Lincoln College Music Society - Lecture Series: Lorane Prevost

Free entry - Registration Required

Lincoln College Music Society is delighted to announce the fourth event in our lecture series. In Week 7, we welcome Lorane Prevost, third year DPhil student at Christ Church College, Oxford. 
In this lecture, Lorane Prevost explores Iranian classical music and instruments used in it, such as the Tombak. She argues that tombak should not be understood merely as an accompanying percussion instrument in Iranian classical music, but as a practice structured by the same principles as the radif. Although musicological research has largely focused on melodic instruments due to the modal and notated framing of the radif, ethnographic evidence shows that tombak transmission relies on traditional, recurring rhythmic patterns that function as flexible frameworks for musical creation, much like melodic segments in the radif. These patterns carry shared aesthetics, ornamentation, and poetic grounding, revealing that percussion participates fully in the tradition’s musical logic. The marginal position of tombak in scholarly sources therefore reflects a longstanding bias toward notated, formalised knowledge over orally transmitted practices, rather than an accurate representation of tombak’s musical role.
The lecture will take place in the Oakeshott Room, Berrow Foundation Building, Lincoln College.

We look forward to seeing you there!