh, but insists that Persian practice is not scale-based:

“Still, today the majority of Persian performing musicians have no knowledge of what a scale is. They do not understand, should they be asked to play the scale of this or that mode. They see no point in playing the notes used in a mode as a descending or ascending scale. The musical context does not provide for such an exercise; it is therefore artificial and irrelevant.”

This highlights that dastgāh are not “modes” in the Western sense, but frameworks defined by tonal centres, characteristic motifs (gusheh), and melodic pathways transmitted through the radif corpus.

Like Māori chant, Persian music is fundamentally gestural and melodic, with performance shaped by oral tradition rather than theoretical abstraction.

Part Two: Hubs of Transmission

The marae of Taputapuātea (Ra‘iātea) was not simply a kinship hub but a ritual-intellectual centre, where ariki and tohunga gathered to exchange genealogies, chants, and navigational knowledge. These were restricted forms of expertise, guarded by hierarchy and tapu.

Only those with chiefly lines or trained intellect — those who had earned or inherited the right — could participate. Later, Rarotonga emerged as a percussion hub, developing sophisticated ensembles of pātē and pahu under chiefly sanction. Polynesian music thus spread not only through voyaging and kinship, but through imperial ritual networks and scholarly elites who carried specialised knowledge between centres.

Persia played an analogous role in West and South Asia. From the Abbasid era, Persian musicians and theorists disseminated modal systems that shaped Arabic maqām, Ottoman makam, Central Asian practice, and Hindustani rāg. Hubs like Isfahan and Baghdad diffused these traditions through courts, Sufi lodges, and scholarly lineages.

Music and the Power of Sound - Alain Daniélou. Persian music operates through groups of intervals that access the Indian shruti via uneven steps. These steps formed the dastgāh, which shaped the Arabic maqām.

Knowledge was tightly controlled: musicians learned through apprenticeship (ostad–shāgerd), and performance was inseparable from cultural authority.

Both Taputapuātea and Isfahan functioned as elite centres of ritual and intellectual exchange. Polynesian chant travelled with tohunga and ariki just as Persian dastgāh travelled with court musicians and scholars. In both cases, music carried legitimacy because it was sanctioned by chiefs, priests, or patrons, and embedded in sacred or scholarly contexts.

Part Three: Cell-based Thinking, Elite Transmission, and Regional Distinctiveness

Polynesian chant traditions reveal a shared cellular system: reciting tones, cadential dips, oscillations, glissandi, stepwise descents, and formulaic repetition. These gestures carried ritual and emotional functions, forming a pan-Polynesian vocabulary.

Within Aotearoa, however, these cells were inflected by iwi-specific styles: Ngāti Porou chants emphasised sharp, declamatory cadences; Tūhoe were associated with softer, more flowing delivery; Ngāi Tahu reflected the rhythms of their distinct southern dialect. Some iwi favoured plain declamation, while others used more elaborate slides or cadential ornaments. Certain karakia and mōteatea were restricted to tohunga and hapū, and may have contained unique melodic contours unknown outside those communities. In modern kapa haka, these distinctions remain recognisable: Te Arawa are famed for precision and flair, Ngāti Porou for upright delivery, Tūhoe for fluidity.

Persian dastgāh shows parallel variation. While the broad structures were shared, regional and lineage-based differences shaped performance. Isfahan was known for refined, lyrical interpretations; Shiraz styles were often described as more ornamented. Distinct pedagogical lineages preserved subtle differences in how motifs were realised.

Thus, just as Māori iwi had gestural “signatures,” Persian schools carried stylistic inflections of a shared cellular system. Both cultures balanced a common canon with local distinctiveness, reinforcing identity while sustaining continuity.

Part Four: Vernacular Continuity

The elite and vernacular were not separate strata. In Persia, Farhat observes that:

“An overwhelming number of folk songs … are in the mode of Dasti. It is the most natural thing for a Persian shepherd to play on his pipe in the mode of Dasti, or for farmers, returning to the village from the fields, to sing impromptu melodies in Dasti.”

This shows how the modal framework of dastgāh saturated daily life. Ordinary Persians improvised within the same melodic logic as professional musicians, collapsing the divide between “classical” and “folk.”

Māori music reveals the same vernacular depth. While tohunga guarded ritual chants under tapu, waiata were woven into daily life: genealogies sung to assert identity, laments intoned at tangihanga, songs punctuating oratory, and informal whānau singing that employed the cadences of their iwi. Just as Persians naturally fell into Dasti, Māori instinctively drew on the gestural idioms of their own iwi’s chant. These were not abstractions but vernacular expressions of belonging and memory.

In both cultures, the gestural vocabulary was innate: children absorbed it as naturally as language. Music lived simultaneously as elite knowledge and everyday voice, ensuring its resilience across generations.

Conclusion

Māori chant and Persian dastgāh, though geographically distant, reveal a shared musical logic. Both reject Western notions of even scales or abstract modes, instead privileging uneven intervals, gestural cells, and ritual context.

Both radiated from elite hubs of authority — Taputapuātea in Eastern Polynesia, Isfahan in the Persianate world — where knowledge was exchanged by specialists and tightly controlled. Both were sustained as elite motivic cultures based on sociocultural gestures, transmitted through ritual and scholarly lineages, while simultaneously embodied as vernacular traditions, saturating everyday life so fully that their gestures became intuitive within their culture.

Equally significant is the presence of regional and local variation within each tradition. In Aotearoa, iwi styles reflected dialect, ornamentation, and ritual practice, making a waiata recognisably Ngāti Porou, Tūhoe, or Ngāi Tahu. In Persia, lineage and geography shaped interpretation, so that an Isfahani performance might be distinguished from one rooted in Shiraz. These variations reinforced identity, tying music to community while maintaining continuity with wider canons.

Seen together, Māori and Persian music are not opposites of “oral” and “formalised,” nor separations of “folk” and “classical.” They are parallel examples of elite motivic cultures with vernacular depth, balancing shared vocabularies with local distinctions, and linking identity to networks of ritual and authority. Their enduring power lies in this duality: global hubs and local signatures, specialist lineages and everyday voices, all woven together through gesture and cells rather than scale.