Vantage Points: Critical Perspectives, Personal Reflections, Field Notes, a Manifesto and a Letter

When the Shah of Iran was eager to westernize his country in the 1960s and 1970s, he and his wife assumed that, by buying and displaying European art in museums, they could bring Iran closer to a more westernized world—a world where modernism, industrial development, and culture flourished. Half a century earlier, in the nineteenth century, European classical music, mostly from France, was imported to train military bands, leading to the establishment of a music school in Tehran. This school even taught Iranian instruments in the Western style, embodying the belief that anything manufactured, processed, or taught in the West should be available in Iran, then Persia.