Happy to play violin

I committed anew to my students, determined to find better ways to connect with them. For the second variation of "Twinkle," I added the Dari words "Khobi? [pause] Khob!" to fit the rhythm. (They mean "Are you fine? I'm fine!") Another student suggested "Bia bir'im maktab" ("Let's go to school") as a suitable rhythm for the first section.

My ensemble and orchestration class has so many questions that we seldom get to the topics I intended to discuss, which is fine for now. I love the students' insatiable zest for exploration, so when the guitarist started a class by enthusiastically strumming one of the most universal chord progressions (the same four descending chords Bach used as the basis for his famous Chaconne), I encouraged the other students to join in, offering comments about balance and encouraging them to take risks as they riffed over the shifting harmonies.

Another student asked about sonata form, so I gave a crash course in that, before another student asked about string quartets, prompting me to play all the ones on my computer. Since they want to be able to arrange music that is not written down, we worked on dictation with the Indian film song "Lala lala mazal."

Am I starting to view my students as I should: as curious young people deserving of quality education regardless of their background? I think so, although I can never quite forget where I am.

A reporter who observed my lesson asked one of my students questions through an interpreter. A little slip of a girl who loves violin and smiles frequently, she told a story that cut through the routine I am slowly establishing. She is one of six children, all supported by a mother who does laundry for money. About a decade ago, the government at the time beat her father with an electric cable; he is now paralyzed and cannot work. Before she arrived at the school, she sold chewing gum on the street for a year, and I attribute her persistent cough to that time.

She is so happy to be playing violin.

Inventory

Last Saturday, ANIM welcomed the second member of its international staff: Norma, a Mexican percussionist. Given her experience working in a library in Paris, she proved a tremendous help with the week's main task: taking inventory of the massive shipment of musical instruments that had arrived the previous week.

This proved surprisingly exhausting. On one day, I ran back and forth from my computer to the innumerable boxes of percussion instruments, racing to keep up with the pace set by a dozen excited colleagues opening the boxes of instruments their students would soon be using. I would leap to where my laptop balanced precariously on a box of ukuleles, hurriedly type a cryptic entry into my Excel spreadsheet, and then race back to the next box to give it a reference number with my dark blue permanent marker, accidentally inking myself so often in the process that my cerulean shirt now looks like a modern artwork called "Study in Blue" by a third-rate Jackson Pollock.

By the end of the day I was utterly drained, my legs sore from constant crouching, jumping, and running around the library where all the instruments were stored. Yet the result was a rough draft of a document that revealed both the scope and whimsy of the largesse of the Society of Music Merchants.

When we found the first pair of miniature conga drums, Norma was delighted, expertly tapping out a complex rhythm, showing herself to be an extraordinary musician and the drums to be of the finest quality. The more we discovered, the more all of us were astonished and happy for her and her students, until at some point (perhaps around the thirtieth box) our astonishment turned to bewilderment. We're thrilled by the German generosity, but do ANIM's dozen percussionists really need exactly 68 pairs of miniature congas? We will distribute some of them to other emerging music institutions, such as a school for the blind.

The massive shipment ran the gamut from the very finest Yamaha pianos to 41 guitars to clarinets to computers to a dozen world-class microphones to flat-screen TVs and beyond to the more unusual items: a Wagner tuba, a couple bass recorders, a couple mandolins, a set of bagpipes, and a hammer dulcimer with a Santa hat.

The highlight for me was the violins. Forget cheap factory-made instruments. The violinists of Afghanistan will be learning on world-class, hand-made German instruments, some of which are significantly better than mine. I was thrilled to discover the outstanding Bubenreuth-based luthier Gottfried Raabs, who will be represented in Kabul by three outstanding violins and three beautiful violas. I was particularly taken with a magnificent 1920 violin by one Francesco Bertani of Modena, Italy. Some donors added a personal touch: an older man tucked into the violin case a photo of himself with his two dogs, and one woman included some stationery, markers, some pressed flowers, and her business card.

Due to the lengthy process of inventory and the many hours spent waiting in various offices in a successful attempt to get a visa extension and an unsuccessful attempt to mail a package, my students were deprived of me nearly all week. One of them, a girl who weaves rugs to help her family make ends meet, said accusingly in Dari: "Where were you? I have not had a lesson in two weeks."

Suddenly, I felt terribly guilty. True, the inventory needed doing, but I had lingered over the finer violins longer than necessary. Throughout the week, I found delight in the cultural exchange moments that add color to a Cultures in Harmony project: a rifle-toting guard who cultivates flowers and urged me to smell one while I waited one evening for a pizza, or my friend the librarian who heard me play some Bach and said, "I will not say it is like jewelry, because jewelry has value and truly this music is beyond value." Such a moment happens, and I think: "Ah! That will look good in the blog on Friday."

Yet I need to be harsh with myself. I must not become yet another relatively privileged Westerner who goes to developing countries to be seen as helping, rather than actually helping. In the eyes of my students, Afghanistan is not exotic and they are not oppressed, downtrodden children meekly emerging from war. Afghanistan is their home, and they are music-loving students who expect and demand the quality instruction they deserve. I must commit anew to teaching them, and realize that I have been here a month now. Setting aside the fact that this is Afghanistan, I am a violin teacher with the same responsibilities and obligations as a violin teacher in Indiana or New York.

Thanks to the Germans, Afghanistan's children will learn music on the very finest student instruments in the world. Now it is up to me to ensure that their instruction is of equal quality.

Pakistan documentary online

I will update this blog whenever major Cultures in Harmony news comes along, though I will continue to add new diary entries about my work at Afghanistan National Institute of Music on Fridays.

I am thrilled that Dawn News has uploaded Umbreen Butt's fabulous documentary about our Pakistan project to YouTube! Check out chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5!

While we're talking Cultures in Harmony, I'm still overwhelmed by the generosity of the German government to ANIM. Germany, unlike many countries, understands the importance of cultural diplomacy. A friend sent me this article about recent testimony to the US congress about the importance of the arts. The arts are important not just for the diplomatic goals of winning friends around the world, but also for their own sake. I hope that donors in America grow to understand this, and I urge anyone who questions the relevance or significance of the arts to drop by our school in Kabul.

The German shipment

I sat in my studio with a few orchestration students, none of us really concentrating. We absent-mindedly went through some solfege. We were all too excited to think, for today was the day the instruments would come.

I wrote earlier in this blog about the condition of the instruments I had found at the school. Dr. Sarmast was aware of this problem long before I came here, so he worked with the German Embassy and the Goethe Institute to arrange a shipment of five tons of instruments donated by the Society of Music Merchants.

The Australian filmmaker came up to my window: "William, the instruments are here!" I dismissed my students and ran out the door to the driveway. False alarm…it turned out to be the cultural affairs officer from the Germany Embassy. By this time, nearly all the students had left their classes, so we hung around, sitting in the forklift, chatting, or listening to music.

Finally a shout went up. This time it was for real. I ran out to the street.

I had thought that "five tons" might be hyperbole until I saw the trucks. An enormous crane lumbered up the road to our gate, followed by three of the largest trucks I'd ever seen. Another teacher and I stood in front of the guardhouse, jumping up and down and hugging each other. This turned out to be dumb: the crane nearly ran into us. These vehicles were not built for tight turns.

We slipped past the crane and back onto campus. Where would the trucks unload? A couple workers bent one of our lanterns to the ground. Slowly, the four behemoths eased their way up the driveway, coughing up exhaust, threatening to knock over trees.

I walked around with my camera on video mode, asking students what they thought. One of them, an easy-going older teenager lounging in the forklift, said "Actually I am so happy" and one of his friends teased him: "Don't cry!" He insisted in Dari that he was just pretending. Was he?

The crane maneuvered into our field next to the first truck as the Associated Press, Afghan media, and the Australian film crew scrambled to record this moment. Slowly, the crane lifted the first shipping container off the truck and lowered it to the ground. The German cultural affairs officer made a few notes on her manifest, and then opened it to a burst of applause. I struggled to make my way through the crowd of students to the front as one of the teachers shouted to me: "William! Violins!"

The small yellow forklift lifted each package out of the shipping container and gently set it down just by the school entrance. Then, the older boys would have at it, guided energetically but kindly by our librarian. A group of ten or twelve boys would each find a handhold and hoist it up the stairs to the library for storage. I pitched in several times, enjoying the labor, not caring that my suit was getting dirty.

These packages were no joke. Each one massed several hundred kilograms and contained eight guitars, a dozen violins, drum sets, a piano, monitors for the multimedia room, a recording studio, or computers. We carried up the monitors individually, and I commented to Dr. Sarmast, pleasantly surprised: "We're getting Toshiba? This is great stuff." He smiled.

Eventually, all the shipping containers were unloaded, emptied, and reloaded, their contents safely residing in the library. Together with several other teachers, I signed my name on a blank piece of paper and taped it over the locked door. The students trickled off, the German cultural affairs officer left with our heartfelt thanks, and a calm settled over the institute, enabling me to reflect on the students who would soon be using this world-class equipment.

I thought of a girl who at her first lesson was so shy she practically faded into the wall. At her lesson this week, she seemed far more confident, asking the Australian cameraman if she could sing a song in English right into the camera.

Another girl kept holding the bow too lightly. I told her to hug the bow, imagining that it was her friend: "archet dostetan ast." She looked absolutely radiant and kissed the bow, as I looked on in amusement, wondering why a tear had suddenly arrived in my eye as she showered her violin bow with affection.

A guitar player stayed after school for a half hour because he was so excited by my copy of Robert Starer's Rhythmic Training that he is now determined to make it through this demanding book.

The ANIM students aren't perfect, of course. The idea of regular, structured, individual practice is new to them, so I typed up a practice policy that I will propose to the teachers tomorrow and then the students. With the ghichak teacher, I am working hard to develop a method book, so that more students and audiences grow to hold this ancient instrument in the high esteem it deserves. Many of the students are bound by tradition, and it can be hard to make demands of them that are different than what they know.

I think of my new student who used to sell plastic bags on the street. She had her first lesson this week. She was so happy to play the violin that she smiled every single second of her lesson.

I thought of the constancy of that smile this morning as I sat composing in my garden while butterflies flitted about the dandelions and the sun embraced the sky. There is some measure of justice in this world.

The Bird Market

Young men clutching eagles to their chest, jammed against old bearded fellows patiently making their way through boisterous gangs of teenage boys peering at the fighting birds, shoving past fathers kindly helping sons choose from among dozens of twittering songbirds all pressed us relentlessly forward along a narrow dirt path through ancient mud buildings from which towers of bird cages threatened to topple on the seething mass below, past an old man in a tiny hut methodically carving the end of a bird net with a curved knife, past an alcove where one vendor listlessly stirred boiling chickpeas and a cave-like restaurant where men stared at us expressionlessly as they waited for sizzling lamb, until the old bird market itself coughed us up on a wider, quieter street where the blue perfection of the birds' natural home finally embraced us overhead.

The street selling musical instruments and kites made a welcome change, though the sight of bombed-out shops was a sobering reminder of where we were. I delighted in trying out different rubabs, including one worth $2,000. Its strings resonated magnificently; the intricacy of the mother-of-pearl inlaid in the wood was a stunning instance of Afghan craftsmanship at its best.

We crossed a broad paved street on which a tiny boy sat glumly on a cart, urging his donkey to keep pace with the cars. Soon, a gaggle of children surrounded us, including one who pointed out a nearby mosque said to date from the time of the Ghaznavids. The mullah, a young man fluent in English, welcomed us warmly and gave me a hug when we left.

We walked back to the music street so that the Australian film crew could get a few shots of Dr. Sarmast, so I joined a group of young men outside a kite shop as they rapidly spun kite string from small spindles onto a huge one which they would take turns spinning, two at a time. I tried it for a few seconds until my wrists gave out on me; grinning, the boys offered me tea, naan khoshk (thick bread), and lamb. I sat down for a short rest at the end of what had been an eventful week.

A few days ago, I had been in the middle of trying to resolve a student's problem. She seemed upset, and so I searched for a translator to find out why when I got a phone call from Homayun Sakhi that stopped everything. He was just outside the school.

What Yo-Yo Ma is to the cello, Homayun Sakhi is to the rubab. He has toured the world, worked with the Kronos Quartet, represented the rubab at the Smithsonian, and is one of the few musicians able to make a living in the United States playing Afghanistan's national instrument. My father had forwarded me an article about his work with Kronos, and I contacted him to see if he might drop by the school some time.

I ran to the entrance to greet him and invited him to come to my studio. We chatted about the school until I saw one of my two English-speaking violin students through the window and motioned for him to come in. He ran around to my door and answered a few of Ustad Sakhi's questions in Dari before I suggested that he get all the rubab students.

More quickly than seemed possible, three little boys and a girl came pouring into my room, happily clutching their rubabs. The Ustad (master musician) spoke with them kindly, asking them questions, giving the girl a pick from his pocket, and tuning their instruments. We asked him to play a short piece for us. One of the little boys turned to me, pleading, when the gong sounded for lunch, but I sternly said: "Mohem ast! Naan khordan, pasantar." (This is important. Lunch, later.)

Word was spreading. I could imagine students running through the halls, shouting excitedly "The great rubab player is here!" Soon my tiny studio was jam packed. A few of the older students stared admiringly at the two deluxe CD-DVD sets of his that Ustad Sakhi had brought as gifts. Soon the Australian film crew came in, and then the construction crew came into my room and began discussing my electrical outlet and taking measurements.

I asked Ustad Sakhi if I could join him for a couple pieces, so we played "Let's Go To Mazar" and "Anar Anar," though his version of "Anar Anar" was so different than the one I learned that I had to stop, embarrassed. A student tabla player came in to join us. The students clapped enthusiastically and the tabla player glowed as the Ustad gave him a few words of quiet praise that will stick with him the rest of his life.

The visit left us all on a high, and I returned to teaching with new zeal. My methods continue to evolve as I find ways to adapt the brilliant method of Mimi Zweig and Brenda Brenner to Afghan culture.

Studying the Suzuki Method of violin in the US, I was told to keep the bow straight by keeping it on the "Kreisler highway," an imaginary miniature roadway named after the great violinist Fritz Kreisler and leading from the end of one F-hole to the other. With one student, I decided the highway was in for a name change. I told him to stay on the Kabul-Jalalabad highway, and he grinned and played with a perfectly straight bow (never mind that the real-life highway with that name curves a lot). As Afghans know, that highway hugs steep mountainsides; just a tiny swerve and you'll sail off into the valley.

Since many of the bow games kids play in the US would not translate, I made up a new one: "Grass in a River" (Chaman da Darya). They hold the bow vertically at arm's length and then move their arm languidly, letting each joint undulate, as though their arm were a long blade of grass gently rocked back and forth by the river's current.

Despite my need to use Dari, I've discovered that it doesn't always work to point at things and look woefully at your students for a word. I had been trying to tell one student that his wrist resembled the rigid stone on the windowsill, so I pointed to it and he said "tok." My suspicions were aroused about ten students later, when an older student said "sang." No wonder the students in between had given me strange looks when I begged them to avoid that common student mistake: a wrist that is like a windowsill.

When all language fails, I resort to other means. One student had difficulty remembering the form of Sol-Re-Sol, which is AABA. She got it after two techniques I made up. First, I put three CDs on the floor with my camel puppet after the second CD: AABA form. When that started to work, I put my baton on the floor to divide the room in two. I would sing the A sections on one side, jump over the baton to sing the B section, and jump back to sing the A section. She got it.

In our orchestration class, we watch and discuss Knowledge is the Beginning to pass the time until our textbooks arrive. The documentary presents the story behind Daniel Barenboim's orchestra in which Arabs and Israelis play together in hope of peace. In 1999, Barenboim decided to have the musicians visit a concentration camp, since they were rehearsing in Germany. When my students saw the barbed wire, high walls, and guard towers on screen, one of them innocently asked: "Is that a school?" I realized with a start that it resembled many schools of Afghanistan.

Yet such grim moments are few compared with the pleasant ones. My initial concern on learning that I was about to get more new students vanished when I saw that one of them was this tiny slip of a girl who presses her face against the window to watch me practice when the other kids are playing during recess. I don't think I have seen happiness so purely manifested as in her smile when she learned she would be studying violin with me.

Today's day of tourism drew to a close as we drove up a hill with a 360-degree of Kabul and the towering snow-capped mountains that surround it. As dusk drew the light from the sky, wedding palaces gave us neon winks from the distance. Children chased each other at the bottom of an abandoned swimming pool. The fast, lilting beat of a song featuring a Pakistani woman singing in Pashto blared from the open window of a station wagon until it gave way to the hauntingly beautiful counterpoint of half a dozen muezzins calling Kabul's faithful to prayer. I clambered on top of a broken-down tank for a spectacular view of a city that should not know anything other than peace. Yet on the way back, we had to stop in traffic as a convoy of heavily armored military vehicles lumbered out of some military base. Those machine gun toting soldiers in their body armor were going to their job, and a grimly necessary one it may be. Tomorrow I will go do mine...with my violin.

National anthem completed

Due to an increasing work load, I am going to switch to updating about once weekly, probably on Fridays, since that is the day off here. Please assume that no news is good news. As I never tired of telling friends, I feel far safer here than I did when I lived in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, where my life was threatened three times in 2009 alone.

Yesterday I completed the first ever arrangement of the national anthem of Afghanistan to include traditional Afghan, South Asian, and Western instruments. Balancing the overwhelming power of the trumpet with the softly keening tone of the ghichak would be nearly impossible: the ghichak will color the sitar's statement of the theme, and the trumpet is saved for the very end.