Sorna

Mohsen hajarian was born in the city of Khoram-Abad, Iran, in 1946. He has his bachelors’ degree in Geography from the University of Esfahan in 1970 and  his master of Education in Criminal Justice from the Coppin State College, Baltimore, Maryland in 1975. He continued his studies in the filed of Sociology and Anthropology at the South Dakota State University, Brooking, South Dakota, where he spent three months of a field work among the Native Americans in Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in 1977. In this research, he studied the Lakota Social System, an anthropological study related to the Native American in Pine Ridge Reservation. In 1978, he attended at the Sorbonne University in Paris, where he studied French Language and Civilization. He also attended University of Barcelona, Spain, for one year in 1981 to learn Spanish.
He received his Master of Ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County in 1995, and his Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnomusicology from the University of Maryland at College Park, Maryland in 1999.
He has extensive background in the two areas: Iranian Classical Music and Iranian Literature and History. In music, he has a practical knowledge of dastgah repertory, being practiced on three instruments of kamanche, ud and nay for a short period of time with Ostad Mohammad Reza Lutfi, Master of Iranian Music, and played ud with Dr. Munir Beken Master of Turkish Music and ethnomusicologist. He has a thorough knowledge of Iranian poetry as well as theoretical treatises in music in Persian and Arabic. He has extensive background in the music of Middle East, especially Iran, Turkey, Central Asia and the Arab World that include the historical, social and cultural. In his field work study in, on Nubat al Andalusia, in Morocco in 1993, he compared Nubat Ramal al-Maya, one of the eleventh Nubat-s in Andalusian Music, in  two Musical Schools of Meknes and Fez in Morocco. Part of this comparative study was done in Tunisia. He also studied the Egyptian Wasla (suite), where he spent two months in Egypt in 1995.
During 1996 and 1997, he published “Iranian Music Newsletter” in English in the University of Maryland at College Park, Maryland. He is recently publishing Iranian Musicology in Persian. He has also published more than forty articles in Persian and English, including translations. His doctoral dissertation, “Ghazal as a Determining Factor on the Structure of the Iranian Dastgah” explains the formative influence of the Persian poetic form of ghazal on the music of the Iranian dastgah, especially its vocal version. It looks into historical, political and cultural context of Iran in the 13th century and onward.