Persian and Sephardic

Pejman Tadayon opens the evening by speaking about his instrument and his musical tradition. The târ — which he describes as the traditional guitar of Persian music — is his primary vehicle. He left Esfahan at seventeen, carrying the instrument with him to Italy, and has spent the years since teaching Persian classical music theory and performing across Rome.

Persian classical music is organised around the radif — a vast repertoire of modal melodies preserved through oral transmission across generations. Each mode (dastgah) carries its own emotional and spiritual character: some are associated with joy, others with longing, grief, or the contemplative states of Sufi devotion.

When Pejman speaks about his music, he is describing a tradition that is simultaneously a technical discipline and a spiritual practice — one in which the performer must not merely execute notes but inhabit a particular feeling that the music is designed to evoke.

Pejman plays the târ to demonstrate the characteristic sound and technique of Persian classical music. What you hear is not a fixed composition but an exploration of a particular dastgah (modal framework) — the kind of improvised elaboration that lies at the heart of Persian performance practice.

The târ's metal strings and moveable frets allow Pejman to produce the microtonal intervals — the subtle notes between the notes of a Western scale — that give Persian music its unmistakeable quality of inwardness and emotional precision. The same intervals appear, in different guises, in the Sephardic and Yiddish repertoire that Riccardo Manzi brought to the same room that evening.

Both traditions descend from the same ancient world: the modes of Persian and Jewish music share common ancestors in the medieval musical cultures of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Andalusia.

This is a passage from Ghazal 2131 in the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi (The Collected Poems of Shams of Tabriz), the spiritual poetry of Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (1207–1273), the legendary Persian Sufi mystic and founder of the Mevlevi Order.

The poem is a deeply mystical call to spiritual transformation. The opening line originally reads "Heilat raha kon, asheqa" — "Abandon your cunning/tricks, O lover" — and urges the seeker to shed the calculations of the ego, plunge into the fire of divine love, and become like a moth drawn irresistibly to the flame. In Sufi tradition, the moth represents the human soul surrendering itself to the infinite light of divine reality.

Because of its powerful rhythm and profound mysticism, this poem has become a staple in Persian classical and traditional music for centuries, having been adapted and recorded by generations of iconic Iranian artists including Shahram Nazeri and various traditional and contemporary ensembles. Pejman performing it with the traditional târ — using bow technique — places his voice and instrument squarely within that deep classical and spiritual heritage.

Pejman speaks about what happens when two musicians from different cultures share a stage. For him, the central fact is that music renders language unnecessary. The encounter does not require translation because music is already its own form of communication — precise, emotional, immediate.

He defines peace as dialogue: the simplest and most direct description he can give. And in the act of two musicians playing together — without needing a common spoken language — he sees that definition enacted in real time. The magic he describes is not metaphorical. It was present in the room that evening.

Riccardo introduces this piece in his own words: "Questa è una melodia sefardita, quindi ebraico-spagnola come origini. E ho aggiunto un testo in romanesco perché sentivo molto vicino questo modo di suonare il Mediterraneo a quella che è la cultura nostra di Roma."

"This is a Sephardic melody, so of Hebrew-Spanish origins. And I added lyrics in Romanesco [the Roman dialect] because I felt this way of playing the Mediterranean was very close to our own culture here in Rome."

The underlying melody is "Morenica" (Morenica alta y graciosa) — one of the most celebrated traditional songs of the Sephardic diaspora, historically preserved by Spanish-speaking Jewish communities after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. The song is traditionally sung in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). Riccardo Manzi and his group KlezRoym recorded an acclaimed version of "Morenica" on their 2000 album Scené.

What Riccardo performs here is a unique act of cross-cultural composition: he takes the ancient Sephardic melody and sets it to original lyrics he wrote in Romanesco — the Roman vernacular dialect — bridging the Mediterranean/Iberian roots of the music with the local poetic voice of Rome. The ancient Sephardic tune becomes a contemporary Roman love song, without either tradition losing itself in the process.

"Tum Balalaika" is one of the most beloved traditional Yiddish folk and love songs of Eastern European Ashkenazi origin. It opens with a spoken introduction that sets the scene: a young man standing awake through the night, wondering whom he should choose to marry without causing shame.

Structurally, the song is a riddle song: in its full form, the young man tests a young woman's intelligence and character with a series of poetic, existential riddles — what can grow without rain? What can burn without ending? What can weep without tears? The woman answers each riddle with swift intelligence (a stone grows without rain; true love burns without ending; a heart weeps without tears), proving herself worthy.

The title's chorus — Tum-balala, tum-balala, tumbalalaika — plays on the word balalaika (the traditional Russian stringed instrument) using celebratory nonsense syllables to create a mood of festivity and courtship. The song is a staple of the Klezmer repertoire and has been recorded and performed globally across generations as a symbol of communal joy, the wisdom of women, and cultural continuity.

"Arum Dem Fayer" (Around the Fire) is a traditional Yiddish folk song rooted in the culture of Eastern European Jewish communities. It describes people gathered around a fire — singing, dancing, keeping warm together — in the collective spirit that fire has always symbolised across cultures: community, continuity, and the human need for warmth against the dark.

The song belongs to the broader body of Yiddish folk music that Riccardo Manzi has spent over two decades studying, performing and transmitting as part of KlezRoym, the Rome-based klezmer ensemble he co-founded. That a Roman musician devoted his life to preserving the musical memory of Eastern European Jewish communities is itself a form of cultural coexistence — one that predates and in some ways mirrors what Accordi di Pace was attempting to create.

The image of people gathering around a fire — warming themselves together, regardless of origin — carries a particular resonance in a concert that brought two musicians from historically separated worlds into the same intimate room.

Riccardo's view of music and peace is the most sceptical in the Accordi di Pace archive — and the most precise. He refuses the easy claim that musical harmony translates automatically into political or human harmony. Getting along when you play does not mean you get along in everything. He knows this from experience.

But he does not dismiss the encounter. He believes something real is possible — only that it must be learned slowly, from this model, through repeated practice rather than a single evening's magic. It is a measured, long-term faith rather than an immediate one.

The tension between Pejman's direct certainty ("music is the best example of peace") and Riccardo's careful scepticism ("perhaps slowly, slowly") is one of the most honest moments in the archive. Together, they describe two truthful ways of holding the same hope.