سه‌تار

Persian *سه‌تار* (setar) compounds *se* (three) and *tār* (string). The instrument belongs to the long-neck lute family and is closely related to the Indian sitar — both names mean 'string' in their respective languages, from Persian *tār*. The setar has a small pear-shaped body and a long neck with movable gut frets; its four strings (a fourth was added in the nineteenth century, but the name stayed) are played with the index fingernail rather than a plectrum, producing a soft, intimate sound that cannot project into large spaces.

The setar is the instrument of the mystical dimension of Persian classical music. Where the *tar* (a larger, louder, plucked lute) suits performance and the *kamanche* (a bowed fiddle) carries the melodic line in ensemble, the setar is associated with private practice, meditation, and the *radif* — the vast canon of Persian classical melodies transmitted from master to student without notation, memorized in full before composition or variation is attempted. To study setar is to spend years learning the radif note by note from a single teacher.

The Sufi mystic tradition gave the setar its most charged association. In *Masnavi-ye Ma'navi*, the thirteenth-century poet Rumi uses the reed flute (*ney*) as his primary metaphor for the soul's longing for its origin, but the setar and similar instruments accompany the *samā'* — the Sufi ceremony of music and movement. The *ney* speaks of separation; the setar plays the session in which that longing is expressed and partially resolved.

Setar master Dariush Talai and others have worked since the 1970s to document and teach the instrument's techniques precisely, partly in response to the 1979 Revolution's temporary ban on music performance and instruction. The ban was eventually loosened, but the period of suppression accelerated the work of preservation through transcription and recording. The setar's radif exists today in written and recorded forms that did not exist fifty years ago — a paradox of threatened tradition producing its own documentation.