For five years Afghanistan’s airways were silent. From 1978 to 2001, the government there repressed music, but from 1996-2001 the Taliban forbade it entirely. Sunday March 28, as part of a weekend-long festival “Seeing Through Afghanistan: Re-viewing Afghanistan through Film, Photography and Music,” Wesleyan broke its own silence in that arena with a concert of traditional Afghan music.
Although Wesleyan has a world-renowned ethnomusicology program, the University’s World Music Hall had never before hosted a concert of Afghan music. According to Professor of Music and American Studies Mark Slobin, who played a key role in bringing the festival to Wesleyan, the goals of the weekend were twofold.
The first goal was to get people to begin talking about Afghanistan and to examine the country from an angle other than the primarily negative one disseminated by the media. Slobin hoped that the festival would bring people to see through the media image and view the complex country from all sides. Secondly, Slobin hoped to celebrate Afghan and Afghan American art that has exploded since 2001.
The three performers of the concert were John Bailey, Veronica Doubleday, and James Kippen. These three do not usually perform together, but they are all experts in Afghan music and are involved in disseminating and teaching Afghan music.
“Wesleyan is an important center for ethnomusicology,” Bailey said, a professor of Music at the University of London and employee of Freemuse, a Denmark-based organization that fights censorship of music. The non-profit group commissioned Bailey to draw a report (published in 2001) about the suppression of music in Afghanistan during and in the years preceding the Taliban. His report is available online at www.freemuse.org.
After the concert, Bailey described his current work in Afghanistan. He noted that Afghan youth, despite their many hardships, reflect musical taste similar to that of youth all over the world.
“They have an increasing interest in western music,” he said, adding that such an influence can either augment or push aside traditional music. Today, Bailey is involved in a program in Afghanistan which works to preserve and teach traditional music to students.
Doubleday, a vocalist, has been researching and performing Afghan music since her initial study in Heart, a town in Western Afghanistan, in the 1970s. Doubleday actively raises awareness about Afghan music through her own recordings as well as through her writing, which includes the book “Three Women of Herat.”
Kippen, the ensemble’s drummer, is a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto, and he specializes in North Indian music, particularly its drumming.
The repertoire of the concert included dance music, solos, folk songs, as well as a guest performance by Slobin, who sang a folk song and played a traditional two-string, lute-like instrument called the rubab. Other traditional Afghan instruments used included drums called diorama, and a percussive tambourine-like instrument called the daira. All of the songs played were traditional folk pieces and discussed traditional folk themes, such as young girls preparing to leave their families to marry.
Students seemed enthusiastic after the concert, recognizing the novelty of Afghan music at Wesleyan. Of course discussion and research at Wesleyan about Afghan art prior to 9/11 occurred before this weekend festival. But “Seeing Through Afghanistan” brought Afghan music and art into the limelight and served as a forum to broaden peoples’ thinking about Afghanistan in a way as of yet unseen at the university.
“The concert was really cool,” said Zach Kolodin ’07. “The musicians played these interesting and beautiful instruments, like the tabla and some of sort of four-string guitar. I don’t take advantage of great opportunities like this often enough.”
“The rebab had a wonderful distant quality because of its sympathetic stings and deep resonating chamber,” said Jesse Watson ’06. “The highlight, however, was certainly the softly forceful, unaffected voice of the female singer, who achieved all the emotion of, say, a new bride leaving her family for her husband’s home, with dignity and subtlety. One could imagine such a concert descending into a curiosity show (as it did for a moment when Slobin came out) but [the female singer] gave the music such integrity and life that it transcended the exotic and spoke to the audience directly.”
“It was very interesting how many of the songs’ themes reflected similar values to those expressed in American folk songs,” said Jeffrey Kessner ’07. “Different songs went at different tempos, some were more conducive to dance, others to mediation.”
In addition to music, the festival included a talk by Slobin, panel discussions, and screenings of Afghan films. The films included premieres of new footage as well as a viewing of “Firedancer,” the first Afghan-American fiction film and Afghanistan’s first-ever Oscar entry (2002), as well as new documentaries.
Slobin had help bringing the festival to Wesleyan by The Edward W. Snowdon Fund and the George Jackson fund and the Departments of Music, Film Studies, Anthropology, and History with support from the Center for the Arts.
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