Counted strings
سهتار joins سه, three, and تار, string. Persian lutes have long been named by that count. The dutar is the two-stringed cousin. The Indian sitar inherited the same Persian words and grew into another instrument.
Persian lute · Canada
Setar
سهتار
A long-necked lute of Persian classical music, quiet enough for one room.
The name means three strings. Players keep four. A thousand years is a fair age to give its family, and too round to be a date.
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- Four strings, played as three
- Frets tied on, and moved
- Sounded with one fingernail
01 — The instrument
Three strings, and then one more.
Wood and gut
The bowl is pear-shaped, mulberry or walnut, about 25 to 30 centimetres long and 12 to 16 wide, carved from a block or built up from ribs. A thin wooden soundboard closes it. The neck runs 40 to 48 centimetres, sometimes faced with bone. Gut or nylon is tied on for frets, usually somewhere between 22 and 28, and the ties are meant to move. Persian music lives between the piano keys: koron lowers a pitch by about a quarter tone, sori raises it.
Four strings, three courses
From the upper side to the lower, the strings are بم, the bass; مشتاق, the drone; the yellow string; and the white string, which carries the melody. Bass and drone are played together. A common tuning, in scientific pitch, reads C3 and C4 for that pair, G3 for the yellow, C4 for the white. Other tunings follow the dastgah and the singer. The music is modal. The frets are there to meet it.
One finger
The player sits. The setar lies across the right thigh at a slant. The left hand stops the strings. The right hand uses the index fingernail, rocking against the metal. Related tanburs are often struck with several fingers or a plectrum. The setar stays with that one nail. Its range runs past two and a half octaves. Its volume ends at the edge of the room, which is where this music often prefers to stay.
02 — A long lineage
Older than any single date we can defend.
People say the setar is a thousand years old. The sentence is worth keeping, with the disagreement beside it.
10th century
The tanbur’s century
Abu Nasr Farabi, writing in the tenth century, treats the tanbur as an instrument worth measuring. The setar belongs to that family of long-necked lutes. Some accounts place a setar, or a close ancestor, in Persia by the ninth century. The guess is widely repeated. Proof of that early date is thin.
12th–13th centuries
The name in poems
Rumi and Khaqani use setā, a short form of setar. Osman Mokhtari does too. Poetry dates a word more readily than a surviving instrument. It does place the name among people who were listening.
By the 15th century
A cautious date
Standard references settle on a careful line: the setar had taken shape by the fifteenth century, and possibly earlier. The distance between the ninth-century speculation and that fifteenth-century caution is the real width of the history. A thousand years is a fair thing to say about the family. It is too round to stamp on the instrument.
Around 1600
A face, in Isfahan
A Safavid painting made in Isfahan around 1600 shows a woman holding a setar. From here the instrument is a body in a picture, as well as a word in a poem.
Late 18th century
The fourth string
The name still meant what it counted: three strings. Tradition credits a fourth to Mirza Mohammad Torbati, the Sufi musician known as Moshtaq Ali Shah, who was killed in Kerman in 1792. Later authorities, among them Abolhasan Saba and Ruhollah Khaleqi, tell it as his addition. The string is called sim-e moshtaq, and also sim-e vakhan, the sympathetic string. It sits between the bass and the yellow string and is played with the bass, so the hands still keep three courses. Across the nineteenth century, four strings became the ordinary setar.
Qajar era
The room grows louder
In the hands of Ali-Akbar Farahani and his sons, Mirza Abdollah and Aqa Hossein-Qoli, the radif — the ordered memory of Persian classical music — is carried on tar and setar together. The tar is larger, double-bowled, and easier for a full room to hear. The setar stays with smaller gatherings, and for a time it comes close to being left behind.
20th century
Heard again
Early microphones were blunt, and a setar could pass through a recording almost unheard. The archive is quieter than the playing was. Ahmad Ebadi, son of Mirza Abdollah, is the name most often tied to the instrument’s survival into the twentieth century. Later, musicians including Mohammad-Reza Lotfi, Hossein Alizadeh, and Dariush Talai brought it back within public reach.
03 — A second home
Canada, where the room fits the instrument.
280,805
People identifying as Iranian or Persian in the 2021 census, counted together.
200,465 Iranian·80,340 Persian
Iranians are a young community in Canada, and already one of its substantial ones. Through the Second World War, about a dozen people from Iran lived in the country. After the revolution of 1979, families began to arrive in earnest. Across the past three decades, that migration has kept its pace.
The largest shares live in greater Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Among people born in Iran, more than 70,000 had landed in the ten years before the 2021 census.
A migration carries a language, and it carries the radif, which still moves the old way, from a teacher’s instrument to a student’s. It carries the setar, built for a smaller room. The nineteenth century had handed the crowded salon to the louder tar. A Canadian apartment returns the setar to its own scale: a lesson, a closed door, a fret slid until the note sits where the mode asks.
Players who left Iran, and players born in these cities, keep that chain going. Small schools, societies, and concert series treat Persian classical music as present work. The people who want company around the instrument meet as Se-tar.
Toronto
The largest community
Vancouver
A Pacific home
Montreal
In Quebec
04 — Together
Join the people who keep this instrument.
گروه سه تار نوازان و علاقمندان به این ساز ایرانی
Setar players, and people who love this Iranian instrument. The group is on TeamUP.Space, in Canada, under the name Se-tar. Join there to support it.
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