The musical instrument is an object that faithfully records and reflects the evolution of the civilization of a territory. Describing in a few lines a subject so vast and complex as it involves a multitude of aspects, requires identifying which ones allow us to reconstruct the most evident traces in a journey made up of times and places. As the marks left by the performer and by time on the body of an instrument allow us to reconstruct its history as well as on the body of this instrument which is the territory of Iran, the instruments are the signs of an ancient civilization capable of expanding into neighboring territories its original characters by virtue of a poetic and refined cultural domination.
To make the subject complex is the presence, in the present Islamic Republic of Iran, of a great variety of ethnic groups and regions with very pronounced characteristics: the Persian official language, it is spoken by little more than half of the population and other languages characterize strong cultural identities such as those of Azerbaijan, Baluchistan, the Turkmen Plateau (Iranian), the Kurdistan (Iranian), the regions of the Persian Gulf, all regions whose ethnic groups cross the territorial borders making the national belonging more uncertain.
The expressions of each ethnic group, especially when they are characterized by strong identities such as that of Azerbaijan or of Baluchiscan or of Kurdistan, claim their own cultural autonomy with respect to the national one: the dotar, long-necked lute of the Turkmen bards, the version of frame drum DAYERÈ called ARABUNÈ in the province of Yazd, the monossary SORUD viella (case made from a single block of wood) diffused in the Baluchiscan, cannot be reduced to regional instruments but are a component of precise historical-cultural traditions of people that for historical processes have been separated by a border in States different.
