Persian tar: a living instrument

For the Iranian Australian musician Hamed Sadeghi, one strum of the tar is all it takes to echo millennia of Persian history. The guitar-like instrument took on its modern six-stringed form in the 18th century, but comes from a lineage of instruments that dates back to the ancient Persian Empire. In this short film from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, Sadeghi gives a soulful performance of the instrument and explains why, for him, playing the tar is both an act of anchoring and of ego dissolution, in which technique gives way to emotion. As such, it’s no coincidence that the instrument is played close to the heart. He also explains how each note played helps to reclaim a piece of Iranian classical music history, some of which vanished when a rich radio archive was lost following the Iranian revolution of 1979.