“The most important thing about this concert,” says Arson Fahim as excitement takes over his usually calm voice, “is that eight new pieces by Afghan composers have been commissioned. Each will be receiving its world premiere at our concert.” He is speaking about the upcoming Concert in Solidarity with Afghan Musicians which he has organized for March 14th at 8:00 PM in Jordan Hall.
“So that means at a time when the Taliban are trying to silence music, we have created eight new pieces of music.” He is too polite to raise his middle finger to the Taliban, but the sentiment is there.
Even more exciting for him, two of the pieces have been composed by musicians living in hiding in Afghanistan. Fahim asked them to record about 20 minutes of original music on their instruments. He will not say on what instruments the musicians played, lest any information he divulges will lead to their arrest.
“Musicians in Afghanistan are being tortured and killed,” he says speaking in the student center at the New England Conservatory where he studies composition and piano. “They are traditional musicians who play traditional music,” is all he will reveal. He will not even say how the recordings reached him in Boston.
“I shared their recordings with composers in the U.S. who have turned them into orchestral pieces. To me, that’s really meaningful, given that there’s not a huge repertoire of orchestral works by Afghan composers. Any effort to expand that repertoire is very important.”
Fahim arrived in Boston from his native Afghanistan to study composition just days before the Taliban took over in August 2021. In the five years since, he has earned a diploma from Longy School of music and is now weeks away from completing his BM at NEC.
Throughout these past five years, there is no day when he is not thinking about Afghanistan. His parents and sister are there. Many fellow musicians are there. Though most of his classmates from the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) were evacuated to Portugal, some remain stuck in a country where music is banned and life for musicians is dangerous.
Three weeks ago, the Taliban made a show of gathering musical instruments they found in two provinces and destroying them in large public bonfires. The message was clear to anyone who wanted to play them.
“Two things made this really hard, for me,” states Fahim. “One is a feeling of guilt to have abandoned my country and my family and my friends and my colleagues at such a difficult time. There are days when I feel like a traitor. I know that being there, I probably wouldn’t be able to do much. But still, I would have been there with them.
“The other thing was, just this feeling of my life suddenly and completely changing, I’m a musician and in my country music got banned. That means I have become a criminal in my own country. I lost my country.”
In his first year in Boston he was emotionally numb and often angry.
“On the T, I would see people listening to music on their headphones as if nothing had happened. I would have this urge to go to them and scream that, this thing that you’re doing right now is a crime Afghanistan. Are you okay with that? Why are you not saying anything about it?”
As his fury turned to resolve, he organized a Concert in Solidarity with Afghan Musicians. He brought together some virtuoso players of Afghan traditional instruments and assembled a small chamber orchestra playing western instruments. Held in 2013 at the First Church in Cambridge, it was a huge success.
“We had this amazing community of people coming together to play music,” Fahim says. “The support by the audience just overwhelming.” It has long been in his mind to have a second concert, but bigger, to attract more attention to the condition of Afghan musicians.
Now for this year’s March 14th concert, the orchestra has swelled to 80-plus players drawn from NEC, Longy, The Boston Conservatory, Boston University and other schools around the country as far away as Oberlin. None of the players are being paid nor having their travel or lodging expenses covered.
“They just want to do it,” Fahim says.
The number of virtuosi have also grown.
Among them is Milad Yousufi, who last year was the first Afghan ever to win an Emmy for music scoring. He has been commissioned to compose an orchestral version of the Attan, the national dance of Afghanistan.
Seare Ahmad Farhat a 2023 BMI Composer Award winner is studies composition at Cornell, has orchestrated one of the pieces smuggled out of Afghanistan. The other was orchestrated by Yangfan Xu, a young Chinese-born and NEC-trained composer now in New York
Violinist Mehran Fanoos was a student with Fahim at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and is now studying at Indiana University.
Elaha Soroor is a well-known signer songwriter in Afghanistan has sent a new song she wrote specifically for this concert. Now living in the U.K., she was unable to get a U.S. visa, The song, whose lyrics are in Farsi, will be performed for her by the Tehran-born Monicki Firouzmand. Mahya Hamedi will be singing an original song she has written for Afghan women
Cellist and orchestral composer, Nazira Wali, fled the Taliban and is now at the University of Memphis. She is a founder of Afghanistan’s all-female Zohra Orchsetra.
Qais Essar is a master of the rabab, a 22-stringed relative to the mandolin and one of the leading figures in contemporary world music. He has played major venues, won many prizes, released two albums, and contributed music to an Oscar-nominated film. He participated in the 2023 Concert in Solidarity with Afghan Musicians where he electrified the audience.
Hamid Habib Zada, a master tabla player who also dazzled in 2023, will return.
Fahim himself is among the composers, and is contributing an orchestral piece, The Eve of the Lovers’ Executions. The title suggests the tragedies with which he is grappling. He says the piece is “nearly finished,” and softly offers as an explanation, “Somebody has to write the emails.”
“Not only are Afghan musicians in danger, they are desperately poor. The way it works in Afghanistan, it’s like, music is something that’s passed down generation to generation within a family. It’s all you’ve ever done. And then when you’re not allowed to do that, like at weddings and celebrations, what do you do to feed your family? Some might have relatives in Europe or the US. who can support them. Some of the greatest musicians still in Afghanistan now go on the street with a cart and try to sell fruits or whatever to make ends meet.”
Fahim has successfully raised funds from the Goethe-Institut Boston, the Longy School, the NEC, Cautro Puntos and Dr. Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey among others, so that each of the composers will be paid, apart from himself.
“It is not much, but will mean a lot to the musicians in Afghanistan.” He has opted to take no fee for his composition “so there will be more to spread around to the others.”
Fahim’s big worry as the concert date approaches is filling Jordan Hall. Helping him with that and other production elements are NEC colleagues Yangfan Xu, Alex Aranzabal, Eleanor Markey, and Inés Issel Burzyńska.
“My goal is to do this again and again and again. Every time I want it to be bigger and better and reach more people, so they know what is happening in Afghanistan. Without a good turnout, it’s gonna be hard for me to convince the next venue or presenter to support me in doing this.”
The concert which starts at 8:00 PM is free. But tickets should be obtained in advance HERE.
Stephen Landrigan is a former print journalist and concert presenter.