Golhā (literally 'Flowers') was the umbrella title for five long-running Radio Tehran programme series broadcast between 1956 and 1979 — Golha-ye Javidan ('Immortal Flowers'), Golha-ye Rangarang ('Colourful Flowers'), Yek Shakhe Gol ('A Single Flower'), Barg-e Sabz ('Green Leaf'), and Golha-ye Tazeh ('New Flowers'). Together they broadcast approximately 850 programmes, each roughly 30-60 minutes long, pairing a reading of classical Persian poetry (Hafez, Sa'di, Rumi, Nizami) with a pish-daramad (instrumental prelude), a vocal setting in one of the 12 dastgahs, and a concluding reng (dance-like coda). What made Golhā a distinct art-music school rather than merely a broadcasting project was the systematic transformation it worked on the Persian classical tradition: the private, master-to-apprentice transmission of the radif was replaced by a conductor-led studio ensemble; free-time (avaz) sections were tightened to fit broadcast slots; Ali-Naqi Vaziri's Western-influenced tuning system was standardised; and a permanent professional cast of singers (Banan, Marzieh, Delkash, Vigen) delivered the works to an audience that heard them not in a private mahfil but through the radio at home.

The founder was Davoud Pirnia (1900-71), a Tehran-born lawyer, poet and man of letters who was recruited as head of music at Radio Iran in 1956. Pirnia was not a professional musician — he was a legal scholar in his mid-fifties when he took the job — but his conception of pairing classical Persian poetry with dastgah settings, delivered as a fixed programme format, structured the entire enterprise. Ruhollah Khaleghi (1906-65), a composer and conductor trained in the reformist school of Ali-Naqi Vaziri and director of the National Music Conservatory from 1949, organised the radio orchestra; the pianist-composer Morteza Mahjoubi (1900-65) wrote the accompanying harmonies. The singers — Gholam-Hossein Banan, Marzieh, Delkash, Vigen — were mostly born in the first quarter of the twentieth century and had come up through the emerging Tehran cabaret and film-music scene of the 1930s and 40s. The 1979 Islamic Revolution ended broadcasts of the series and forced most of the female singers out of public performance; many, including Marzieh, went into exile. From 2005, the Golha Project at SOAS in London, led by Jane Lewisohn, has digitised and put online almost the entire archive.

First, listen for the piano. Traditional Persian classical had no piano; Morteza Mahjoubi introduced it as a left-hand harmoniser under the traditional right-hand modal melody, and his approach set the harmonic template for a generation. Second, the female tahrir. Marzieh's Ghesse-ye Sham', for example, uses a much higher-register, more delicate throat ornament than the traditional male masters — a change made possible by the recording microphone. Third, the conductor: unlike the negotiated intimacy of a traditional trio, a Golhā broadcast has a director standing above the players who cues transitions and dictates tempo. Fourth, the recitation-then-music binary: most programmes open with a pure spoken reading of a classical ghazal, followed only after several minutes by the entrance of the ensemble.

Start with Banan's Elahe-ye Naz (1955, composed and accompanied by Mahjoubi) — the textbook example of the Golhā broadcast style. Then hear Marzieh's Ghesse-ye Sham' (1958) for the female-voice tradition. For the archival dive: the SOAS Golha Project (from 2005) has almost the entire ~850 broadcasts online. In the post-revolutionary continuation, Homayoun Shajarian's Nasim-e Vasl (2007) and Alireza Ghorbani's Sokoote Sarshar-e Nagofteha (2001) inherit the format explicitly.

Pirnia was, by training, a professor of law at Tehran University; music was a second career he began in his mid-fifties. That a legal scholar shaped the twentieth-century institutional form of Persian classical music is a small piece of intellectual history the field has never quite reckoned with. Second: after 1979 the female singers of Golhā were forbidden from public performance in Iran, but their recordings continued to circulate through home cassettes, diaspora radio (KIRN Los Angeles), and eventually the SOAS archive. The genre survived not through the state that produced it but around it — an unusual case of a national art music preserved by its own exiles.