Hidden Words and Sounds:
Tracing Iranian Legacies and Traumas in the Music of the Bahá'ís of North America

by Daniel Akira Stadnicki

About: This dissertation examines music in North American Bahá’í communities and artistic contexts by focusing on the Faith’s legacy of Persian culture, aesthetics, and history of religious persecution. As such, it provides a reinvigorated look into the development of Bahá’í devotional life from its emergence in mid-nineteenth century Persia to early twentieth-century expansions in the West, as well as more recent developments following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Through incorporating a mix of ethnographic, historical, and analytical approaches to key Holy Texts, Bahá’í scholarly literature, and select musical case studies (including pop, rock, hip-hop, and classical compositions, as well as the development of a music program at the Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education), I explore how Bahá’ís navigate the Faith’s world-unifying message and administrative processes amid greater diversification of membership, patterns of devotional localization, and ongoing struggles in the Islamic Republic of Iran. It traces a history of religious oppression and considers how narratives of persecution and martyrdom throughout the Faith’s succession prophetic revelation (the Báb, Bahá’u’lláh) and leadership (‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Shoghi Effendi, and the Universal House of Justice) has shaped global Bahá’í identity formation, as well as inspired forms of aesthetic worship. At the same time, it will contribute new perspectives on research in the Iranian diaspora, transnational music-making, and musical cosmopolitanism through a ‘Bahá’í inspired’ theological approach, which emphasizes Bahá’í literatures, utterances, worldviews, and scholarly conventions. (ualberta.ca)