TEHRAN -- The rediscovery of Kakuti, A Dance for Her offers new opportunities to perform and study a work that premiered at the 1967 Shiraz Arts Festival.
An orchestral work by Iranian composer Morteza Hannaneh, preserved for decades in a single poor-quality recording, has returned to the musical repertoire following the reconstruction of its missing score, opening new possibilities for performances and research into one of Iran’s leading advocates of orchestral composition.
The score of Kakuti, A Dance for Her was reconstructed by composer and conductor Omid Mehrabi from the surviving audio of the work’s first and, until recently, only known performance.
A presentation and performance of the reconstructed score took place in May 2025 at Farabi Hall of Iran University of Art, organized by the Iranian Musicological Society’s archival working group in cooperation with the university and supported by the Iran Musicology website.
Hannaneh composed the approximately nine-minute work for the inaugural Shiraz Arts Festival in 1967. Titled Kakuti after his daughter, the piece was entered in a composition competition devoted to new ideas in music.
It received a special jury prize in a field that included prominent avant-garde composers Olivier Messiaen and Edgard Varèse. The festival’s international program brought Iranian and international
artists together, creating a platform for exchanges between musical traditions.
The work occupies a distinctive place in Hannaneh’s career. Although he is best known for exploring ways to combine Iranian musical materials with Western orchestral techniques, Kakuti displays a particular interest in percussion, modal structures and contemporary compositional approaches.
In a commentary on the piece, composer and santur player Aref Shahednavaz noted that the missing score had left scholars with little more than the low-quality recording of the original performance. Its reconstruction now makes the work available for closer examination and potentially for renewed performances.
Born in Tehran in 1923, Hannaneh studied the French horn at the Tehran Conservatory before pursuing further musical studies in Italy. He became a prominent composer, conductor, theorist and educator, working to develop a distinctively Iranian approach to orchestral music.
A central concern of his career was polyphony, or the combination of independent musical lines. He explored how Iranian melodies could be developed through harmony, counterpoint and orchestral forms without losing their cultural identity. After returning from Italy in 1961, he became active in teaching and broadcasting and established the Farabi Orchestra at Radio Tehran in 1963.
Hannaneh also made a substantial contribution to film and television music. His best-known screen work includes the score for Ali Hatami’s television series Hezar Dastan, whose musical themes evoke Tehran in the early 1940s.
His theoretical writing, particularly Gamhaye Gomshodeh (Lost Scales), reflected his interest in historical Iranian musical intervals and the possibilities of developing alternative harmonic structures.
Hannaneh died in October 1989. The reconstruction of Kakuti offers a new opportunity to reassess his compositional range and to bring a little-known work back into concert life, while preserving an important part of Iran’s modern musical history.