Behrouz Vojdani, a member of Research Faculty of Iran’s Cultural Heritage, Handicraft and Tourism Organization, broke the news of his team’s efforts to inscribe a group of Iranian musical instruments on one of UNESCO’s lists of intangible cultural heritage.
Vojdani, along with people from Iran’s House of Music, has been a major contributor in processing the registration dossier of Kamancheh on UNESCO’s list, lamented what happened in the case of the Tar in which Azerbaijan took the initiative in registering an originally Persian instrument in UNESCO as an Azerbaijani instrument, and urged Iranian culture officials to speed up the effort to register Iranian instruments in UNESCO, Mehr News Agency reported.
An Iranian bowed string instrument, Kamancheh is the historical ancestor of the European violin family and appears in paintings of 1669 on Hasht Behesht Palace in Isfahan.
Kayhan Kalhor is Iran’s most renowned Kamancheh player whose works have been nominated for the Grammy Awards.
