Persian classical music is built on a system of modes called dastgāh — seven primary and five secondary — each with its own emotional weather.
A dastgāh is not a scale and not a key — it is closer to an Indian raga: a collection of melodic cells, each with its own name, which a performer strings together according to mood and context. You study it for years before you improvise in it. The result is music that breathes like speech.
Folk, pop, and the underground
Beyond the classical tradition sits a huge folk landscape — Bakhtiari, Kurdish, Baluchi, Turkmen — and a vast pop music in both exile and at home. Since the 1990s, a rich underground scene has produced rock, rap, and electronic music that borrows freely from the dastgāh without being ruled by it.