TEHRAN -- The 7th Regional Music Festival ended with a program honoring veteran musicians from different provinces here on Wednesday evening at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall.

Senior musicians from the different regions of Khorasan, Mazandaran, Azarbaijan and Sistan-Baluchestan were all gathered at the closing ceremony attended by cultural officials.
Deputy Culture Minister for Artistic Affairs Hamid Shahabadi, secretary of the festival Jahangir Nasri Ashrafi, and Managing Director of the House of Music Hamidreza Nurbakhsh took part in the ceremony handing the awards to the honorees.
Musicians Mohammadreza Es’haqi from Mazandaran, Ashiq Qodrat Mirzapur (Azarbaijan), Mohammad Es’haq Baluchnasab (Sistan-Baluchestan), Iraj Rahmanpur (Lorestan), and the so-called 117 year-old tanbur player Seyyed Qadamyar Hosseini from Kermanshah were among those who were honored.
The ceremony continued with several performances by different participating troupes and a short message delivered by Shahabadi.
The seventh edition of the festival was simultaneously held in Tehran and Kerman. Several troupes gave their performances in Kerman during the four-day program and the ceremony was wrapped up in Kerman on Tuesday evening.
The festival was held in a non-competitive manner, since the participants are all unique and irreplaceable, Shahabadi said.
“This type of music needs to go beyond the festival and must find its way into peoples’ lives and hearts in order to prevent it from sinking into oblivion,” he added.
Nasri Ashrafi also expressed his appreciation to the organizer of the event and said that experts are well aware of the importance of these regional music festivals as they transmit the oral heritage of our homeland.
He also said that different types of regional and nomadic music narrate the great achievements and spiritual wisdom of Iran and need to be given additional veneration.
Photo: Bakhtiari nomads perform dance during the closing ceremony of the 7th Regional Music Festival at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall on May 18, 2011. (Fars/Hossein Musavifaraz)