Harmony Beat

Opportunity for musicians from Egypt, Pakistan, Philippines, Tunisia, and USA

2012-01-26T16:19:00.004+04:30

Cultures in Harmony is happy to promote an exciting opportunity for musicians from 40 countries. The countries from that list where CiH has done projects are Egypt, Pakistan, Philippines, Tunisia, and USA.

OneBeat is an international music exchange that celebrates musical collaboration and social engagement through innovative people-to-people diplomacy. In the fall of 2012, 30 musicians (ages 19-35) from around the world will come together in the USA for four weeks to collaboratively write, produce, and perform original music, and develop ways that music can make a positive impact on our local and global communities.

OneBeat will be a musical journey like no other. It is a chance for adventurous musicians from an incredible diversity of traditions to seek common ground, creating new musical combinations, pushing the boundaries of music technology, and finding ways to involve all members of society in the process of musical creativity. OneBeat endeavors to be the nexus of a new way of thinking about how music can connect people from across the world and around the block.

One Beat is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, administered by Bang on a Can’s Found Sound Nation.

New website and Kennedy Center video

2012-01-12T14:28:00.003+04:30

Cultures in Harmony's new website is live!

Check it out here.

Thank you to Amanda von Goetz, our board member and Founder of GvG Studios, for this great new design! The design will make it much easier to learn the facts about Cultures in Harmony.

Also, if you missed watching the webcast of the Kennedy Center concert featuring Cultures in Harmony Deputy Director Kimball Gallagher and Nidhal Jebali, the video is available here.

Article about Kennedy Center concert

2012-01-08T20:10:00.001+04:30

Check out this great article about today's concert by Kimball Gallagher and Nidhal Jebali at the Kennedy Center! And, don't forget to watch the webcast of the concert live today at 6:00 p.m. EST here.

Concert at Kennedy Center

2012-01-06T10:00:00.001+04:30

Happy New Year from Cultures in Harmony! Thank you so much to all the donors who supported us in the past year. We could not do what we do without you.

This Sunday, January 8, 2012, at 6:00 p.m. EST, at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater in Washington, DC, Tunisian violinist Nidhal Jebali and American pianist Kimball Gallagher will perform a concert
commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Tunisian revolution. I met Nidhal on CiH’s first project, in Tunisia in 2005, and Kimball is CiH’s Deputy Director for Tunisia.

Please join us and thousands of Tunisians who will tune into the live webcast of this concert, which will be available at this link. The concert will feature works by the Finance Minister of Tunisia.

Tuning in to this concert will be a great way to remember the historic achievements of the Tunisian people and to show your support for two musicians with close connections to Cultures in Harmony!

How You Helped Changed Tunisian Students' Lives in 2011

2011-12-23T10:24:00.004+04:30

As this holiday season lights our lives with joy and gratitude, I’m very grateful to you for what your support for Cultures in Harmony has made possible. In a year when revolution swept across the Arab world, our work has become more relevant than ever. We have been working to build people-to-people relationships in Tunisia since 2005 and in Egypt in 2008. Thank you for enabling us to continue to do so.

Cultures in Harmony Deputy Director Kimball Gallagher has been to Tunisia twice since their revolution, and to Egypt once since theirs, in order to plan our projects in those countries in 2012. We helped
send young Tunisian musicians Senda and Amani to the New York Summer Music Festival in summer 2011. As part of our ongoing effort to raise the profile of CiH, I lectured about Cultures in Harmony’s work in Tunisia, Egypt, and Pakistan on the campus of the British Parliament and at the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin.

The heart-warming impact of Kimball’s trips is best expressed by a young Tunisian composer, who wrote to Kimball: “But the moment I played that piece for you, my life changed, that was the first time I feel that someone at least considered and gave value to what I’m doing.” Read the rest of this young man’s letter here.

On January 8, 2012, Kimball and Tunisian violinist Nidhal Jebali will collaborate in a program presented by the Kennedy Center at their Terrace Theatre in Washington! I met Nidhal on Cultures in Harmony’s first project (Tunisia 2005) and urged him to pursue his dream of continuing violin; he now studies at Indiana University. Kimball and Nidhal will play compositions by the Hon. Jaloul Ayed, the Tunisian Minister of Finance. They will also share stories of their experiences in Tunisia during Cultures in Harmony projects. The concert commemorates the one-year anniversary of the Tunisian revolution and will be webcast; follow CiH on Twitter to stay informed about
this exciting event!

We hope that as you plan your year-end giving, you will consider making a contribution to Cultures in Harmony.

At a time when the urgency of maintaining and growing people-to-people relationships throughout the world is more clear than ever, our work remains a valuable component in humanity’s shared journey towards understanding. In this season of gratitude for friends and family, Cultures in Harmony thanks you for your support as we continue to connect individuals across the world through the gift of music.

The most incredible, moving letter from a Tunisian student

2011-12-22T10:59:00.003+04:30

A composition student in Tunisia wrote this letter to Cultures in Harmony Deputy Director Kimball Gallagher after performing for him in Beni Mitr, Tunisia, at the Atlas Music Academy in 2011:

I'm writing you this message to tell you that I'm so thankful and I owe you a lot. Really, none was considering my compositions, I didn't even get a little encouragement which made me even think to stop composing and that's what happaned, I stopped that for about 6 months before the training of the summer at Beni Mtir. I thought that people were not interested in what I'm doing and made me think I'm silly when saying: "I composed something " just because I don't interpret a lot for other composers like my other colleagues do. Plus, I was on my own, I live in a town when I couldn't even find a piano teacher, I visited Mdm Fusun once per year when I get the chance to go to the capital. It was really hard, so I was always trying to improve my techniques and myself through what I compose. even during the training I didn't have the chance to have a couple of courses from you. But the moment I played that piece for you, my life changed, that was the first time I feel that someone at least considered and gave value to what Im doing or trying to do. And then you put me on contact with Simon, with whom I'm doing great work and progressing a lot and he really feels what I'm doing. I am very happy now and I'm focusing on what I have. And all that thanks to you, that's why I wrote you this message to thank you Kimball :)

New Board Member

2011-12-02T10:12:00.002+04:30

We are happy to welcome Kimball Gallagher to the board of Cultures in Harmony. Kimball has participated in our annual Tunisia project since 2007 and has led it since 2009. In 2011, he has traveled twice to Tunisia and once to Egypt to maintain, grow, and develop relationships for Connect Cultures through Counterpoint, our upcoming project in those countries. Keep your eye on this blog for news of an exciting concert Kimball will perform at the Kennedy Center in Washington!

We are grateful to Kimball for his expertise and look forward to the exciting ideas he will bring to Cultures in Harmony, ideas that will help us build a dynamic and sustainable future.

The Friendship Bell

2011-11-25T21:38:00.004+04:30

Bo-o-o-o-o-nnnnng. The log swayed crazily on its chains long after I had pulled it back and released it, so that it could strike this soft but powerfully resonant note on the mammoth bell. Beneath the elegant wooden pavilion, deeply green grass banked down towards a meandering creek. In the middle distance, a jogging path wove past a few low-lying trees. All was at peace.

The disconnect between the setting of the Friendship Bell and the reason it was built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, can be jarring at first. Oak Ridge did not exist until it was built as part of the Manhattan Project. The town was a Secret City, built to refine materials that were then shipped to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where they were made into the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Friendship Bell attempts to establish friendship between the country of Japan and the city where its defeat in 1945 was assured.

I pulled the log back again. The ring of the bell is somber and a bit foreboding, like a warning not to forget. But what should be remembered? I decided that it is right and good that the bell remembers the tragedies of the Second World War in such an idyllic setting, to symbolize hope for a better future. How is it doing? What are people remembering, and what are they forgetting?

The panels of the bell beautifully depict American and Japanese nature scenes. The architecture of the pavilion housing the bell evokes Japanese and Midwestern American characteristics. Clearly, the bell wants to remind us to reach out, to seek to understanding. The bell is architecture, art, and one long, sad musical note as cultural diplomacy, just as Cultures in Harmony explores music’s ability to promote understanding.

And yet, over the past couple years, the words “of Japan” had been quite deliberately scratched out on the metal plate affixed to the log. In spite of more than six decades of friendship and peace, some vandals did not want Japan remembered.

I was in Oak Ridge on annual leave from my job at Afghanistan National Institute of Music. My old friend Dan Allcott had invited me to perform the Ranjbaran Concerto with the Oak Ridge Symhony and to give a recital with pianist Paul Thurmond at Tennessee Tech University. I had a great time playing those concerts and enjoying wonderful Tennessee hospitality. Since this is my one vacation this year, I was thrilled that my parents could join me, and that we had time to explore beautiful parts of the USA, such as Burgess Falls State Park.

I performed another recital with Dr. Elena Cholakova, live on WFMT Chicago. And before that, I spent a week in New York City seeing friends and holding meetings related to Cultures in Harmony and to my job in Afghanistan. A highlight of my time in New York was attending a benefit concert given by American Voices, a leading American cultural diplomacy organization. Its director, John Ferguson, has been a wonderful mentor and friend to me during the six years I have worked to build Cultures in Harmony.

At the benefit, I was blown away by the quality of the Iraqi musicians that American Voices has worked with in Kurdistan at their annual YES Academy. American Voices has brought some of these extraordinary musicians to study in St. Louis. These Kurdish violinists from Iraq have superb bow control, stage presence, and a passionate commitment to their music. I hope that they can perform in every city in the United States, so that Americans would remember the common love of music we share with Iraqis, and forget the stereotypes they harbor about what it means to be from a country like Iraq.

The following week in Oak Ridge, the Oak Ridge Symphony kindly organized a benefit event for Cultures in Harmony. The lessons I learned at the American Voices benefit were fresh in my mind, so I selected my anecdotes with care. I related one that I don’t always tell when making a presentation about Cultures in Harmony.

In 2007, Cultures in Harmony flew to the island of Mindanao in the Philippines to create compositions with teenagers from the Tala-Andig tribes, located in the remote village of Miarayon, where clouds beard the mountains and magic moves through every verdant valley. At the beginning of the workshops, I noticed a young girl off by herself, squatting on the ground, picking at the dirt beneath the pines with a short twig.

“Why don’t you join your group?” I asked her.

After a while, she glumly explained in halting English that some other girls had made fun of her outfit. I leaned over and said, “Well, when I was your age, the other kids called me ‘Fancy Pants.’ I was upset too, but I turned out OK. Why don’t you re-join the group?” She smiled slightly, and went back to her small group.

Two years later, we were happy to help our partner organization, the Cartwheel Foundation, with a gala concert at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, in celebration of their tenth anniversary. They brought the various indigenous groups with which we had worked in 2007, 2008, and 2009 to Manila for the performance. A girl from Miarayon passed me a small blue note, which she said was from another girl who was sorry that she was unable to come.

I saw that the letter was dated June 15, 2009, and at the bottom, I read the words: “By the way Sir, maybe you don’t know who am I or who I am writing to you.., I’m the girl who was lonely and then you came to me and you let me convince to smile?”

Two years later, and she had not forgotten.

Perhaps I chose this story because like the Friendship Bell, I believe we have the power to choose what to remember and what to forget. In Indianapolis today, the day after a Thanksgiving where I gave thanks that my brother could travel 768 miles from Dallas and I could travel 7,069 miles from Kabul to be with our parents, I went on a walk through the wooded yard of the house where our family has lived since 1987.

The walk was too brief, too cluttered with dead leaves and childhood memories for me to have the time to wade through it all. Here was the pine tree, now twice my height, that I once transplanted with a friend. Was it beneath that other tree that we built our forts? Where did I build tiny bridges across the drainage ditch, bridges which I would then proudly show my parents? Ah, here is the leaf pile I would jump into.

Tomorrow I head to New York City, then Dubai, then Kabul. The note sounded by the Friendship Bell in Oak Ridge will stay with me. As individuals, we can choose how we remember both childhood play and schoolyard taunts. As nations, we can choose how we remember the conflicts that divided us from one another. Music, architecture, and art urge us never to forget the lessons we learn from tragedy, but to give preference in our remembrance to pain past, rather than saddling our memories with a throbbing, ever-present pain that we will not allow to dissipate. Only this too-well-remembered pain could have found immature expression in that vandalism that obliterated “of Japan” from the Friendship Bell’s ringer.

The notes bells sound soon fade. May our thirst for forgiveness, understanding, peace, and love never be allowed to do so.

Article in Tunisian press

2011-10-28T21:44:00.003+04:30

Cultures in Harmony is proud of the strong relationship we have had with Tunisian civil society since 2005, a relationship that is growing after their revolution. Deputy Director Kimball Gallagher has visited twice since January 2011! Here is an article about Cultures in Harmony in the Tunisian media, dating from his most recent visit. The article mentions the story of Nidhal Jebali, whom I discovered in Tunis in 2005. Read about Nidhal's story at the CiH website!

For those of you who don't read French, myself included, I used Google's language tools to generate a translation, which I then edited for clarity:

A Tunisian-American Musical Soirée at the Acropolium
by Emmanuelle Houerbi

This past October 17, Nidhal Jebali violinist and pianist Kimball Gallagher performed in concert at the Acropolium as part of the musical in October. This was an opportunity to hear one of our young talents and to discover the American Association "Cultures in Harmony." Its goal: "uniting people through music."

Nidhal Jebali, second year student at the prestigious Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in the United States, appears regularly in concert in Tunisia. This Oct. 17, as part of the music festival in October, he performed with the American Kimball Gallagher works by Debussy, Wieniawski, and Cesar Franck, and one of his compositions: "Metamorphoses."

Concert after concert, the audience has had the pleasure of seeing this young violinist and composer change rapidly, making the most of his time overseas and the teachings of famous masters.

Nidhal Jebali: a "success story"

It all started in summer 2005. William Harvey, an American violinist who graduated from the Juilliard School in New York and founded Cultures in Harmony, was for the first time on tour in Tunisia. After hearing Nidhal Jebali, who was 15 years old, play the fourth concerto by Mozart, he was convinced of having found a young talent. On his advice, Nidhal participated in summer 2006 at the Summer String Academy of Indiana University, led by the violinist Mimi Zweig.

For the record, Nidhal is the first student from Africa, and his presence raised a host of unusual questions: "You come from Africa? But you're not black!", "Do you have cars or do you move around on your camel?" "Are you a terrorist?" Five years later, he laughs at this. Fortunately, Nidhal is sociable, friendly, and his first experience was successful, reoccuring the next two summers.

Then in 2009, time for business. After graduating from high school, Nidhal again obtained a scholarship, but this time to go study the violin at the prestigious Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. And last summer, before starting his second year, Nidhal attended the New York Summer Music Festival with another young Tunisian violinist, Senda Zayati. A new memorable and informative experience.

Crossing borders through music

If Nidhal had a unique opportunity (and a lot of credit!), he is not the only one supported by the association and the U.S. embassy to develop his talent. Every year since 2005, teachers and American musicians cross the Atlantic for concerts, conduct master classes, and participate in music courses in Tunisia.

Since this last summer, Kimball Gallagher has provided courses to over 30 young pianists at the Atlas Beni Mtir Music Academy, along with the Turkish-Tunisian pianist Füsun Regaieg and Polish pianist Lech Furdyna. A perfect example of harmony and blending of cultures around a common passion: music.

More generally, since its inception in 2005, Cultures in Harmony conducted over twenty projects in over 10 countries and formed a group of fifty musicians (from all sources, and mostly women) who travel the world in projects depending on the needs on the ground. True "musical ambassadors" for the promotion of cultural exchanges, they build a positive image of the United States in the world.

Music for a successful democratic transition?

After the Arab revolutions, Cultures in Harmony is committed to supporting the democratic transition in Tunisia and Egypt. The focus of its projects will be on chamber music, conducting, composition, and the organization of a "musical caravan" across the regions. This ambitious project is called "Connect Cultures Through Counterpoint," in reference to this delicate musical discipline in which several voices coexist in perfect harmony. On his blog, William Harvey, the founder of the association, is delighted about this project: "Our work in Tunisia is older and deeper than in any other country."

Since the first project in 2005, the exchanges have never ceased, and over 10 American musicians have traveled to Tunisia to date, thanks to the many donors and the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, which has supported and continues to support this ambitious initiative.

Ten years ago today

2011-09-16T22:39:00.002+04:30

Ten years ago today, I performed for soldiers from the Fighting Sixty-Ninth Regiment as they returned from a long day of rescue and cleanup work at Ground Zero of the World Trade Center. As they walked up the stairs of the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, they would take off their helmets, look at me playing the violin, and smile. That experience convinced me that music can positively transform society. As a result of this belief, I founded Cultures in Harmony in 2005.

Since then, we have conducted over 20 projects in a dozen countries promoting cultural understanding through music. I just got back from London, where I spoke about our work at the British Parliament’s Portcullis House, as part of a conference sponsored by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. The theme of the conference was “A Three Piece Puzzle: The Relationship between Culture, International Relations and Globalization.”

In the presentation, I guided conference participants through the process we often use to create compositions with communities in the countries where we do projects. I gave the example of Egypt in 2009, where Cultures in Harmony created compositions with underprivileged girls in Alexandria. One of those girls was Marwa, a pint-sized little imp in a red skirt, who delighted us with her constant smiles. Marwa, who works in a factory making rugs every day after school, said that she loves us. A sweet reaction to our project, but when we think of the tragedy of ten years ago and the tragedies that unfold today whenever terrorism strikes across the globe, how relevant is the reaction of a sweet and loving little girl in Egypt to composition workshops presented by Americans?

At the end of the London lecture, I said something like this: “This conference speaks of a three-piece puzzle, but I can't help thinking a fourth piece is missing. Culture can help us deal with inhumanity, international relations provide a forum for trying to prevent it, and globalization often increases it. The pieces don’t fit when terrorism strikes. Why should we keep going? Reason might impel us to give up, but that fourth piece is not reason. It is hope. Cultures in Harmony will continue to create compositions with young Egyptian girls like Marwa, because especially after the events of this year, we know that Marwa can aspire to have a voice in Egypt's future. After her composition workshops with us, hers is a voice she will lift as a friend.”

Donate to Cultures in Harmony now to sustain the hope of girls like Marwa. With your support, Cultures in Harmony will return to Egypt, Tunisia, and Pakistan in 2012.

Checks made payable to "Cultures in Harmony" may be mailed to PO Box 1244, New York, NY 10163.

London conference

2011-09-03T15:09:00.003+04:30

Cultures in Harmony recently benefited from being featured as a partner in a conference presented in London by the Berlin-based Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. I arrived at Heathrow early in the morning of Thursday, August 25, and just a few hours later, I delivered a presentation at Portcullis House of the British Parliament. Entitled “Musical Diplomacy in Action,” the presentation was intended to guide conference participants through the process Cultures in Harmony uses to create compositions with local communities in our projects.

After a brief introduction to our projects around the world, I did a couple exercises to illustrate the suitability of music to cultural diplomacy. First, I did an exercise (cribbed from Augusto Boal) in which I drew a person with a dotted line. I asked the participants to imagine that the person is a London rioter. Within the person, on the left side of the dotted line, we will write one justification the rioter would offer for his/her actions. On the right side of the line, we will write a self-critical comment. The area outside the drawing of the person represents the way the London rioter would be viewed by a business owner affected by the riots. On the left side, we had to write a positive comment this person would make about the rioter; on the right side, we had to write a negative comment.

The participants enjoyed the exercise and gave creative answers. Then, we repeated a similar exercise with music. I played the beginning of the third movement of the Brahms Violin Concerto and then the beginning of the first movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. I asked the audience to explain why one excerpt sounded like the perspective of the rioter and why the other excerpt sounded like the perspective of the business owner. As they soon discovered, arguments could easily be made that the two pieces of music, different and emotionally communicative though they are, represent either one or the other perspective. The words in the first exercise pin us down; music communicates powerfully while enabling us to bring our unique perspectives to bear.

With the help of my observing friend, the superb British violinist Simon Hewitt Jones, I warmed up the participants, getting them used to creating music through the sounds they could make with their voices and bodies. Soon, we created a short but effective piece about arriving in a new country while jet lagged.

I asked them to consider what they knew about their fellow participants before we started, and what they knew now. I told them: “As you reflect on the composition we have just created, ask yourself if you know what religion I am. Wait, how would this question be relevant to musical diplomacy in action?

“In Egypt in 2009, Cultures in Harmony created compositions with underprivileged girls in Alexandria. Afterwards, we wanted to know what the girls thought, so working with our translators, we asked them. One little girl named Marwa, who works in a factory making rugs when she's done with school each day, said that she loves us. When we asked the girls what religion they thought we were, they all thought that we are Muslim. This reaction shows that over the course of the workshops, they had come to see us as not so different from them after all. If musical diplomacy can get this reaction, what can't it do?

“In addition to my work with Cultures in Harmony, I also teach violin at Afghanistan National Institute of Music; in fact, this morning I arrived from Kabul via Dubai. I also conduct the orchestra at the school, an orchestra that has included little girls playing the violin ever since I conducted the concert celebrating the school's inauguration on June 20, 2010. That concert took place on a stage donated by the British Council.

“For me, the tragic attack on the British Council in Kabul was not an attack on a faceless institution. It was an attack on Paul Smith. I don't know Paul well, but I've spoken with him at parties in Kabul. He's the director of the British Council in Afghanistan: an older man, jolly, easy to talk to and like. No ideology that seeks to kill a decent man can claim any kind of sanction or justification.

“Fortunately, Paul was in New York. The casualties were mainly Afghan policemen. But once again, this is personal for me: Afghan policemen protect the home where I live. When they see me, they wish me a good afternoon and ask me to play the violin for them. I put down my case and play a few Afghan tunes next to the barbed wire and concrete barriers. These are men who like to listen to an Afghan tune and have agreed to work for next to no money so that their country can have a safe future. They deserve to be a part of that future, and the Taliban cruelly denied them this possibility. The British Council, the oldest and most prestigious cultural diplomacy organization, was attacked in spite of all their outreach. Why should Cultures in Harmony continue creating compositions with Egyptian girls like Marwa? Why should the music school in Afghanistan keep going when one of its donors cannot operate safely?

“This conference speaks of a three-piece puzzle, but I can't help thinking a fourth piece is missing. Culture can help us deal with inhumanity, international relations provide a forum for trying to prevent it, and globalization often increases it. The pieces didn't fit when the British Council was attacked. Why should we keep going?

“Reason might impel us to give up, but that fourth piece is not reason. It is hope. Cultures in Harmony will continue to create compositions with girls like Marwa, because especially after the events of this year, we know that Marwa can aspire to have a voice in Egypt's future. After her composition workshops with us, hers is a voice she will lift as a friend. And a week from tomorrow, I will return to Kabul to teach violin and conduct the orchestra, because I have hope that the future of Afghanistan will be determined not by men with guns running towards the British Council, but by little girls playing violin on a stage built by the British Council.

“I ask from you the same hope. Whether you use music or another medium, engage in cultural diplomacy. Reach out. Let the hope that you cherish make the pieces of the ‘three-piece puzzle’ fit.”

The presentation and my closing remarks went over well. On Saturday, August 27, I performed a recital at the Embassy of Bulgaria. Entitled “Echoes Across the Divide,” this recital explored music inspired by folk music, as well as actual folk music. I began with the Nigerian folk song “Imeda Mbre Idi-Oh,” which I learned during CiH’s Cameroon project in 2009. Then I played Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 6, which is loosely inspired by Spanish folk music. Japanese violinist Midori Komachi spoke briefly about her own musical diplomacy project involving Britain and Japan before joining me for some Bartok Duos. Next, I played my arrangement of the Pakistani folk song “Mor Tor Tillay Rana,” followed by my arrangement of the Afghan song “Bia Ke Birim Ba Mazar.” The concert closed when pianist Gabi Teodoru joined me for Rhapsody Vardar, which is perhaps the most beloved Bulgarian piece by the most beloved Bulgarian composer, Pancho Vladigerov.

I enjoyed the rest of the conference. The Grand Union Orchestra presented about their work combining young musicians from many musical traditions into a single orchestra. The recording was interesting, though as I have discovered in Afghanistan, it is hard to balance the sitar with Western brass instruments, and sometimes in the arrangements made for this group, the Hindustani instruments were drowned out.

Several presenters did a good job of questioning an unabashedly positive view of cultural diplomacy’s role in the world. As Prof. Francois Nectoux of Kingston University pointed out, France originally used rayonnement (its cultural diplomacy policy) to justify colonialism. The Belgian Ambassador to the United Kingdom compared diplomacy to a tree. People often make the mistake of trying to extend the branches (outreach to other countries, multilateralism, internationalism) while cutting the roots (identity, parochialism, nationalism). As he points out, “This kills the tree.” Both need to be nourished. Rod Fisher, Director of the European Cultural Foundation UK, told us that a few weeks before the invasion of Iraq, the British Council was asked to develop a strategy for how to use culture to engage with the Iraqi population after the invasion. And John Holden, a visiting professor at City University, observed that it’s called “propaganda” when your enemies do it, and “winning hearts and minds” when you do it.

Many presenters simply proved the truism that diplomacy, like anything else, depends primarily on the charisma and personal force of its practitioners. When the head of a Latin American music society gave a presentation about the gloomy prospects for Latin American music in the United Kingdom, I found myself wondering if those gloomy prospects have anything to do with the pessimistic outlook of some of the advocates of this vibrant and profound music. In contrast, while I have never been particularly interested in the unique issues of the Jewish community in the UK, the head of the London Jewish Cultural Centre was such an extraordinary person that we all hung on her every word. Similarly, Paraguay’s Ambassador to the UK charmed everyone into wanting to visit his country.

Often the participants’ questions provided some of the most striking and provocative insights. A young man from Zimbabwe said that there is too much cultural exchange and not enough cultural diplomacy. As he put it, “gangsters and pimps” can do cultural exchange when they meet from different cultures. Additionally, you can know a lot about a group of people and still be a racist. “Knowledge does not lead to liberation from prejudice,” he said. “Only responsibility can do that.”

A young man from Norway asked if it is right that we in the West seek to adopt other cultures while rejecting our own, and yet we expect people outside the West to proudly celebrate their own culture and are uncomfortable if they appreciate Western culture. Certainly, I have experienced this when Americans (typically young, white, educated, and liberal) asked if the work of Afghanistan National Institute of Music or of Cultures in Harmony amounts to cultural imperialism. I have not encountered an Afghan who views ANIM in that light, nor am I aware of anyone in the Philippines, Pakistan, or Tunisia who feels that way about CiH.

We may not have solved the “three-piece puzzle” of culture, globalization, and international relations referenced in the conference’s title, but we sure enjoyed playing with the pieces.

The first four (Billy's Bollywood Explorations)

2011-08-12T21:33:00.005+04:30

Tees Maar Khan ***

I loved Tees Maar Khan, the first Bollywood film I ever saw. The Hollywood options on my Emirates flight back in May looked so dreary, and this looked like a ton of fun, which it was. I was surprised to learn online that the general reaction to it was negative, but it does offer a lot of what those who have not experienced Hindi cinema think they will see when they finally get around to seeing it: color, cheesy humor, and sexy song and dance numbers. Indeed, it is easy to join the millions of Katrina Kaif fans after her memorable Sheila Ki Jiwani song, which I confess to later watching numerous times on YouTube. A Pakistani friend of mine expressed dismay that I would enjoy a film starring Akshay Kumar so much, since she finds him irritating, but I found him wonderfully charismatic.

The movie is a crime caper in which a con man (Kumar) gets a village to rob a train by pretending to film a movie. I enjoyed the unabashed cheesiness of the sense of humor, particularly when the con man’s henchmen repeatedly exclaim, “The Khan of Khans: Tees Maar Khan.” Admittedly, the most memorable part of the movie is “Sheila Ki Jiwani,” which I later discovered that many young men in Afghanistan knows by heart, even though the movie was released just last year.

The movie shares an unfortunate flaw with many of the recent Hindi films I’ve seen: an obvious envy of Hollywood. Salman Khan’s character, a prominent Bollywood actor, is persuaded to make the fake movie-within-a-movie only because he might get an Oscar. Why isn’t he more concerned about getting a Filmfare Award?

After seeing only twenty Hindi movies, I can already look back three months and realize that my initial reaction to this one might have been a bit too enthusiastic, but can you blame me? I had just discovered a whole new world.

Robot ***

This was the first movie I saw starring Aishwarya Rai, frequently referred to as the most beautiful woman in the world. I won't dispute that here. The movie is a thought-provoking exploration of some of the problems typically explored by movies about robots: can they act morally? Can they love? These problems take on a new dimension when viewed through the prism of Indian culture. The robot is programmed to save lives, but the tide of public opinion begins to turn against it when it carries a naked woman out of a burning building. She promptly throws herself under a bus, because she is so ashamed. It is difficult to relate to such feelings coming from American culture, where one would not want to stand naked in front of a crowd of curious onlookers, but would be relieved and grateful that one’s life had been saved.

In retrospect, a problem with the movie is its careless approach to civilian casualties. When the robot causes mayhem near the end, hundreds upon hundreds of innocent people are killed. The Hindi movies I’ve seen tend to show more concern for life than most Hollywood movies, so the absurd amount of collateral damage at the end of this movie seems like an unfortunate attempt to pander to audiences desensitized by big bad American movies.

Action Replayy **1/2

This mostly forgettable time travel adventure was nonetheless very enjoyable at the time. A young man travels back in time to try to get his parents (played by Akshay Kumar and Aishwarya Rai) to enjoy a more loving relationship.

Kambakkht Ishq ***1/2

I have such an irrational fondness for this movie that I actually saw it twice. The premise of supermodel (Kareena Kapoor) and stuntman (Akshay Kumar) both trying and failing to reject the possibility of love was very well-executed and witty.

Given that the stuntman in question works in Hollywood, this movie cannot avoid the one common flaw that bothers me in recent Bollywood movies: an almost palpable insecurity revolving around the fact that the filmmakers are based in India, not the USA. Which Hollywood movie starring major stars is set in India? You’d have to go back to a couple examples from the 1980s, Slumdog Millionaire hardly being analogous to the situation I’m decrying.

Yet in my still-young exploration of Bollywood, I keep running into scenes or entire movies set in the USA. Would the movie have been so different if the stuntman had worked on sets in Mumbai? True, the filmmakers never would have found an excuse to get Sylvester Stallone to play a memorable cameo as himself, and the world of cinema would have been forever deprived of the Italian Stallion’s attempt to speak a little Hindi.

Despite my American liberal’s discontent with the neo-colonialist overtones of this fawning admiration of the USA, I enjoyed seeing my country through this idealized lens. In the America portrayed in Bollywood movies like “Tees Maar Khan” and “Kambakkht Ishq,” everything is possible.

Three of the first four Bollywood movies I saw starred Akshay Kumar, and in this one as in the others, he is incredibly charismatic and never seems to be phoning it in. Kareena Kapoor is captivating and almost fearsome in her volcanic temper and effortless wit. The chemistry between them explains why I enjoyed it in spite of occasional hackneyed moments.

Next week, I will write about why I disliked “Dabangg” even though it admirably steered clear of the pandering to Western sensibilities that irks me in the movies I’ve seen so far. I’ll also express my amazement at the bizarre “Welcome,” and explain why “3 Idiots” and “My Name is Khan” pretty much define awesomeness.

Billy's Bollywood Explorations: Introduction

2011-08-05T15:57:00.006+04:30

Cultures in Harmony’s Deputy Director, Kimball Gallagher, just finished a productive trip to Tunisia and Egypt, where he conducted several meetings to prepare for our 2012 project in Tunisia, Egypt, and Pakistan. Here in Kabul at Afghanistan National Institute of Music, we have finished our first semester and are now in the Ramadan vacation, during which some of the most dedicated students are coming to study with our guest clinician, Dr. Tanya Kalmanovitch.

It was she who suggested to me that I also write in this blog about a topic that has become increasingly dear to my heart: Hindi cinema. I was on an Emirates flight in May and tired of all the Hollywood options on the entertainment system after a particularly dispiriting experience watching the execrable No Strings Attached. To my horror, I suddenly realized that despite listing movies as one of my passions, I had never actually seen a single Bollywood movie. How could this be?

I quickly scrolled through the options and settled on Tees Maar Khan. By the end of the song Sheila Ki Jiwani, I was hooked. Fortunately, back in Afghanistan, it is easy to find DVDs of the latest offerings. Yet in my desire to somehow experience more of the largest movie industry in the world, I lacked any frame of reference. I had always bolstered my sense of myself as a connoisseur of Hollywood by reading the major American film critics and following all the major award ceremonies; whom should I read about Bollywood, and which award ceremonies meant anything? Recommendations from friends always help, but while the cinematic tastes of my friends back in the USA range from the considerable variety produced by Hollywood to all kinds of intriguing independent and foreign cinema, I knew very few people who regularly saw Bollywood movies.

As I started online research, I encountered something very strange. Indian writers interviewing major Indian movie stars often asked if the star would make a film in Hollywood, yet no one asks Tom Cruise if he would make a film in Bollywood. In some of the Hindi movies themselves, one senses a certain insecurity in the number of scenes (or entire movies) set in the United States, or rather, an idealized version of the United States. The more recent a movie is, the more common English dialogue is. Of course, the name “Bollywood” is a portmanteau of the colonial name for Mumbai and Hollywood. It makes almost as much sense for American cinema to operate under the name “Humbai.”

These neo-colonial attitudes persist in the other direction as well: despite the fact that the Indian movie industry is the largest and most popular in the world by many measurements, it is virtually invisible in American media, though this has changed slightly in recent years. Moreover, even the most educated Westerners do not feel the compulsion to be culturally aware of Hindi cinema, as they might for the latest Hollywood offering.

I was particularly shocked one time when I was watching a Shah Rukh Khan film in the common area of my guesthouse, during a week when I had already seen a couple other films starring him. A Western guest walked through and joked, “Oh, there’s your actor again,” suggesting with his tone that this was an obscure talent that only I knew about, although SRK is one of the biggest superstars in cinema history with a fan base of over one billion people. The fact that SRK was detained upon entry to the United States is more than a humiliating commentary on the excesses of airport security: it is an indictment of the fact that apparently, none of the American airport personnel recognized one of the most famous people on the planet.

One of the two or three regular readers of this blog (the absence of comment on this blog leads me to doubt whether any of the hundreds of entries I’ve written over six years has actually appeared on the internet) may observe that Bollywood does not seem to relate much with the cultural diplomacy theme of this blog, which generally covers my work as Violin and Viola Teacher at Afghanistan National Institute of Music and Founder and Director of Cultures in Harmony. However, I have found that since I have started to watch more Bollywood films, I have much more to talk about with my older Afghan students, who are far more familiar with Bollywood than with Hollywood. Cinema, like music, is a universal language, and our shared admiration for certain actors and actresses has brought us closer together.

Therefore, I will continue to blog on occasion about the music school in Kabul, about Cultures in Harmony, and about cultural diplomacy in general. Every Friday, I will try to write another installment of “Billy’s Bollywood Explorations.” I will cover movies in the order in which I’ve seen them, so at present, I have a backlog of about 20 movies. I will start next week with Tees Maar Khan, Robot, Action Replayy, and Kambakkht Ishq, the first four movies I saw. I’ll rate each out of four stars and write some very brief impressions about each.

If you’re another one of those living in a grayscale world bereft of Bollywood’s color, splash, and passion, perhaps my opinions will help you decide where to start. If you’re a longtime fan of Hindi cinema, feel free to laugh at how naïve my opinions may sound or how much they diverge from the general consensus regarding a movie’s quality. More importantly, feel free to send along recommendations.

Tunisian musicians a big hit in New York

2011-07-20T19:48:00.007+04:30

Senda Zayati and Amani Jebali, the two young Tunisian musicians whom Cultures in Harmony helped send to the New York Summer Music Festival, have returned to Tunisia and had a great experience. From their private pictures on Facebook, I can see that they made a lot of friends and created a positive impression in the minds and hearts of everyone they met. Senda wrote the following note to thank those who helped make this happen:

Hello,

I went to a summer music camp, called NYSMF (New York Summer Music Festival) from June 25th to July 10th. It's an interesting camp because we can do many things: besides music, there is a composition program and an acting program. The ambiance was excellent, I met many people and everyone was very nice and helpful. Personally I loved this festival. I had a wonderful experience, and the days I spend there are unforgettable.

I wanted to try something new, so I took the musical theater, opera scenes, and chamber choir classes. I also participated in the orchestra, and I took violin and singing technique classes. I had 3 violin private lessons, and 2 singing private lessons. I had a busy and exciting schedule. I wanted to work hard, so I had lessons all day without a break:

7:45 to 8:45 : Violin private lesson
9:00 to 10:00 : All NYSMF choir and the announcements
10:10 to 11:00 : Violin technique
11:05 to 12:30 : Symphony orchestra
1:00 to 1:45 : Singing technique
2:00 to 2:50 : Chamber choir
3:30 to 4:30 : Musical theater
4:45 to 5:45 : Opera scenes
5:45 to 6:45 : Singing private lesson
Dinner
7:30 : Activties

At the end of the session I participated in 5 performances: on Friday the 8th, I had the opera scenes and the musical theater performances. On Saturday the 9th I had the orchestra, chamber choir and all NYSMF choir performances. I was scared before all of the performances, but as soon as I went on stage, I forgot everything and I had fun.

I had the special opportunity to work with John Frederic West during the master class, and I also had a private lesson with him. He gave me many names of Arias and songs to work on, he also invited me to his house with my friend if I come back next year to the US, to have private lessons with him. I was amazed by his voice.

I also had a wonderful teacher, Blayth Walker who encouraged me to sing art songs in front of people. I learnt so much from her.

One day, we went to a lake, not far from the camp. The view was amazing, I had fun with my friends and the weather was very nice.

We went to see the opera Carmen, and it was the first time I've seen an opera. I would love to be Carmen someday. It was definitely the best day of the festival.

Thank you so much for your contribution, for giving me the opportunity to go to such an amazing festival.

At the beginning, I was scared and stressed and I wanted to go back to NY, but at the end of the session, I couldn't stop crying because I didn't want to go home, I didn't want to say goodbye to my new friends.

I hope I'll go back to this camp next year.

Senda Zayati

Amani Jebali sent the following note:

Before i go the camp, I went to NYC with my friend where we met our teacher, Kimball Gallagher. When we was there, we went to time square "my favourite place in NY", it was incredible and a magical place, also we went to central parc, juilliard school and a lot of places there. It was really cool because NY is a very beautiful place to visit. Then,we went to washinton DC, and I really liked this place , it was totaly different of NYC but i really liked it . We went to many museums and it was beautiful. It's a great experience to see another culture different of the one of your country . I loved this part of the trip.

The next step was going to the camp:
In the camp, I had lessons all the time :
From 9:00-9:50: All the Nysmf choir with Mr Isaac and it was so fun .
From 9:50-10:05: Daily annoucements with Mr Keiskue .
From 10:10-11:00: Cello technique.
From 11:15-12:30: The orchestra and we played "Nabucco of G.Verdi " and "Capriccio espagnol of N.Risnky-Korsakov, op34"
then, I had 30 minuts for lunch be cause from 1:00-1:50 I had foundations of vocal technique with Mrs Blythe Walker .
From 2:00-2:50: Chamber choir with Mr Isaac too .It was one of my favourite lessons during the day because Mr Isaac was really funny and nice . We sang Shosholoza of Lotti Helmut ,Abendlied of Josef Gabriel Rheinberger, My lord what a morning of Joan Baez.
From 3:30-4:30:Original Musical Theater P&W with Mr Keiskue and we wrote a musical idea called" Mister Keiskue " by the NYSMF players 2011 .
From 4:45-5:45:Vocal ensemble /opera scenes with Mrs Blythe walker ( my favourite teatcher).
From 5:45-7:00: Dinner but sometimes from 5:45 to 6:45 I have a private voice lesson .
then, after that we have an activity but everyday we have a different one .

In the last day,I had performance with the chambre choir and I had a solo in "My lord what a morning " as a soprano with an alto and a bass we sang together , also, a performance with the musical theater , the opera scenes , the orchestra,and all the NYSMF choir.

The camp was amazing and the thing that i really liked about it was the people there ,
, they are so funny, so kind and nice. At the begenning ,before I go to the camp, I was scared that people won't accept us because we will be the only strangers there but I was wrong, they really loved us and we made a lot a friends and we lived together magical moments .The best day that i really liked was the day when we went to the baseball game. Also when we went to watch Carmen, It was really amazing.and the day of skating was one of the best too we had a lot of fun .
I lived there an experience that i can never forget, it's the master class that I had with Mr John west, he encourage me to sing and he told me many things that was really helpful in my life and he invited me with Senda to his house , he was really nice.
The camp, was the best experience ever , I spent the best days in my life that I can never forget and I met many amazing people that I can never forget too and all of this is thanks to you because you helped us and gave us the chance to prouve that we were talented and merit what you did for us , and thanks to you, we realised our dream and we lived the best and the unforgettable days in our lives so thank you for everything.

Senda Zayati (front row, left) and Amani Jebali (front row, second from right) sing in a choir at the New York Summer Music Festival

Testimonials to music's impact

2011-07-06T10:35:00.003+04:30

The Financial Times has this fascinating portrait of the extraordinary, admirable Daniel Barenboim, who is the titan in the field of cultural diplomacy. I have rarely read a more powerful testimonial to music's impact bridging cultures in conflict than the words of a young man in Gaza who came up to Barenboim after his concert there and said: "When the international community ignore us except to give us food, it makes us feel like animals. When you come here and give us a concert, it makes us feel like human beings."

Here at Afghanistan National Institute of Music, we also do our best to create a bridge between Afghan culture and the many Westerners who live and work in Kabul in the fields of diplomacy, reconstruction, aid, and development. Yesterday the Russian Ambassador visited our institute. After I conducted the Afghan Youth Orchestra in my arrangement of Bolero, he said: "One could hardly imagine coming to Afghanistan and hearing Ravel's Bolero played better than by any European orchestra. And what European director would have thought to improve the orchestra with such beautiful and ancient Afghan instruments? This mixing of Western and Afghan music is wonderful."

Music continues to act as that natural force which compels us to acknowledge our shared humanity.

Cultures in Harmony 2011 Projects

2011-06-24T11:12:00.005+04:30

Cultures in Harmony announces our 2011 projects, which will include work in Tunisia, Egypt, and Pakistan. In those countries, our primary focus will be holding meetings to prepare for our major projects there in 2012: Connecting Cultures through Counterpoint.

In Tunisia and Egypt in July, CiH Deputy Director Kimball Gallagher will hold meetings and play performances. In addition, this year CiH, Kimball, and CiH's Lilian Belknap worked together to bring Tunisian musicians Senda Zayati and Amani Jebali to learn and perform at New York Summer Music Festival and in New York City. This exciting project will enable hundreds of Americans to meet a couple talented young Tunisian musicians who are also wonderful people. CiH contributed major funding to this effort, as did the Williamson Foundation for Music. Cultural diplomacy is a two-way street, and just as we played an instrumental role in bringing Tunisian violinist Nidhal Jebali to the US, we hope to do more going forward to bring people from the countries where we have done projects to the United States. We are proud of Nidhal, Senda, and Amani, and we are happy that they have already done much to change the relationship between Arabs and Americans, one melody and one smile at a time.

In Pakistan in August, I will perform in Islamabad and Karachi and hold meetings with our partners about the 2012 project. In Karachi, I will be joined by CiH volunteers who will work to lay the groundwork for the school partnerships that will be key to the success of Connecting Cultures through Counterpoint.

We hope that this work furthers our mission of bringing people together through music while preparing for our expansion into larger-scale projects in 2012.

In honor of these new projects, check out our re-modeled front page, now featuring heart-warming stories from our six years of projects!

Khodetan

2011-05-29T02:04:00.003+04:30

The clattering mass of horses and men careened closer and closer to the wall just beneath me. Strong men in T-shirts and helmets, teenage boys, and old men in shalwar kameez grimly kept their places on saddles and colorful blankets. Whips flew right and left, urging the horses to greater speed, commanding them to crush each other into the wall just above which the several hundred men of the audience squatted. But the man most pressed broke free, triumphantly carrying the decapitated limbless goat carcass away from the other riders. As he galloped furiously around the faraway pole, the riders rushed towards him, the din of hooves echoing around the giant’s amphitheater created by the mountains surrounding on the other side of the valley from our high perch. We burst into applause as one rider appeared to be on the brink of dropping the goat carcass into the white circle hastily drawn on the ground by an anxious assistant sprinkling flour from a bag. Yet our applause faded as it became clear that his scrum of competitors had thwarted him, and once again the sound of peacocks plaintively calling to one another in the garden behind us imbued the stunning, awe-inspiring vista with a sad beauty.

This, then, is buzkashi, the ancient Afghan game in which men on horseback compete to see who can grab a decapitated limbless goat and ride free of the other men to carry it around a pole and drop it inside the white circle in front of a grandstand in which the game’s sponsor typically sits. I had the rare opportunity to view a game of buzkashi four weeks ago, just hours before a team of Navy Seals converged on the compound of Osama bin Laden, some 230 miles to my east in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Since bin Laden thrust this region of the world into the American consciousness, many journalists have lazily adopted buzkashi as a metaphor for Afghan politics. That the metaphor is less than apt can be illustrated by the nonplussed reactions of the Afghans who learned I would attend the game. None of them seemed to know or care much about this ancient sport, exciting though I found it.

No single anecdote can stand for an entire culture, but if you would like to join the legion of babblers prognosticating Afghanistan's future, I humbly suggest an inspiring moment that soared above the rush of getting ready for my departure from Afghanistan for a two-week trip to Mexico and the USA.

I was very busy preparing my students at Afghanistan National Institute of Music for my two-week absence. In the evenings, I was practicing furiously for my Mexican concerto debut. I even gave an interview to Ask the Violinist about Cultures in Harmony and the importance of outreach programs.

Just before leaving, some of my little girl students requested that I bring them a doll from Mexico. The adorable red-headed rascal whom I coached daily on the ghichak solo in The Four Seasons of Afghanistan asked me to bring him a present. "What do you want me to bring back?" I asked in Dari.

He thought for a moment and grinned. "Khodetan," he said and scampered off. A lump formed in my throat.

I thought fondly of this little guy during the long flights to New York City two weeks ago. During one day in New York, I met with Susan Schindehette, founder of MiWorld, an extraordinary website devoted to deeply affecting human interest stories. The site allows readers to take a positive involvement in the lives of people they read about. I also got my violin repaired at Gradoux-Matt and enjoyed a productive Cultures in Harmony board meeting.

The next day, I flew to the spectacularly beautiful city of Guadalajara, where I would be privileged to perform the Violin Concerto by Behzad Ranjbaran at the Festival de Mayo, with the Orquesta de Jalisco conducted by Toshiyuki Shimada. The performance, which I advertised in Spanish, received some good reviews and is excerpted in this video.

It was a great honor to perform at such a prestigious festival. One very emotional experience came immediately after the concert, when I found myself mobbed by small children wanting autographs. To my delight, I learned that they are from the Casa Hogar, an organization that cares for underprivileged, orphaned, and abandoned children. Cultures in Harmony had worked with children from the Casa Hogar in Pátzcuaro from 2007-2009, so it was wonderful to meet children from the Guadalajara location.

The next day, in Dallas, Texas, I visited my brother, noted monarchist Theodore Harvey, and got to hear him give an engrossing, compelling, informative, and entertaining lecture called "Choirs and the Crown," about the relationship of Anglican choral music and the British monarchy. The following day, in Indianapolis, Indiana, I visited my parents and was formally inducted into the Hall of Fame of my alma mater, North Central High School. This honor acknowledged my achievements in cultural diplomacy since graduating from the school in 2001. I thanked the school for nurturing my curiosity about the world as well as my parents, Jay Harvey and Susan Raccoli, without whom none of this would have been possible.

The following day, back in New York, I met with Cultures in Harmony volunteers as we discussed the organization's direction. I also purchased music and other supplies for Afghanistan National Institute of Music. And now I am back in Kabul, severely jet lagged (as you can tell from the time stamp on this entry) yet very happy to see my students again.

I gave the little girls the small, colorful Mexican dolls they requested, but if you don't speak Dari, you may wonder what I got the red-headed ghichak player, who is a far more inspiring exemplar of Afghanistan's future promise than the buzkashi games typically thrust forward as an easy metaphor.

I simply gave him a hug, because when I had asked what present he wanted, he responded, "Khodetan." You see, "Khodetan" is Dari for "yourself," meaning the only present he wanted is for me to be in Kabul once more.

Concert in Gaza

2011-05-04T22:16:00.002+04:30

Congratulations to one of my heroes, the great conductor Daniel Barenboim, for organizing and conducting a tremendously successful concert in Gaza.

Where Music Matters

2011-04-23T22:12:00.002+04:30

Music should mean something. It is the privilege of a lifetime to work at ANIM, teaching extraordinary Afghan children who delight and thrive despite unimaginably difficult circumstances. Making music with them and hearing them make music electrifies, and not just because they’re hard-working students who rise above poverty and discrimination. The giant hills that tower over all of Kabul suggest that every endeavor is mountain-sized, that every triumph is epic. The hills aren’t just alive with the sound of music: they know that it matters here more than anywhere.

I have lived and worked here now one year and one month, and the first month of my second year has been packed with meaningful performances. All of us were deeply honored to perform for President Hamid Karzai two weeks in a row: first at the School Bell ceremony, at which the President and other dignitaries ring a bell (our school bell, as it happened) to signify the beginning of a new academic year, and then the following week at the graduation of teachers.

As an American, the endorsement of music at such a high level meant a great deal to me. In the USA, the music I make is nearly irrelevant. Back home, I feel as though I’m sawing away some distance outside the city that contains the building that contains the room where the serious boys and girls are running the world. Obama has tried to improve things by featuring Itzhak Perlman, Anthony McGill, Yo-Yo Ma, and Gabriela Montero at his inauguration, but our culture hasn’t caught up with him. Try to remember, if you can, the coverage of the most recent Grammy Awards. Were the awards for classical music even mentioned?

So therefore, I am proud to work in a country where for good or for ill, music means something to people. Ten years ago, the government at the time banned music, and in 2011, the President requests it two weeks in a row. His gesture matters, and I did not complain about the hard work of preparing these performances in a short time, because in the only country where music was recently banned, the President wanted it. Conducting the ANIM Orchestra for him was one of the highlights of my career, and when he came up to me after his speech, shook my hand, looked in my eye, and said in English, “You are doing a very great job,” it was a shining moment of my life.

Whether the audience is the President, the US Ambassador, regular Afghans, international donors, or friends, ANIM students have made all of us happy beyond words during the first month of the new year, 1390 in the Persian calendar. When the World Bank, a major donor for ANIM, visited, I wanted to feature two students I hadn’t often featured in the past. One was a young man who always sports a rebel’s haircut and a rascal’s grin. I had made the grave mistake of underestimating him, and he stunned us all with his brilliant, beautiful performance. At some point when I wasn’t looking, he figured out how to rebel by practicing longer and harder than anyone else, staying after school on Thursdays when everyone else had gone home. He figured out how to turn his rascal’s confidence into a showman’s confidence, owning his performance in the same sense that the finest concert artists own theirs. Give him time and support, and he will continue to surprise until the world knows his name, so I need not give it here. You can wait for it.

The other student also rewarded the faith I placed in her. Of all my little girl students who used to work on the street, she had struggled the most. She came from the most difficult and least supportive family background. When she first began studying with me, she was so shy that her voice never rose above a whisper. She seemed to want to disappear into the wall, so tightly would she press herself into it. As she lost her fear, her painfully thin face would frequently poke through my door and she would smile her greeting, silently hoping for a sticker or the chance to play the electric keyboard. She struggled for months to learn “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and when she got a passing grade on it at her first exam in July 2010, it was a miracle.

So then, we were all thrilled to see her stand up with confidence and played “Allegro” from the first Suzuki Book. Her rhythm problem, which had made it impossible for her to hold a steady tempo, had all but disappeared. Just before she played, Dr. Sarmast, whose superhuman efforts in founding and directing ANIM have made all of this possible, told me, “This performance could change her life.” I think it has.

Seeing one of our young rubab players rise to become a soloist, hearing two little girls play violin at the US Embassy for Women’s Day, smiling as two young percussion students offer an Afghan version of a Haydn tune with fierce concentration, and giving the first violin lessons to a tiny, happy little girl, barely taller than a small table, who is the younger sister of one of my students: these treasures have filled the first month of my second year. Even the stumbling blocks underscore music’s significance. One of my top students unexpectedly announced that music has no future in Afghanistan and that he would leave the school. To our immense relief, he changed his mind, but he can be forgiven his hesitation, given the controversial role music still plays here. Controversy. Musicians of the USA, do you remember what that is? It’s the sign that your art means something. When art comes up at all back home, people debate whether the government should fund it or not. They don’t debate whether the very idea of art is good or bad, and a concert is more typically a nice evening out on the town than a significant moment of history, a mountain towering over the pettiness of quotidian life.

Therefore, I was somewhat surprised to attend a concert tonight that didn’t seem to matter much to its performers. It mattered a great deal to the audience, who had showed up early to hear the renowned ghazal singer. Yet the performers hurriedly marched on stage, instruments still in cases, about 45 minutes after the concert started. After unpacking, the singer kept clearing his throat and pretending to start, before clearing his throat and pretending again. For at least the first hour, the performers kept repeatedly talking to the sound booth, trying to fix some infinitesimal problems with the sound system that I could not even detect. At some point, could they not have simply accepted the sound system and continued with the concert? Imagine attending a play where every few lines, the actors complain that the spotlight is not sufficiently focused on them or that come to think of it, their costume is a bit tight around the middle.

When they did begin properly, the tabla player in particular seemed more eager to amaze our ears than touch our souls. His finger-busting pyrotechnics were admittedly astounding, but was it necessary for him to throw his arms dramatically away from his instruments and motion for the audience to applaud him after every solo he took in the raga? I’m no expert about Hindustani music, but I know enough from working with and listening to musicians here, in Pakistan, and in the US to know that most of them are humble, dedicated to engaging the audience in the artistic experience of a concert rather than constantly tossing them out of that experience, and deeply focused on affecting our spirits, on pointing the way towards truth.

On occasion, the musicians did enter a selfless space of dedication to pure music, and then they approached greatness. The loudest applause of the evening came after the singer’s brother had been invited to come up and give a tabla solo. The sarangi player, who had watched from the audience, draped his shawl over the young man’s shoulders, and the audience roared. The sarangi player was my favorite of the musicians, and I would not be surprised to learn if he was also the most humble and friendly man among them.

Dr. Sarmast is a titan for founding and directing ANIM, but he, I, and my fellow teachers alike stand in awe of our students, whose daily courage, sacrifice, and dedication suggest advice all musicians would be wise to follow:

Free your music. Free it from your own doubt and that of others. Free it from stereotypes, from expectations, from your ego, from discrimination, from irrelevance. Make it matter. In every corner of the world, music resonates, showing us something outside ourselves yet within each of us. Free your music from that which would toss it in the box of unnecessary things. Know that you are no tiny rivulet in the mighty stream of history, but the tiny twig, changing its course.

Free your music, and your music will free you.

The tree in the lamppost

2011-03-09T18:20:00.003+04:30

Three of my expatriate friends suggested a late afternoon walk in Kabul University. I was astonished by what I found.

The crisp air carried the promise of spring as we moseyed down a stone path through fields. Deep furrows in the moist earth seemed to hold tiny seeds, so that the whole campus will probably turn into a garden or a small farm in a few months, perhaps for the benefit of the agriculture students. Past the fields, sturdy evergreen trees surrounded the low-lying buildings like patient old professors. In the distance, the enormous dusty mountains, dotted with houses, created a dramatic backdrop as the clear sky purpled with dusk.

Walking down broad avenues with no cars, lined evenly by such huge trees, I felt a peace I rarely feel in Kabul. Indeed, I was powerfully reminded of the leafy campus of Indiana University. Sure, some of the sidewalks are crumbling and the occasional building could use a new coat of paint, but this university deserves tremendous credit for creating the aura of an established, idyllic center for learning after thirty years of war. Before entering the campus proper, we passed a construction site. One of my expatriate friends is a construction expert, and the Turkish mechanical engineer was happy to answer his questions. The new building will feature an exquisite design, vaguely reminiscent of Ottoman architecture, by a Turkish company.

Young men laughed easily and greeted us kindly as we passed. Young women walked in pairs, wearing headscarves and carrying large bags full of books. Shouting, joyous groups played soccer on lawns that will soon be bursting with green. I let out a sigh. One can relax here. My own university days are not so far behind, and I could easily imagine grabbing a quick tea at one of the Alokozay tea stands, sitting down on a bench, and cracking open a French textbook.

We stopped at an extraordinary feature: a tree growing inside a lamppost. Several years back, a seed must have blown inside a foot-long electrical gap and taken root. It found a way to grow up, twist out through the gap, and upward towards the sun. My friends pointed out the bullet holes that tore through this long-defunct, rusted pole, intended as a light source, not as some kind of postmodern planter. “It’s a work of art,” one friend commented.

For me, the highlight of the walk was the stunning College of Arts, a monumental new building that is a gift from Pakistan. The design is exquisite, with the seats of the indoor theater positioned on the second floor, just above the grand entrance, creating an impressive reverse staircase layering effect that warmly welcomes the visitor towards the entrance. The yellow exterior exudes optimism, and the stone caught the day’s last sunshine, inviting me to notice a small corner that bore the English graffito: “L + M = Love Forever,” suggesting that Kabul University students are rather like college students anywhere.

Indoors, sculptures by students and faculty line magnificent atria, some of which are open to the sky, while skylights of an intricate geometric design top other soaring hallways. We marveled at the cleanliness of line, the welcoming tone effortlessly conveyed by the brilliant Pakistani architecture, the well-equipped classrooms, the relaxed friendliness of the students we encountered. One kind professor offered us a tour, so I eagerly requested the theater. Though the new stage is not yet finished, the intimate, classy venue already conveyed a sense that this is a safe and innovative space in which daring, modern theater can take place. The College of Arts manages an annual theater festival, and back in our guide’s office, we saw brochures for past years in which play topics included female self-immolation, the importance of involving a woman in problem solving, a poor family hunted by smugglers and becoming a victim of the drug trade, and other intriguing works. I said to one of my friends, "Here in Afghanistan a playwright need only look out the window to find a dramatic subject." After a delicious china cup of cardamom tea, I thanked the professor and told him I can’t wait till the next theater festival.

I keep thinking of that tree that grows, against all odds, in a lamppost pockmarked with bullet holes. No matter the constraints, no matter the rigid modernity or stentorian violence that threaten to imprison us, we will grow and grow till we can grow through a gap, somewhere, anywhere, and keep growing towards the sun.

Berlin lecture online

2011-03-08T19:12:00.004+04:30

The lecture I gave at the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin a couple weeks ago is now available online. It is entitled "The Role Music Should Play in America's Future Relations in Egypt, Tunisia, and Pakistan," and draws on firsthand experience from the projects of Cultures in Harmony in those countries, as well as recommendations from our friends and partners in those countries, to chart a way forward in light of the recent revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia and the continued tension between Pakistan and the United States.

The lecture alludes to a Cultures in Harmony project that will result from the ideas under discussion. Please check out the brand new page for that project, entitled Connecting Cultures through Counterpoint.

Please contact me with your feedback about the lecture, or comment on this blog entry.

Project Map!

2011-03-04T16:09:00.002+04:30

I am very excited to announced that Amanda von Goetz and I have designed a fun new way to present Cultures in Harmony projects to the world: the Project Map!

We are very interested in your feedback about this cool new tool!

1. Please click on the country where you have interacted with Cultures in Harmony the most. Is there any missing or inaccurate information? Let us know!

2. We are considering removing the old project pages and using this new map as the primary means to present Cultures in Harmony's projects to the world. The old project pages were not organized by country, but rather according to the chronological order of the projects, so that someone who wanted to learn about our work in Zimbabwe would have to somehow know that we started going there with Project III in 2006. If we removed the old project pages, what would you miss about them most? Does the Project Map contain enough information about the projects?

We are hoping that a new, streamlined website will better position Cultures in Harmony to raise the funds we need to be sustainable and return to the countries where we have been so successful in the past. Additionally, we hope that the map encourages us as an organization to view our commitment to countries, rather than to individual projects, thereby deepening our involvement.

Thank you so much for any and all comments about the Project Map! Please feel free to comment on this blog entry or send me an e-mail.

Afghan Star

2011-02-25T23:41:00.004+04:30

As the jeep pulled up to the low-lying, fenced-in building, bumping over the unpaved road, a shiver went up my spine as I saw the crowd of laughing young men, eager to be part of the studio audience of Afghan Star. A road much longer than that bumpy alley had taken me here: soon after I received the July 4, 2009, e-mail informing me that I would be the Violin and Viola Teacher at Afghanistan National Institute of Music, I watched the documentary about the TV show with a good friend of mine. I learned that it is the most popular show in Afghanistan, watched by 11 million people then and 15 million people now (about half the population). I learned that despite its popularity, it is controversial, due to the modern showcase it provides for young singers, men and women, less than a decade after the collapse of the only government to ban music.

A couple days ago, I came to the set of the show as the guest judge. “Don’t be like Simon Cowell,” my friends had joked. “Don’t worry,” I would respond. “I only know enough Dari to be positive.”

Technical crew and audience members milled about the side door, as one man took the entrance cards (which apparently fetch quite a price on the black market) and men busied themselves with set-up. I was shown to the make-up room, where I met one of the co-presenters, Mozhdah Jamalzadah, the very popular Afghan singer and talk-show host who has performed for President Obama and who Time Magazine called “Afghanistan’s Oprah.” After changing clothes and going through the rundown of the show with the producer, I sat down for my make-up. I winced as the lovely young woman applied something to my eyelids and then my lips. In Dari, I joked, “I don’t do this every day; just once a week.” She smiled and said in English, “Your face is already beautiful.”

Finally, it was time to go on. A member of the crew ushered me the long way around the set. Mozhdah and the other co-presenter, Omaid Nizami, introduced me to sustained applause. I played my mournful, contemplative rendition of the popular Afghan folk song “Bia ke Birim ba Mazar,” which the audience twice interrupted with applause. Afterwards, Mozhdah interviewed me in Dari, which went fine except when I didn’t understand a question and simply said, “Tashakor” (Thank you) and the audience laughed.

I crossed the slick white stage with a star on the center, sitting in a comfy red armchair just to the side, finally able to absorb my surroundings. Bright points of light shone from a dark canopy covering the wall, suggesting the galaxy of stars the contestants aspired to join. A broad cross-section of Afghan society, from young men having a good time to proper young women to older men to a tiny little girl about 3 years old who clapped along with every song, packed the studio to capacity. In front of the circular stage, the three regular judges sat behind an imposing table with the Afghan Star logo and logo of Roshan, the wireless company that is one of the sponsors. Ustad Gulzaman, the famous Pashto singer, ANIM faculty member, and frequent collaborator of mine, looked resplendent in his chapan. Qasem Rameshgar, whom I know from various dinners and meetings, looked relaxed and vigorous. The one regular judge I didn’t know already was Ahmad Fanoos.

The four contestants came out one at a time to sing a song, and then came back to sing another. All four were young men, showing various degrees of nervousness and rapport with the audience. I wanted to be the encouraging judge, so since I can’t speak much Dari, I came up with a few simple compliments that I used at the right moments: “az diletan da dilem raft” (it went from your heart to mine). “Da chauqi raks kardam” (I danced in the chair). “Khana-e concert masle khana-e shoma ast” (The home of the concert is like your home). Hopefully that one sounded better in Dari!

I was surprised that they wanted me to play on the final number, an Afghan song involving all the contestants, when I didn’t know it and had not rehearsed it, but I was so excited to be there that I jumped in and did it. Fortunately, the harmonies weren’t too hard to find, so I improvised a few musical asides that were perhaps more Argentinian than Afghan.

After the taping finished, the technicians took the set down with remarkable speed. I wanted to linger, to talk to the audience, take some pictures, exchange cards. I felt like I had just been in a movie, and indeed, I had been: a movie that started when I got a job in Afghanistan a year and a half ago and reacted by taking a friend of mine to a documentary about some televised singing contest that was creating a sensation in that faraway country. Just as the singer who is eventually declared the Afghan Star will hopefully see his dreams fulfilled, one of mine came true tonight as I watched the show broadcast on Tolo TV.

ICD Conference

2011-02-22T10:30:00.004+04:30

I nodded in agreement as His Excellency András Simonyi, former Ambassador of Hungary to the USA, declared that “the West has failed in Egypt and Tunisia because they never wielded their soft power.” Indeed, much of this past week’s conference entitled The Language of Art and Music, held at the immaculate, spacious, and modern offices of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) in Berlin’s posh Kurfürstendamm district, involved interesting and distinguished guests preaching to the choir. And yet, the audience at each session of the conference mainly comprised outstanding, dedicated young people who are tomorrow’s leaders. Attending this conference and appreciating the value of cultural diplomacy will enable them to more effectively conduct international relations when they are the one’s holding the world’s reins of power.

Of all the speakers, Amb. Simonyi was one of the most charismatic and effective advocates for cultural diplomacy, which he employed brilliantly during his tenure in Washington by making a guest appearance as a rock guitarist on the Colbert Report. For many Americans, this was their first introduction to Hungary, and his office was deluged with e-mails from Colbert Report fans who said they had never heard of Hungary and were now planning to vacation there. Even President Bush asked him, “How’s the band?” As Amb. Simonyi self-deprecatingly indicated, it’s amazing any time the President of the United States asks the Hungarian Ambassador a question about anything.

Dr. Timothy Emlyn Jones, Dean of the Burren College of Art in Ireland, also did a brilliant job describing the political power of art through many mind-bending metaphors and examples. He cited the scene in Wim Wenders’ film “Wings of Desire” in which two angels are conversing in the no-man’s-land between the inner and outer sections of the Berlin Wall. He says that the guards can’t see them because they are invisible. If we don’t accept dualities or binary ways of seeing the world, what else could we see? He also amusingly pointed out that everyone thinks ghosts can pass through walls, whether or not they believe in ghosts. Art is the same way in its ability to pass through walls regardless of the tiresome binary question of whether we believe it can or not.

Yet such idealism was rightly tempered with reality. Dr. Jones reminded us that one man’s cultural diplomacy is another man’s cultural imperialism. Colin Tweedy, Chief Executive of Arts and Business UK, observed that the British Museum, with its many artifacts forcibly removed from countries where they would be national treasures, is a monument to theft and power.

Amb. Simonyi was asked if rock-and-roll would have been as effective in helping bring down the Iron Curtain in Hungary if the genre had been a state-promoted effort of the US government. He replied that when Bruce Springsteen had such a seismic impact in Hungary, he had come under the auspices of Amnesty International. “Government involvement should not degenerate into propaganda,” Amb. Simonyi declared.

Indeed, many speakers concurred that government involvement in cultural diplomacy or even just in culture can be problematic. Dr. Jones cited the Irish government promotion of such titans of Irish culture as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who were at one time or another banned in Ireland. Beckett had to leave his native land and so is regarded as French in France. Many made reference to the complicated relationship between jazz and official US cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, when Uncle Sam sent great black musicians on tours abroad to represent a country where blacks and whites did not yet enjoy equal rights.

Amb. Simonyi recalled one of the most chilling instances of the co-mingling of art and politics. A film from Berlin at the end of World War II shows Joseph Goebbels shaking the hand of Wilhelm Furtwangler after the great conductor led the Berlin Symphony in Beethoven’s Fifth. Amb. Simonyi spotted that for a brief second after the handshake, it is possible to see Furtwangler reach into his pocket for a handkerchief, with which he then wipes off his hand.

The way many artists had to wipe the shame of collaboration with the Nazis off their hands reminds all of us to be wary of the too-close marriage of art and politics. His Excellency Karl-Erik Normann, former Swedish Ambassador and Secretary-General of the European Cultural Parliament, told us: “You are not automatically good because you are in the arts.”

Such nuance was not always sufficiently present when the topic turned to multiculturalism, which could fill many ICD conferences on its own. ICD director Mark Donfried casually observed that the French government handled the headscarf issue well because the various religious symbols that it banned were equal. In truth, many Muslim women believe that they must wear the hijab, but few if any Christians believe that wearing a large cross is essential to their being religious.

Erna Hennicot-Schoepges asserted that “in Europe we succeeded in tearing down our borders but we still have them in our heads.” As a Member of the European Parliament and former Minister of Culture and Religious Affairs of Luxembourg, it is understandable that she would be a staunch supporter of the new European order, but many of us feel that tearing down those borders was not such a great idea in the first place. The Hon. Dr. Rocco Buttiglione, Vice President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, former Italian Minister of Culture, and former Italian Minister of European Politics, better captured my personal ambivalence : “One problem of multiculturalism is that it tries to sever culture from space.” He formulated a brilliant metaphor: “A house without walls is as ineffective as a house without doors or windows. We must have the same attitude towards multiculturalism.”

To represent practitioners of musical diplomacy, Mark Donfried invited my friend John Ferguson, Founder and Director of American Voices, and myself in my capacity as Founder and Director of Cultures in Harmony. John presented American Voices’ fantastic work in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Syria, Thailand, and elsewhere, correctly noting that “we cannot Facebook and Twitter our way to better relations. Nothing replaces face-to-face interaction.” He shares my belief that good projects must be recreated annually, which contrasts sharply with the State Department preference for funding something once and then moving on, in order to showcase a variety of American cultural media.

He also offered some unusual and revealing anecdotes. “Where in the world?” was a great photo segment in which we had to guess where the photos came from, the point being that culture connects us so thoroughly that it can be hard to hold on to old stereotypes. At a time when Syria is generally distancing itself from the US, the Syrian Minister of Culture requested the expansion of the American Voices YES Academy there, proving the value of cultural engagement. CNN declined a story about their Iraq project, with the producer saying: “We want to show car bombs.” This shows that perhaps most of our diplomatic work should be focused at the American media, which perpetuates the stereotypes our engagement efforts work so assiduously to challenge.

On a panel discussion about graffiti, I discussed my friend Adil Omar, the most famous rapper in Pakistan. I noted the irony of the “F*** ADIL OMAR” graffiti that has become prevalent in big cities, since presumably the graffiti artist is condemning Adil’s decision to rap in English, yet is writing the graffito in English. I suggested that perhaps seemingly senseless, vulgar, empty graffiti may emerge if there is no political space for other, more important debate. For instance, the graffito wrongly attacking my friend Adil may be a plea for less Western influence (represented by English) in Pakistan. I also noted that the infamous crosshairs map propagated by Sarah Palin is another example of political art that emerge from marginalized extremists, particularly given that it would have been perfectly acceptable to employ another visual to highlight the congressional districts the artist wanted to emphasize. For instance, districts in which the artist hoped the incumbent would be defeated could have been circled.

The highlight of my own lecture, “The Role Music Should Play In America’s Cultural Diplomacy in Tunisia, Egypt, and Pakistan,” was undoubtedly the three games with which I began it. First, I played a rhythm and then asked the audience to clap it back to me. Second, a volunteer invented a rhythm to which I responded on my violin. Third, I said, “Now, I would like all of you to leave the room. I’ll invite Mark Donfried to the stage, teach him how to play violin, and when you come back in fifteen minutes, he will be able to play Paganini’s 24th Caprice, one of the most difficult pieces for the instrument. OK, I’m joking, you don’t really have to leave. This third kind of dialogue is what the US government has been doing in Muslim majority countries for years.” The audience burst into laughter and applause.

The audience also enjoyed the recommendations I had solicited from the friends of Cultures in Harmony in those three countries: decentralize, go to rural areas, engage with the people, stay far away from politics. As a Tunisian kanun player and medical student noted: “Don’t come now to give us lessons in democracy; we were doing it while you were supporting Ben Ali.”

John and I united in a concert focusing on four areas in which the fields of music and diplomacy intersect: the Muslim world in general, Iran in particular, Eastern Europe, and musical representation of the United States. For the first section, I played “Fantazy El Mansora,” by the Egyptian composer Attia Sharara, and my own arrangement of the Afghan folk song “Bia ke Birim ba Mazar” and the Sindhi folk song “Mor Tor Tillay Rana,” basing the latter arrangement on the exuberant version by Abida Parveen.

For the second section, the beautiful and extraordinary Iranian pianist, composer, and flutist of poetic sensitivity, Nazanin Piri-Niri, joined in. With her on flute, we played a couple Iranian pieces, one of which was by her. She played two of her lovely solo piano pieces, and then John and I did the last movement of Henry Cowell’s “Homage to Iran,” which the American composer created after a Rockefeller grant enabled him to study the music of that country, and which was premiered in the Shah’s Palace in Tehran on July 3, 1959.

For the third section, I spoke of the different ways composers behind the Iron Curtain protested against enforced proletarian ideals. The Lithuanian composer Vytautas Barkauskas twisted folk elements into a dark statement in his solo violin Partita from 1967, and Arvo Pärt pursued a subtly religious inspiration in his hypnotic Fratres from 1980.

I introduced the final section by noting that both John and I represent American culture through its music. John did a brilliant job with Zez Confrey’s aptly named “Dizzy Fingers” before he and I played “Mother and Child” by the great African-American composer William Grant Still, then closed the concert with three Gershwin numbers from “Porgy and Bess.”

One of my favorite speakers was the noted film critic Meenakshi Shedde, who gave a stunning, hilarious, and charismatic lecture about Bollywood’s global impact without any notes, and as though she were effortlessly chatting with a friend. Her lecture persuaded me that I haven’t seen enough Bollywood films, though that may not necessarily have been her point. Indeed, her tremendous personal presence was a reminder that the best diplomacy is a function of personality.

She was also one of many instances in which the conference reflected that it was scheduled at the same time as the Berlinale. I saw some extraordinary and devastating films and also learned much from the lecture about Wajda’s film about the massacre of Polish soldiers at Katyn by the Soviets during World War II. The final scene, in which bulldozers slowly shovel earth over the Polish corpses while the terrifying music of Penderecki screeches and grates in the background, had an impact at once shocking and cathartic.

Mohammed Reza Farzad also made a film about a massacre: the September 8, 1978 killing of protesters by the forces of the Shah of Iran. He focuses the viewer's attention on the people killed as individuals, making it impossible to view them as statistics. Voiceover ruminations speculatively comparing specific victims in faded, grainy footage of the killings to photos of happy Iranians in daily life accomplish this feat, made difficult by the paucity of detailed information about who those individuals actually were.

“Tales of the Defeated,” an Israeli short documentary by Yael Reuveny, movingly dealt with her discovery that her grandmother’s brother had not actually died in World War Two but had converted away from Judaism and settled right outside the concentration camp where he had been interred. That he married the sister-in-law of a Wehrmacht soldier was to her unthinkable, and a particularly powerful scene shows her struggling to control her emotions when the giggly and gregarious widow of that soldier shows her the family album containing her husband and the filmmaker’s grandfather, men who were mortal enemies in 1944 but friends by 1950.

Yet the most personally affecting film screening for me was our group attendance at an official screening at the Berlinale of the new film by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou. “Under the Hawthorn Tree” reminded me of an earlier moment in the conference in which Dr. Jones cited Rillke’s poem about a sculpture of Apollo in which Rillke concludes that the message of the sculpture is that “You must change your life.” Dr. Jones then said that, “A passive engagement with art will change nothing.” The goodness and purity of Zhang Yimou’s male protagonist in this romantic story of doomed love have led me to conduct a re-examination of my own life more thorough than what any lecture could have prompted.

The power of art to speak to the profound and the mundane also emerged through the conference's various local and social connections to Berlin; indeed, it’s hard to imagine a better city in which Mark Donfried could have placed the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, given that Berlin was for so long a city divided by an actual wall, parts of which are now covered with actual art. Yet somehow the high-flying metaphors about art soaring over walls, and experiences such as the Zhang Yimou film, remain more powerful than striding quickly past outdoor art painted on a remnant of the wall at the East Side Gallery, given that the extreme cold prevented much artistic enjoyment of the experience.

Also, my attempt to enjoy the Checkpoint Charlie museum became rather surreal when just I was about to buy my ticket, the ticket taker took a phone call and said, “Mr. Hasselhoff, it’s for you.” Suddenly I noted a camera crew, and the Baywatch star David Hasselhoff emerged to be filmed receiving a call at the museum’s ticket desk. After he gave me his autograph, he said in his overgrown surfer’s patois, “Yeah, man, this museum is really important, the widow of the founder is like a friend of mine, and we’re gonna do a concert to save the museum. This is important stuff, man.”

Quiet, delightful dinners at exquisite restaurants with friends old and new offered a better way to enjoy Berlin.

As I told Mark Donfried, I really enjoyed the entire experience of the conference, though I expressed the hope that future events at ICD can do more to engage Berlin’s vibrant world music communities as well as the ethnic constituencies most relevant to its mission. The German Turkish community has turned out for conferences at ICD specifically about Turkish issues, but I would have enjoyed seeing them turn out for the intriguing talks by Dr. Tomur Atagok, Professor and Dean of the Art and Design Faculty at Yildiz University in Turkey.

Mr. Tweedy summarized the spirit of the conference when he said, “When we understand each other better through art, we understand each other better through politics.” Yet perhaps the best aspect of the conference was the humility and nuance frequently offered by its speakers. All diplomats, from foreign ministers to citizen diplomats engaging populations through the arts, must remember the wise words of Amb. Simonyi: “It’s important as we discuss all this to know that we don’t have the answers.”

Let us continue to pose the questions and keep the dialogue going, creating the climate for that mutual understanding and respect towards which we all aspire.

Winter Academy

2011-02-15T12:08:00.005+04:30

The Afghanistan Winter Music Academy is now finished, and I regret that I was so busy, I never had time to write my personal impressions. Suffice it to say that I think that all of us at Afghanistan National Institute of Music were successful in our ambition to make this a prestigious, highly beneficial music festival like Aspen, but in Afghanistan in the winter time! Please read the report about the final concert that is now the main item on the front page of the ANIM site. The eight weeks of eighteen world-class guest artists teaching and performing at ANIM culminated in this unforgettable, standing-room-only event.

For me personally, the highlight was arranging, preparing, and conducting The Four Seasons of Afghanistan at the gala. And if I had to pick one highlight of that immensely rewarding and complex process, it would be working with the young boy who ended up playing the beautiful slow movement of Winter on the ghichak.

He's a teeny tiny little boy with bright red hair and a mile-wide grin. He's 10 years old but looks about 6. He's so excited about music that as soon as he gets his instrument, he runs to the practicing room, grinning the whole time. Oh, and he's far and away the greatest prodigy I've met.

Only obstacle to him becoming world famous? The instrument at which he is so astonishing is the ghichak, little-known outside the region. I hope he will do for the ghichak what Ravi Shankar did for the sitar, Zakir Hussain for the tabla, and Kayhan Kalhor for the kemencheh.

He studies with Ustad Murad, our kindly ghichak teacher who plays the solo ghichak part in the Four Seasons. Ustad Murad is one of the most inquisitive ghichak players I've heard: while other ones I've heard stay firmly within the tradition, Murad experiments with making his own ghichaks, adding more efficient pegs, using different bows, and even making one with four strings instead of the traditional two.

So I'm not surprised he produced a student like this little fellow. One day a couple weeks ago, Murad came to practice the Four Seasons with me. At the end of last week's practice, this tiny student came in. Murad smiled and passed him the ghichak. He played the first two lines of the slow movement of Winter perfectly.

My jaw dropped. At that moment, Dr. Sarmast came in, and the boy repeated the feat. Dr. Sarmast was equally impressed and asked Murad in Dari when his student had started the piece. "This morning," came the answer. If my jaw could have dropped further, it would have!

This is a kid who started playing ghichak just a few months ago. Before he came to our school, he was working on the streets, living a desperately poor life. And here he is, effortlessly learning music from Western notation, something few if any ghichak players in history have done. Murad said that if we could get the boy ready for the gala concert on February 9, he could play the big ghichak solo!

So every morning, long before the other students arrived, this sweet little boy pokes his head in my door, grins, and asks to get his ghichak. Then we work. In one week, he learned the entire thing. How many years had I been playing before I could do the slow movement of Winter? Around seven years? And that was a piece from my culture, where reading music is common.

He asks for whole sheets of heart stickers: why? He covers his ghichak with them. It's the cutest thing you've ever seen: the whole instrument has bright yellow, orange, and blue hearts places in symmetrical patterns. One time, he held his hands behind his back and said he had a present for me. "Where are your keys?" he said urgently in Dari. I held them out. With a big smile, he thrust his hand at me. He was holding a small teddy bear key chain. It looks a little raggedy, but meant the world to me.

Finally, the day of the concert arrived. He was a little nervous, but Dr. Sarmast did a brilliant job calming him down. The whole concert was a deeply moving, tremendous success for all the performers, but I didn't tear up until the very end when this young man (and he has earned the right to be called a young man with his disciplined behavior) played the slow movement of Winter with such beauty and dedication. The reaction of one audience member was typical: "I still can hardly speak without crying."

Thank you so much to everyone who made the Winter Academy, the Gala Concert on Wednesday, and the Four Seasons happen, particularly the Goethe Institute, Embassy of Finland, Embassy of USA, and French Institute of Afghanistan. On a personal level, thank you above all to Dr. Sarmast for his extraordinary work; to my amazing colleagues and students at ANIM; and to the red-headed boy, small in stature but large in spirit, who made an unforgettable impression in the hearts of everyone in the audience last Wednesday, reminding them never to forget to have hope.

Today, I leave for Berlin, where I will represent Cultures in Harmony at this conference sponsored by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. Soon I will write here with a report about the conference.

Milton Babbitt, 1916-2011

2011-01-30T22:02:00.005+04:30

I had intended to write in this blog more often following my return to Afghanistan in December, but the Winter Academy, Afghanistan’s first music festival combining performance and education, has kept me very busy. Hopefully I will soon have a chance to write my impressions, but for now, I pause with sadness and tremendous respect to note the passing of one of the giants of music in our time, Milton Babbitt.

I met Mr. Babbitt (he always insisted on “Mister” and abhorred the term “Professor”) the day before the tragedy of September 11. As a freshman double major in violin and composition at Juilliard, I attended a forum where my beloved composition teacher, Samuel Adler, introduced me to his friend and colleague, then already 85 years old. Before I met Mr. Babbitt, I knew him only as the fearsome legend behind music of mind-twisting complexity, the man who wrote (but did not title) the infamous essay Who Cares If You Listen?

At that first meeting, Mr. Babbitt offered to introduce me to Paul Zukofsky, a violinist who is one of the great champions of modern music. The tragic events of the following day derailed many plans, but Mr. Babbitt kept his promise and gave me Mr. Zukofsky’s phone number. When I decided to learn the Sonata for Solo Violin, a half-hour behemoth by Roger Sessions, I asked Mr. Babbitt if I could play it for him. He agreed, and as I was about to begin the piece in Mr. Babbitt’s fifth floor studio at Juilliard, he asked where my music was. I told him I’d be playing from memory.

“You son of a bitch,” he said with a smile. To this day, I haven’t received a more meaningful compliment.

When I returned to Juilliard in 2004, I decided it was finally time to work on a piece by Mr. Babbitt himself: Melismata, his 20-minute yearning, lyrical work for violin. In its lines of spontaneous and irrational freedom, a beguiling elegance, at once witty and nostalgic, awaits the listener willing to discover it.

In November 2004, I returned to his fifth floor studio to play it for him in private. Afterwards, he was very complimentary, and soon he was regaling me with incredible stories of a bygone age. He remembered concerts from 1945 as though they had happened yesterday. When he found out that my brother lived in Charlotte, he brightened and said, "Oh, they have great beer there."

At the recital where I performed Melismata, I re-told the story about the first time I ever played for Mr. Babbitt. When I got to his compliment about my memory, the audience chuckled. He called out in mock protest, “I would never use such language!”

Until I graduated from Juilliard in 2006, I ate breakfast with Mr. Babbitt nearly every Tuesday. He was unfailingly gregarious, funny, kind, and generous. He warily eyed me spreading jam on a bagel and joked, “If that was a real bagel, I might not speak to you again,” then waxed poetic about how you couldn’t find good bagels or Chinese food in New York anymore. For a man so firmly associated with the cutting edge in the minds of most people, he was remarkably old-fashioned. He avoided e-mail and when it came to non-classical music, he preferred the early jazz that most of us know from scratchy recordings. For him, of course, the vibrant sounds of the 1920s remained as fresh in his mind as though he had heard them yesterday.

He was always a perfect gentleman, revealing the gentility of his Southern upbringing in every encounter. On a day when he was almost 90, I introduced him to my girlfriend at the time. He struggled briefly to get up before collapsing back into his chair. “If my mother could see me unable to stand for a lady, she’d never forgive me,” he sighed. My girlfriend was very impressed and told me later I could learn a thing or two from him!

I was honored to perform Melismata again at his 90th birthday concert at Juilliard in March of 2006. That concert also featured his magnificent "Solo Requiem" (1976-77) for soprano and two pianos. This is an absolute masterpiece that incorporates ruminations on death by Shakespeare, Hopkins, Meredith, Stramm, and Dryden. Mr. Babbitt’s exquisite music expertly captures the assonance and meaning of the words, carefully considers and balances textural/structural elements, and manages to be achingly beautiful throughout. As a profound yet comforting statement on loss, it ranks up there with Brahms’ German Requiem.

As the organization now known as Cultures in Harmony began to take form, Mr. Babbitt was a great source of encouragement. I brightly told him that after my graduation from Juilliard, I would lead a group of musicians to the Philippines to promote cultural understanding. I would even learn some Tagalog! He raised an eyebrow and gently corrected my pronunciation of the language. It was then that I began to discover an extraordinary side of Mr. Babbitt. Since his secret work for the US government during World War II, he was fascinated by politics and by the world, and his phenomenal intellect has given him a nuanced and complex view of the world that might be a better place if run according to his principled opposition to power.

I had only just begun to learn from him in these areas when I graduated from Juilliard. I saw him a few times since then, but I never thought any particular time would be the last. The huge dome of his head, framed by tufts of white hair; his alternately stern and kindly gaze peering intently at you from behind those thick glasses; his slow but determined walk were indelible features of the years I grew into a professional musician.

And how could such a man ever leave us, when he refused nearly every concession people make to advanced age? He told me with pride that the president of Juilliard offered to send a car to New Jersey to bring him to Manhattan, but he insisted on taking the train.

But now he is finally gone, one of the last great men who remembered when gentlemen stood for ladies, when popular music was beautiful, when real bagels were plentiful, when no one stood on the pretense of fancy titles like “Professor.” Yet while those of us privileged to have known him still thrive thanks to him, he cannot be truly gone. The first leaping, seductive lines of Melismata thrum through my heartstrings like a breeze playing about grass-crowned mountaintops, and those bespectacled eyes twinkle in my memory, reminding me to be the decent person their owner always inspired me to be.

Mr. Babbitt claps for me at my recital on December 14, 2004, at The Juilliard School

What Cultures in Harmony's Friends Around the World Are Saying

2010-12-24T21:15:00.005+04:30

This Christmas Eve, I sat in my little room in Kabul, Afghanistan, wondering how to write the year-end donation request letter for Cultures in Harmony.

Perhaps I could focus on how the Samuels Foundation has agreed to give us $3,000 if we can raise $3,000 in private donations by March 31, 2011.

Maybe I could emphasize that Cultures in Harmony was recently placed in the company of the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and Sesame Street, when we were recognized, along with them, as a Best Practice in International Cultural Engagement at the US Summit and Initiative for Global Citizen Diplomacy.

But instead, I headed to Facebook, and over simultaneous instant message conversations with friends in Pakistan, Mexico, Philippines, Egypt, and Tunisia, I asked them why you should consider Cultures in Harmony in your year-end charitable giving.

Here is what they said:

"Cultures in Harmony is another effort to keep kids off religious extremism. It has my full support and should have yours too."

Adil Omar, famous rapper, Pakistan

"It would be excellent if you could provide the support CiH needs as they have come to Mexico and have done a great job with the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra of Mexico City. It would be very pleasant to have them back to support this music program."

Alonso, cellist, Mexico

"The Philippines is brimming with young and enthusiastic musicians, eager to share. If CiH came here, then they would have an outlet for sharing and learning at the same time."

Criselda, violinist, Philippines

"Egypt needs to be visited again. And tell them about the kids and the schools!"

Loay, engineering student, Egypt

"Cultures in Harmony was one of the most enriching experiences in my life in music. I still remember the day when we drew the Hands of Friendship. We should look to what unites us, not to what separates us. Politics does its best to make us hate each other. If relations were based on respect and tolerance, you would not see me as a Muslim girl. I would not see you as a bad American guy. We would just see each other as humans, and our differences would be an argument to get closer to each other, to enrich the little person that I am. With your respect to me, you will make me higher."

Nada, violinist and actress, Tunisia

I hope you will consider their words and give to Cultures in Harmony so that in 2011, 2012, and beyond, we can maintain the beautiful relationships music made possible. Rise to the challenge of the Samuels Foundation, so that our total donations from now until March 31 reach $3,000.

To the eloquent testimonials of our friends around the world, I can only add the wish from all of us at Cultures in Harmony that the holiday season lights your lives with joy.

Children in Pakistan enjoy forging connections through music on a Cultures in Harmony project

From Brooklyn to Kabul with a song

2010-12-18T00:30:00.002+04:30

I'm at Dubai airport now as I wait to return to Kabul after my first extended vacation from my job at Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM). The past month has been a good way to gather strength for my return while doing work for each of the several hats I wear.

As Violin and Viola Teacher at ANIM, I gave an interview to National Public Radio, met with several people in the USA who are helping ANIM or are interested in helping, and made a trip to Indiana University to develop closer relations between them and ANIM, noting that three of ANIM's teachers are graduates of the great school in Bloomington.

As head of Cultures in Harmony, I accepted a major award at a very important summit, met with key volunteers to discuss the future of the organization, and recruited a few potential board members. I worked to revive the Juntos con Vecinos concert series that Cultures in Harmony started in collaboration with Culturarte when I lived in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.

And of course, I had a wonderful time seeing family and friends and experiencing the extraordinary cultural and culinary offerings of Washington, DC; Indianapolis, Indiana; Bloomington, Indiana; and New York City.

Yet one of my favorite memories was on Wednesday, when I spent two and a half hours on the subway to go to PS 108, the school where I visited 36 times from September 2008 to May 2009 as a Fellow at The Academy.

I had thought that my students would have forgotten me. They are very young and 18 months is a long time. So I was delighted when even the little kids jumped up and down, delightedly shouting "Mr. Harvey's back!" I was particularly pleased to see two of the violin students who I'd started in first grade. They are now grown-up third graders!

Traveling around the school with my partner teacher, with whom I had and have maintained a very friendly relationship, I enjoyed the opportunity to introduce African-American and Hispanic kids in the middle of Brooklyn to Afghanistan through playing Afghan music and discussing Afghan culture.

With mixed success, I taught them how to clap along to the complicated Afghan rhythm of mughuli, which has seven beats. They enjoyed learning that since the music isn't written down, you can decide in performance when to play the ending, or khatem, and a volunteer (who had been quiet and cooperative during other parts of the performance) would get to whisper "khatem" to me to tell me when to end "Ta Ke Na Bashad."

Some kids danced, some kids looked bored, some listened. All asked great questions about the culture and food, though the younger kids didn't really have a concept of how far away Afghanistan actually is (they think Manhattan is far away).

The highlight was undoubtedly the first grade class in which I decided to see if they could learn the first two measures of an Afghan song, the Katagani of Baba Qiran. To my delight, half the class was soon singing happily while the other half banged out some simple accompanying rhythms on the percussion instruments my partner teacher handed out.

After several repetitions of those catchy first two measures, the kids were gleefully exclaiming, "I like this song!" Music, you really do connect folks as different as first graders in Brooklyn and little girls from the streets in Kabul...or are you suggesting that those folks aren't so different after all?

US Summit and Initiative for Global Citizen Diplomacy

2010-11-26T21:16:00.003+04:30

“The heroes should network as well as the villains,” according to one memorable witticism at the US Summit and Initiative for Global Citizen Diplomacy, organized by the US Center for Citizen Diplomacy. If terrorists get together to compare strategies, why shouldn’t citizen diplomats--whose attempt to build intercultural understanding threatens the simplistic worldviews that fuel both terrorism and preemptive war--do the same?

That was the logic behind the summit, held in Washington, DC, which concluded one week ago today. I was there thanks to Cynthia Schneider, former Ambassador of the United States to the Netherlands, and Frank Hodsoll, former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. As co-chairs of the task force on International Cultural Engagement, they had honored Cultures in Harmony by selecting it as a Best Practice, along with such prestigious organizations as the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the Silk Road Project.

The summit encompassed much more than the arts-focused diplomacy from which I draw inspiration, and which is the context for Cultures in Harmony. One of the repeated themes was the rapid growth in new media technology and the opportunities it provides for citizen diplomacy. I agree that media like Twitter and Facebook have positive applications in the realm of citizen diplomacy, but in my view, the summit was overly ecstatic about the limitless possibilities of new technology, rather than acknowledging that human-to-human interaction remains the most powerful tool of diplomacy. A web-literate, affluent Pakistani can easily click "like" on the Facebook page of the US Embassy in Islamabad, but it’s a bit more difficult and far more necessary to actually make friends with that person, let alone develop a national policy which both preserves American security and earns Pakistani friendship.

Outside of Wednesday's presentation of the task force on international cultural engagement, at which Cultures in Harmony was honored, the most prominent mention of culture as a medium of citizen diplomacy was in the introductory remarks of the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Judith McHale. She positively cited the recent award given by the Asia Society to the New York Philharmonic for its work in North Korea and elsewhere; certainly, the Philharmonic has made it easier for all of us in arts diplomacy to be able to cite a famous touchstone so that people can begin to have a clue what we are doing.

Mostly, the summit focused on other areas of importance to cultural diplomacy, ranging from women’s issues to impact evaluation to corporations. At the session on women’s issues, the panel made a strong case for the need to engage more women in conflict resolution. Kerri Kennedy, Executive Director of Women’s Campaign International, cited a memorable anecdote about a conflict in Sudan in which men from the North and South were arguing with no resolution about possession of a particular river on a map. When after several months, women were brought into the negotiations. They took a look at the map and said, “That river is dry.” The men had not known this.

Evaluating the impact of citizen diplomacy is tremendously difficult to do, and Cultures in Harmony’s past inability to effectively evaluate the impact of our projects has adversely affected our ability to win grants. A representative of the Open World Leadership Project gave a fascinating presentation on that organization’s use of data to evaluate its projects. The Center for Social Development presented the findings of their International Volunteer Impact Survey.

Corporations spoke of the value of their work. After Ingrid Saunders-Jones of the Coca-Cola Foundation spoke about their many laudable efforts, including a $30 million commitment to clean water in Africa, the moderator joked that she would be picking up a case of Diet Coke on the way home. The State Department acknowledges work by companies like Coke with the Secretary of State’s Award for Corporate Excellence, perhaps one of the reasons that Stanley Litow, a Vice President of IBM, flatly declared: “If you don’t care about Corporate Social Responsibility, you’re making a bad corporate decision.”

Most interesting for me were statements regarding the effectiveness of past citizen diplomacy efforts. Azar Nafisi, best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, stated that Iranians who opposed the regime opposed it because of the books they read by authors like Nabokov. Former US Ambassador Thomas Pickering said that when Alvin Ailey Dance Company toured Tanzania around the time of the MLK and RFK assassinations and the rise in opposition to the Vietnam War, the dancers "turned things around" in public perception of Americans.

Pawel Potoroczyn, Director of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Poland’s cultural diplomacy agency, said that the USIA helped the Polish publishing industry revitalize after the fall of the Iron Curtain. As a former publisher himself, he confessed that "we knew how to print underground books, but not how to market them in the free market." He memorably closed his remarks with an assertion every politician in Washington can ignore only at America’s peril: "If you think cultural exchange is expensive, try ignorance."

These statements of effectiveness only served to underscore how the government pays lip service to citizen diplomacy while generally failing to provide the massive support needed for cultural diplomacy in particular. At a packed session about the role of the State Department, I launched the Q and A with an incendiary question: "Hi, I’m William Harvey, founder of Cultures in Harmony, a not-for-profit dedicated to promoting cultural understanding through music. I want to begin by thanking you. The State Department, through its Embassies, supported our projects in Tunisia, Egypt, and Pakistan. Without your support, our projects would not have been so successful. As an example, in Karachi, Pakistan, a music student urged us to come back, saying, ‘Don’t just make a link. Build a relationship. You are feeding an entire nation.’ However, although the Embassies involved agree that our projects have been successful, whenever we go back to them to build or expand on a project, they say, ‘We funded you last year; this year we have to fund something different.’ I get it: you want to showcase a variety of American culture, and this is important. Yet it also ignores that the central ingredient in citizen diplomacy is specific human relationships. Given the importance of making cultural diplomacy sustainable, what are you doing to change or modify this policy of showcasing a variety of American culture to the detriment of lasting relationships?"

The State Department folks on the panel were defensive, saying I should get funding from other sources. (I would if I could.) Yet many in the audience, including a former Ambassador, agreed with me.

Madam Xu Lin, Chief Executive of the Confucius Institute of China, offered an anecdote that testifies to the importance of sustained citizen diplomacy. When Americans send an e-mail asking for dissenting proposals to an idea they have outlined, they will assume agreement if they do not receive a response. However, Chinese will be exceptionally reluctant to disagree in writing.

Her remarks were also quite funny. She began by saying that with all these people, she felt that she was speaking at a wedding feast. She concluded by saying that nations engaged in citizen diplomacy are like lovers who spat occasionally. When Martin Davidson, Chief Executive Officer of the British Council, chuckled and agreed that a marriage was a good metaphor, she piped up, “I said lovers, not marriage!” This brought the house down.

Her good humor only highlighted one of the flaws of the summit: its painstakingly serious tone. This unwillingness to laugh and to appreciate the lighter things in life reflects a flaw in citizen diplomacy. The US Peace Corps was not asked to do a major evaluation for its first 47 years, so before doing one, they made a development model which showed that they should be operating at the intersection of national priorities, local needs, and Peace Corps programming. The evaluation confirmed most of the idealistic hopes of the Peace Corps, but also showed that social contact with a Peace Corps volunteer was far more important than contact during work. If the summit is any indication, citizen diplomacy needs to absorb that socializing can do more than work and that laughter can communicate more than lecture.

Also, much of the summit consisted of ways to improve America’s image around the world, of figuring out how to "get them to like us." While in many cases only a major and irreversible policy change would accomplish this, a woman from Trinidad provided a needed corrective when, during the final plenary at the State Department, she reminded everyone to consider that the goal of citizen diplomacy should be building partnerships of equals, a point I have been making for five years now.

To its credit, State is doing some of this. I love the Center Stage program, which will bring international performing artists from around the globe to tour throughout the U.S. in 2012. This shows that much of the work of citizen diplomacy actually involving getting Americans to like the world, rather than getting the world to like Americans.

More of this spirit would have infused the summit with greater dynamism. I loved the playing of Salman Ahmad, the founder of the Pakistani rock band Junoon, at a reception on Tuesday night. Yet why not have him perform a duet with an equally prominent American rock star? He has done this in the past. What better way to symbolize citizen diplomacy and the partnership of equals?

Also, while I received many compliments about my presentation about Cultures in Harmony, those remarks were strikingly similar: people appreciated that I played my violin, rather than just talking. Citizen diplomacy is about creatively engaging populations, but at the summit, many sessions steered clear of new and innovative ways of engaging the audience in favor of the tried-and-true panel discussion format.

Still, it was extraordinary that the summit finally took place at all, after an inexcusable gap of 54 years since the first (and most recent) citizen diplomacy summit. These summits should take place more regularly, and should be opened by the President of the United States, appearing in person, if he or she wishes to truly demonstrate a commitment to citizen diplomacy.

Laura Freid of the Silk Road Project best captured why citizen diplomacy is important: “What happens when strangers meet? They look for what they share.” At its best, citizen diplomacy can help those strangers in their search, and once they finish it, hopefully they will become friends.

Birthday in Afghanistan

2010-11-15T22:35:00.001+04:30

My last week in Afghanistan before my annual leave was also my busiest. On Monday, after many months of hard work by students, teachers, Dr. Sarmast, and myself, the Afghan Youth Orchestra gave the private world premiere of "The Four Seasons of Afghanistan," my re-imagining of Vivaldi's Four Seasons in an Afghan context.

I call it a re-imagining rather than an arrangement because I added numerous Afghan tunes, changed keys, wrote new sections and entire movements, and even changed the meters. For instance, the third movement of "Spring" is originally in 12/8. I changed it to 7/8, or mughuli, considered by some to be the national rhythm of Afghanistan. The movement then becomes a short story about a little girl (represented by my youngest and most precocious violin student) who asks her father (represented by the rubab, which is the national instrument of Afghanistan) to buy her some pistachios (represented by the popular Afghan tune, "Pesta Farosh").

The preparations were hectic as we set up chairs in three different hallways and even on the staircase, placing the audience opposite the staircase and behind some members of the orchestra for an astonishingly intimate performance in which the pegs of a sitar or a flying cymbal might clip your nose if you weren't careful. The excitement built as the hour approached. Some of my other little students who weren't quite ready to join the orchestra asked eagerly, "Emrooz orkesta man?" (literally, today orchestra me?) I gently informed them that they would be ready to join the fun by the public premiere in February.

It was far more successful than any of us anticipated. The trumpet intoned a prayerful fanfare intended to represent the "Bismillah" phrase before the tabla thumped off the kerwa rhythm and got us off to a roaring start, the violins happily sawing away with Vivaldi's melody while the djembes joined in the fun. Movement after movement proceeded not only without incident, but with many moments of beauty that made me extraordinarily proud of the astonishing feats these students could accomplish.

In the slow movement of Winter, which I chose to end the entire cycle, the ghichak plays Vivaldi's most exquisite melody before the rubab improvises a reflective cadenza, intended to represent the hope for peace in Afghanistan, over a sustained F Major chord that gradually fades away into silence. The applause began slowly, but soon roared into sustained rhythmic clapping with whistles and whoops. The audience may have consisted primarily of the ANIM community and a few invited guests, but the kids more than proved that they are ready for the big public performance in February; they gave a great concert in its own right.

The next day, the American Ambassador visited ANIM. We had choreographed every aspect of his visit like clockwork, and to our relief, it worked out according to plan. Ambassador Eikenberry and his wife were astonishingly personable, taking the time to shake the hand of each and every student who stood, smiling and lining our driveway, to welcome them. Dr. Sarmast escorted the Ambassador and his entourage to the percussion room to begin a tour in which each department would perform a short piece in their own room.
I took the hand of my littlest student, who had also given the Ambassador flowers, and hurriedly brought her to the strings studio. We rehearsed "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" (from Suzuki Book 1) until it was perfect and then she obediently waited until the Ambassador, his wife, and their entourage entered. She did a fantastic job, and through their interpreter, they asked her many questions. "Oh dear, she has a cough, does anyone have a cough drop?" the Ambassador's wife kindly asked, and one was found in due course.

Immediately after they left our room, I collected the members of the orchestra and rehearsed them while Dr. Sarmast and the Ambassador met. They came down and listened to all of Spring from "The Four Seasons of Afghanistan," which went better than it's ever gone. Then, the Ambassador came outside and addressed the media. "Someone asked me what I saw here today," he said, then paused as the cameramen and notebook holders waited with baited breath. "Let me be plain: I saw the future of Afghanistan."

His interest was very gratifying, but we didn't have much time to rest, for the next day, the Ambassador of Finland arrived for a similar tour, around which I worked to fit the violin and orchestration final exams into the schedule. During the morning, I raced around, hunting for students, ushering them into the orchestra room so my colleagues could listen to their exam program, checking my watch the whole time to ensure we would finish before the Ambassador arrived.

He arrived with less ceremony and security than the American Ambassador, but his visit was no less appreciated. For the American Ambassador, we had offered him a musical farewell of two trumpets (our American trumpet teacher James Herzog and one of his Afghan students) playing "Amazing Grace." For the Finnish Ambassador, we greeted him with a version of "Finlandia" by Jean Sibelius that I had arranged for two trumpets and cello.

Like his American counterpart, he showed keen interest in the activities of ANIM and indicated that this was just the beginning of the relationship. I told him how much I enjoyed going to the Rock Church in Helsinki in 2005 with the Juilliard Orchestra and ordering reindeer at the hotel. I had a great time in Finland and have a lot of respect for it, so I hope that both of these prestigious visits do indeed forge closer ties between ANIM and both Finland and my home country.

After he left, I hurriedly graded the orchestration exam, in which the students had to arrange the Albeniz Tango for string orchestra. Was the day done when school ended and my youngest violin students finished their exams? Far from it. The famous rubab virtuoso Homayun Sakhi was in town, so I invited him to ANIM to rehearse a piece of his that he taught me back in April and to teach Robin and me another piece he created for rubab, violin, and cello. He is an extraordinary musician with a phenomenal sense of rhythm and an instinct for exploring every possibility of his ancient instrument to the fullest. We had an amazing jam session with him late into the night before heading to our faculty's favorite restaurant, where I ordered a much-needed steak.

The next day, Thursday, was the last day of school before the Eid holiday vacation began, so I had told my students that it was the last day they would see me before I returned from my month-long annual leave in the US. I rushed around to prepare the violin students for their studio recital, which they would share with the clarinet students. I was racing between tuning violins and calling the pizza place to confirm the party I'd planned for my students, when one of my older students asked me to come into a practice room. He motioned for me to close my eyes. "Uh-oh," I smiled. I remembered that they knew my birthday was coming up.

When I got into the room and opened my eyes, my oldest students, five tall, lanky boys, were all standing around a music stand grinning. On the music stand sat a beautiful cake with two candles reading "2" and "8." I almost cried. As they told Dr. Sarmast, they wanted to make sure that although I am far from home, I would not forget that I am always welcome in Afghanistan. Guys, thanks to you, I never have.

The two studio recitals went well, although the orchestra room is a bit small to encompass the entire student body. Therefore, it was hard to get everyone to keep quiet while the violinists played, but the distractions were good performance practice for them and they all did their best. I was particularly proud of one of my young students for whom even the easiest piece is extremely difficult. She wasn't really ready to perform anything, so I had the brainchild to ask her to play the open D string while one of the older students played "Musette" by Bach, a piece which is supposed to have a D drone throughout anyway. She loved doing this, and when they bowed at the end, a huge smile illuminated her painfully thin face.

The pizza arrived right on time at the end of the concerts, and I loved seeing my students chow down, particularly the girl who played open D in Musette. Pizza is a rare delicacy for most of them, and though I ordered more than enough, they easily finished both the pizza and the cake. "Bisyar mazadar ast!" they said, licking their fingers and smiling. Even the toddler niece of one of my students managed a few bites.

I worked two short days after Friday, the day off. Though there was no school, a variety of journalists had asked to come to the school Saturday. Dr. Sarmast asked for student volunteers, and to our delight, nearly all the students volunteered, so I was able to work in a last day of lessons after all. We very nearly had a crisis when one of my young girl students sadly told me that her brother wanted this to be her last year in school so that she could stay home and sweep the floors for him next year. Dr. Sarmast solved it with a call to the mother, who declared, "If she wants, my daughter will attend your school as long as she lives!"

On Sunday, my 28th birthday and my last day in Afghanistan for just over a month, I woke up to discover that the manager of the guesthouse had purchased a cake for me. "But you have to play Happy Birthday to yourself on the violin!" he teased, so I did.

After school, which was dominated by a meeting about exams, I packed and then headed to the Serena Hotel for a delicious buffet dinner with friends from Afghanistan, Gambia, Germany, India, Italy, the US, and Zimbabwe. I was very touched that my colleagues presented me with a qaraqul, the Afghan hat made from the fur of fetal lambs and made famous internationally by President Karzai. I was so proud that I wore it all evening.

This morning at the airport, security personnel asked to open my violin case. One of them started to pick up my violin, but I wouldn't let him. "Can you play it?" he asked.

With the X-ray machine and a line of bored, tired travelers just behind me, I plucked out the strains of the popular Afghan tune "Bia ke Birim ba Mazar" as the security personnel smiled in spite of themselves. As they joined in the last phrase with me singing instead of playing by that point, I reflected that despite the challenges and struggles of eight months of teaching violin in Afghanistan, music connects hearts there as well as anywhere.

National Cleaning Day

2010-11-05T22:25:00.005+04:30

In the scrum of stories about the US midterm elections, you may have missed the fact that a week ago yesterday was declared a Day of Cleaning by the Afghanistan Ministry of Education. Did that really mean that ANIM's children would run around cleaning the school? I asked incredulously. Why yes, it did.

I asked to be the captain of the smallest children, who were assigned the task of cleaning windows. About twenty milled around me as four of them received rags and I was handed a soapy bucket. "OK, you two carry the bucket, you folks can take turns washing the windows—" I floundered for a second. "You two stand against the wall with your backs straight," I said. And the chubby little fellow who studies violin with me and recently burst into tears when he accidentally broke a bow? "When the window's not clean, you will say 'neest!'" I told him. He grinned. "Neest" is Dari for "it's not," as in, "it's not clean." He delighted in pointing an accusatory finger at a streaky spot and shouting, "Neeeeest!" dragging the "ee" sound out like a shrieking teakettle. Though some of the other kids grumbled, he kept them on task.

Some of the little girls did an outstanding job, and soon the windows were cleaner than ever. A few little boys acted silly, pointing to each other and saying in Dari, "He's not clean," before dusting each other off. The pint-sized impish brother of one of my students gleefully snapped me repeatedly with his rag. Though a few kids managed to make their assigned areas a wee bit dirtier than before, most of the kids did a stellar job. It was a great idea to help them develop a sense of responsibility for their environment, and apparently, other kids at schools throughout Afghanistan did the same thing that day.

The pride in our students' faces only grew later that day, as we inaugurated our intramural concert series with a performance by the piano and percussion students. From seeing a small girl play a beautiful pentatonic piece with her teacher to seeing the percussion ensemble rattle off an irresistible rendition of Khachaturian's "Saber Dance," the concert symbolized how far we've come in a short semester whose frenetic pace has left me with little time for this blog.

The third week in September saw a lot of returns and additions to ANIM: first, our Italian piano teacher Adriana arrived; then, our new cello teacher and my old friend Robin; then, pianist Allegra Boggess, whom Cultures in Harmony brought to Kabul for two weeks to develop a practice monitoring system; and finally, Dr. Sarmast, our beloved founder, returned from a well-deserved vacation in Australia.

We had little time for orientation though: just a week after they arrived, the Afghan Youth Orchestra performed for President Karzai, members of the Afghan Cabinet, and the American Ambassador in celebration of Literacy Day! Early in the morning of September 28, we entered a high school assembly hall to find that a couple hundred people were already seated. A couple hours later, the guests, who by this point numbered well over one thousand, all stood up. President Karzai entered with his entourage. He was wearing his signature white shalwar kameez, tailored suit jacket, chapan (long colorful shawl), and karakol (hat made from the fur of fetal lambs). He seemed very happy and sat down about thirty feet from where I was seated.

After a recitation from the Holy Quran, I slipped to the front of the orchestra and led them in my arrangement of the National Anthem of Afghanistan as President Karzai, his full cabinet, numerous Ambassadors from countries including the US and Saudi Arabia, and the hundreds of guests stood. The Minister of Education gave a short speech, after which Mr. Shefta came to the front to conduct "Sar Zamin-e Man," a heart-rending, beautiful song protesting the rule of the Taliban.

The President seemed very touched. Afterwards, he came to the orchestra, pointed at a couple students, and said, "Bisyar khub" (very good). His subsequent speech to the assembly was captivating. I don't know much Dari, but his charisma is so tremendous that you don't have to understand the words. He had the audience eating out of his hand, and managed to mingle uproarious jokes and pathos in the same speech. He finished on a rousing crescendo and walked out of the hall to a storm of applause. The American Ambassador, Gen. Karl Eikenberry, gave the only other speech.

Back at school, we taught a little more, and then that same evening, some of the faculty, including myself, went to Babur Gardens to perform for an event celebrating Afghan and German friendship. I was delighted to discover that the evening event had been moved from the Kervansaray to a much more glamorous destination: the music room of the Queen's Palace! While waiting for the rock group to finish their sound check, I took in the fantastic view of Babur Gardens, most of Kabul, the surrounding hills, and the Hindu Kush in the distance. After a long series of speeches, I played the Bach E Major Prelude and then joined my friends, the rubab, tabla, and cello teachers, for a couple Afghan tunes.

We ended up back at Babur Gardens just a couple weeks later to play for the National Day of the Arts, a glittering, nationally broadcast event celebrating a variety of Afghan performing arts, ranging from music to theater to a man doing excellent bird imitations. In recognition of this performance, the Ministry of Culture later gave Robin and me a certificate and gave me my very own chapan! Words don't express how excited I am to own this exquisite, hand-woven, near-mystical garment.

Shortly after that, I was pleased to see a friend and wonderful advocate for cultural diplomacy, Cynthia Schneider, former Ambassador of the United States to the Netherlands, visit our school during her brief trip to Kabul. As visitors often are, she was impressed with the progress of the school, the credit for most of which goes entirely to the indefatigable Dr. Sarmast. We shared a memorable dinner with ANIM faculty, the head of Tolo TV (Afghanistan's most popular TV network), and, at the very end, the last Prince of Afghanistan, son of the late King Zahir Shah.

Yet such honors are not the main thing keeping me excited to come to work. Awards and contacts with important people are not what keep me going through the extraordinary difficulties of creating music in a metaphorical minefield of cultural sensitivities, through the disappointment of exciting concerts postponed and difficult compromises made.

A couple weeks ago, I showed my little students The Art of Violin. Mostly it held their attention, and I was especially impressed with one talented but rambunctious girl who sat there mesmerized the whole time. Each time a famous violinist played a piece that is on the curriculum I designed for ANIM, I told the kids how many years from now they could learn it. If the piece was particularly difficult and they weren't in love with it, this would scare them: "I don't want violin!" they would say in Dari, or "Moshkel!" (Difficult). But if they liked the piece, they might say something like "Dars-e man!" (My lesson!).

One piece I told this girl she could start learning in five years. "But will you be here in five years?" she asked. I stopped and thought of all the stress I'd recently experienced due to the difficulties of shepherding the orchestra towards a performance that will now take place over 3 months later than planned. But then I saw her little face, anxious, waiting for my answer.

"Barayetan? Hamesha." For you? Always.

On these cold autumnal days which sneakily hint that winter is closer than you think, the sun will briefly bathe Kabul in warmth around noon. The effect is pleasant, yet can't match her smile upon hearing my answer.

Cultures in Harmony Selected As Best Practice

2010-09-21T21:53:00.005+04:30

Cultures in Harmony is pleased to announce that we have been selected as a Best Practice by the International Cultural Engagement Task Force and the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy (USCCD) and as such will be highlighted as a key component of the upcoming U.S. Summit for Global Citizen Diplomacy, to be held November 16-19, 2010 in Washington, DC. Cultures in Harmony is one of ten organizations so honored by the International Cultural Engagement Task Force; the others include the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Silk Road Project.

In preparation for the Summit, Task Forces in nine sectors – business, community-based organizations, development assistance, global health, higher education, international cultural engagement, international voluntary service, K-12 education, and youth service - were created to highlight ways in which organizations within each sector can expand existing initiatives and offer new and innovative programs to encourage more engagement of Americans in global citizen diplomacy. The Task Forces are co-chaired by experts in their respective fields and represent broad networks of U.S. non-profit, non-partisan organizations. Summit Task Force groups compiled and vetted hundreds of program submittals as part of the selection process, and will make presentations on the role of their sector in increasing U.S. citizen engagement in international affairs at the Summit in November.

Portfolio summaries of the selected Best Practices from each of the nine sectors will be available at the Summit for all participants, including potential funders. The U.S. Summit for Global Citizen Diplomacy is a national meeting presented by the USCCD in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, Office of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. The Summit is designed to broaden the momentum generated from the work of the USCCD as a national resource base and network for Americans to be engaged as citizen diplomats, and two major leadership forums focused on the revival of citizen diplomacy as a critical component of U.S. public diplomacy and foreign policy strategy.

The Summit will be the first such meeting since President Eisenhower’s People-to-People conference on the same subject 54 years ago, and will serve as the launch for a “Decade of Citizen Diplomacy” with a goal to double the number of American citizen diplomats by 2020.

Cultures in Harmony and the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy stand together in their commitment to the expansion and promotion of citizen diplomacy initiatives. The U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy (USCCD) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization established in 2006 to promote and expand opportunity for all Americans to be citizen diplomats, and affirm the indispensable value of citizen involvement in foreign relations.

Playing for the Fighting Sixty-Ninth

2010-09-16T09:24:00.002+04:30

Nine years ago today, I had probably the most incredible and moving experience of my life. Juilliard organized a quartet to go play at the Armory. The Armory is a huge military building where families of people missing from Tuesday's disaster go to wait for news of their loved ones. Entering the building was very difficult emotionally, because the entire building (the size of a city block) was covered with missing posters. Thousands of posters, spread out up to eight feet above the ground, each featuring a different, smiling, face.

I made my way into the huge central room and found my Juilliard buddies. For two hours we sight-read quartets (with only three people!), and I don't think I will soon forget the grief counselor from the Connecticut State Police who listened the entire time, or the woman who listened only to "Memory" from Cats, crying the whole time. At 7, the other two players had to leave; they had been playing at the Armory since 1 and simply couldn't play any more. I volunteered to stay and play solo, since I had just got there.

I soon realized that the evening had just begun for me: a man in fatigues who introduced himself as Sergeant Major asked me if I'd mind playing for his soldiers as they came back from digging through the rubble at Ground Zero. Masseuses had volunteered to give his men massages, he said, and he didn't think anything would be more soothing than getting a massage and listening to violin music at the same time.

So at 9:00 p.m., I headed up to the second floor as the first men were arriving. From then until 11:30, I played everything I could do from memory: Bach B Minor Partita, Tchaikovsky Concerto, Dvorak Concerto, Paganini Caprices 1 and 17, Vivaldi Winter and Spring, Theme from Schindler's List, Tchaikovsky Melodie, Ave Maria, Amazing Grace, My Country 'Tis of Thee, Turkey in the Straw, Bile Them Cabbages Down. Never have I played for a more grateful audience. Somehow it didn't matter that by the end, my intonation was shot and I had no bow control. I would have lost any competition I was playing in, but it didn't matter. The men would come up the stairs in full gear, remove their helmets, look at me, and smile.

At 11:20, I was introduced to Col. Slack, head of the regiment. After thanking me, he said to his friends, "Boy, today was the toughest day yet. I made the mistake of going back into the pit, and I'll never do that again." Eager to hear a first-hand account, I asked, "What did you see?" He stopped, swallowed hard, and said, "What you'd expect to see." The Colonel stood there as I played a lengthy rendition of Amazing Grace which he claimed was the best he'd ever heard.

By this time it was 11:30, and I didn't think I could play anymore. I asked Sergeant Major if it would be appropriate if I played the National Anthem. He shouted above the chaos of the milling soldiers to call them to attention, and I played the National Anthem as the men of the 69th Regiment saluted an invisible flag. After shaking a few hands and packing up, I was prepared to leave when one of the privates accosted me and told me the Colonel wanted to see me again. He took me down to the War Room, but we couldn't find the Colonel, so he gave me a tour of the War Room. It turns out that the regiment I played for is the Famous Fighting Sixty-Ninth, the most decorated regiment in the U.S. Army. He pointed out a letter Abraham Lincoln sent offering his condolences after the Battle of Antietam...the 69th suffered the most casualties of any regiment at that historic battle.

Finally, we located the Colonel. After thanking me again, he presented me with the coin of the regiment. "We only give these to someone who's done something special for the 69th," he informed me. He called over the regiment's historian to tell me the significance of all the symbols on the coin.

As I rode the taxi back to Juilliard...free, of course, since taxi service is free in New York right now...I was numb. Not only was this evening the proudest I've ever felt to be an American, it was my most meaningful as a musician and a person as well. At Juilliard, kids are hypercritical of each other and very competitive. The teachers expect, and in most cases get, technical perfection. But this wasn't about that.

The soldiers didn't care that I had so many memory slips I lost count. They didn't care that when I forgot how the second movement of the Tchaikovsky went, I had to come up with my own insipid improvisation until I somehow (and I still don't know how) got to a cadence. I've never seen a more appreciative audience, and I've never understood so fully what it means to communicate music to other people. And how did it change me as a person? Let's just say that, next time I want to get into a petty argument about whether Richter or Horowitz was better, I'll remember that when I asked the Colonel to describe the pit formed by the tumbling of the Towers, he couldn't. Words only go so far, and even music can only go a little further from there.

Response to criticism

2010-09-09T11:51:00.005+04:30

While I was proud that my open letter to Dr. Terry Jones was featured on AOL News, I was dismayed to read that most of the comments do reflect support for his decision to burn the Koran. Usually, vitriolic comments on the internet do not dignify a response, but in this case, I feel that they are part of an important dialogue.

One general tactic was to paint me as an un-American traitor who is desecrating the memory of the 9/11 victims. Someone said I can't possibly be an American; I must actually be a terrorist. Someone calls me a "Muslim extremist." Another commenter observes "sounds like a terrorist wrote this article."

On September 16, 2001, I performed first for families of the 9/11 victims, and then for soldiers from the Fighting Sixty-Ninth Regiment as they returned from rescue and clean-up work at Ground Zero. In honor of this performance, Col. Geoffrey Slack of the Fighting Sixty-Ninth Regiment gave me the regimental coin, saying "We only give these to someone who's done something special for the Sixty-Ninth." Since then, I have traveled the world with Cultures in Harmony, promoting a positive image of the United States.

Most of the criticisms are simply humorous:

One fellow says "hippacrates get real." Assuming the misspelling of Hippocrates, yes, I agree that it's high time for ancient Greek physicians to "get real."
One commenter opposes "saraha" law and claims vast experience with the "musklims." Is Saraha law like Sahara law (always travel with several big jugs of potable water)? Are the "musklims" the offspring of the musk oxen still found in Arctic regions? My views are "Niave." The capital N must mean that I share the views of Antony Niave, who according to LinkedIn is a telecom manager in the DC area.

One commenter threatens to burn an "epogy" of Mohammed. I had to look this up. "Epogy" is a graphical analysis automation and numerical optimization framework. Sounds complicated: if you build one of those and somehow manage to connect it to Mohammed, that would be such an achievement that I don't think you'll want to burn it.
One commenter says: "William Harvey, you should go play your fiddle for the war mongering mooslims and see how much they like it you idiot!" Are the mooslims related to the musklims? Are we talking baby moose? Because if we're talking Muslims, then I've played for them in the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Qatar, Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey, and yes, they like it.
Another of my favorites: "You sir are a stupid man. As a christian, I will turn the other cheek, but I only have two. Your muslims declared war on us, kill our people, and refuse to allow us equal consideration abroad. Your tratorous slobber is profoundly ignorant." Thank you for correcting me. I was laboring under the misapprehension that you had 17 cheeks.

And of course, there was the popular argument that I, an American of Jewish heritage, have Nazi sympathies: "Mr. Harvey. It is idea's like yours that help keep America's enemies on the attack. Your line of thinking is Treason. If people like you were in charge of ww2,we would all be goose-stepping."

Perhaps 1 of 20 comments is supportive. With such supporters, who needs enemies? One supporter just writes: "That's action is NOT Christian." Oh good. I am always mentioning the pernicious, perfidious That, the oddball of his family who labors in the shadow of his virtuous brother This. I'm so pleased you agree with me: That's action is NOT Christian. Another supporter says Mr. Jones will spew HATERED. Gasp. How can he? Red is such a beautiful color.

Yet behind the insufferable floods of infantile invective lie two points with which I cannot argue:

1. In 2010, there is no manner in which normal people could offend Christians to the extent of endangering their life. Perhaps an abortion doctor's life is in danger from extremist Christians who oppose abortion, but the average citizen or even a prominent author or artist can insult Christianity in any nation in the world without fearing for his/her life. One cannot say the same about Islam. It has been explained to me that this is because some Muslims feel that the word of God and the honor of their prophet really are more important than any human life. Moreover, although God is all-powerful, part of the "judgment" of any individual Muslim (in the views of some Muslims) consists of whether or not that Muslim has acted to enforce Islamic law on earth. Therefore, although their God would be perfectly capable of punishing transgressors, he will judge otherwise-upright Muslims by whether or not they themselves acted to punish transgressors.

To me, this is unacceptable. Nothing is more important than the sanctity of a human life, and an opinion that states otherwise is wrong. As correctly understood, Islam respects the sanctity of a human life.

2. No one can or should try to deprive Dr. Jones of his rights. I would not be proud of an America in which he did not have the right to launch this protest, and I would no longer call myself a patriotic American, as I do now. In America, we celebrate our freedom of choice. My letter was an attempt to convince him to change his mind, not an effort to convince the government to force him to change his mind.

One of my few more thoughtful critics writes:

I disagree most with reason 10, as should everyone else here. It's insulting and it puts the onus of terrorism on those being terrorized. In effect it's telling us to buy into terror by not treading on other people's toes for fear of "offending" them, lest they react with violence. This is dangerous and fearsome because offense is an arbitrary value that may change from person to person, and this is the root of an Orwellian government. Jones is endangering a book made of paper and leather; he is NOT endangering American lives. If someone makes the conscious CHOICE to react with murder and terror, that is their responsibility and the blame should be placed entirely on them. Understand: you may say and think whatever you wish, and you may offend whomever you want in this beautiful country we live in. If someone so offended reacts with violence, that is NOT YOUR FAULT. Let's start NOW illuminating this distinction between speech and thought and retaliatory actions. If a man in the UNITED STATES wants to burn a book, he has that right, and his actions are protected under our wonderful Constitution. If another man chooses to murder to protest, he is a criminal and shall be treated as such.

I do hope that Dr. Jones will choose not to burn the Koran, but I also hope that those Muslims who choose to protest him will do so without harming anyone. May we all continue our struggle for a world in which we may agree or disagree while still respecting each other and acknowledging that the most sacred value of all is the inalienable worth and dignity of each and every human life.

An Open Letter to the American Pastor who wants to burn the Koran

2010-09-05T20:38:00.003+04:30

E-mailed via the form at the website of the Dove World Outreach Center at 8:20 p.m. on September 5, 2010, from Kabul, Afghanistan

Dear Dr. Terry Jones, Pastor, Dove World Outreach Center:

On a warm late summer day at Gainesville Guitar Academy, a 15-minute drive from your church, children plunk out the sound of their favorite songs on guitars. Yesterday at the music school where I teach, I also listened to a student play guitar until his soft chords were drowned out by the shouts of demonstrators marching past. Our music school is in a majority Muslim country, and the marchers were protesting your announced intention to burn copies of the Koran on September 11. As a fellow American, one whose life is endangered by your actions, I implore you not to do this. As you provided ten reasons why you wish to burn the Koran, I will provide ten reasons why your protest is the wrong thing to do.

1. It disrespects the memory of those who died on 9/11.

The vicious thugs who attacked the Trade Center and the Pentagon almost nine years ago did so in order to widen the cultural divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims. Your planned protest would also accomplish this, allowing the message of violent extremists acting in the name of Islam to resonate more widely. The innocent victims of 9/11 deserve better than for you to use the anniversary of their death to commit an act of which their murderers would have approved.

2. It is not Christian.

You defend your decision with a passage from the Bible (Acts 19:18-20) that does not apply to this situation. The passage refers to "those who had practiced curious, magical arts" gathering to burn books in which they no longer believed. This is quite a different act from you choosing to burn a book in which you have never believed, and in which over one billion people still believe. Furthermore, when the passage says that the "Word of the Lord grew and spread and intensified, prevailing mightily," it is clear that this is due to the increased number of new believers, not to the act of burning books which was, in this case, an act chosen by those new believers to signify their faith.

I hope you will re-read the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the assertion that "every one who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment" (Matthew 5:22). Your protest and the words on your website reflect anger and provoke it.

3. It is un-American.

The First Amendment protects Americans from any effort by the government to abridge our freedom of speech; it does not exhort us to say whatever comes into our heads. If the government said that you had no right to express yourself, this would be un-American, but irresponsibly exercising that right stains our hard-earned heritage of liberty and our tradition of tolerance. Book-burning is an act more typically used by dictators as a form of suppression than by free socieities as a form of protest.

4. It contradicts your message.

I have taught music around the world because I believe that it can reach out across boundaries of culture and religion with a message of peace. From the name of your church, I would assume that you shared my interest in peace (the dove is a symbol of peace) and in outreach. Your actions foment hatred instead of peace and encouraging reaching inward towards our innate prejudices rather than outward towards the possibility of understanding.

5. It reflects an unwillingness to explore the wisdom in the Koran.

How much of the Koran have you actually read? It is possible to open it at random and quickly find a passage with which most people would agree. I did this and immediately found Sura 7:84: "Commit no disorder on the earth after it has been made so good." We should all be so virtuous as to live by such words. Given the disorder that may result from your actions, I regret that you have not yet realized that this is a book that contains much for non-Muslims to respect.

6. There are other books denying the divinity of Jesus

You state on your website that you are burning the Koran because it contradicts your belief that Jesus was the son of God, yet there are thousands of books which do this, such as those by renowned atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Thomas Jefferson willfully excised all references to the divinity of Jesus from his book, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Would you burn the Declaration of Independence, the document without which it is doubtful our ancestors would have earned for you the right to launch this ill-advised protest?

7. There are more effective ways to express your views

If you disagree with any actions by individual Muslims, by all means say so! Engage with them, write to them, discuss with them, work with them, break bread with them, agree to disagree with them. I have done this with hundreds of Muslim people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Egypt, Qatar, and the United States. Only good has come of it. The method of expressing disagreement that you have chosen is too hurtful to be effective.

8. Your views reflect limited contact with actual Muslims

Your website reveals an irrational fear and loathing of Muslims. How many devout Muslims have you met? How many have you read about who were not violent extremists? I have met hundreds of Muslims and performed violin for thousands more. They are great, good, and average; they are like humanity because they are of it. None of those Muslims warrant the fear that permeates your website. I urge you to read about the life and works of Abdul Sattar Edhi to learn what a true Muslim looks like.

9. Destroying a book is always a bad idea.

John Milton, who knew more about Christianity than either of us, wrote in the Areopagitica: "As good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God's Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye." No matter what the book contains, no matter the quality, it has the right to be read.

10. You endanger American lives.

Your actions endanger my life. The vast majority of Muslims who learn about your planned protest will peaceably counter-protest, but there are likely to be some, operating under their own perverted interpretation of the religion, who will want to protest your actions by killing Americans wherever they may find them. Not just myself, but thousands of Americans in the military, in the foreign service, and doing humanitarian work in countries from Mauritania to Indonesia (where thousands of Muslims have marched in protest of your plan) are in danger.

I understand that you are disturbed by many of the actions that have been committed in the name of Islam. I understand that at this late date, you will not want to easily walk away from the attention of the international media at a time when they are happily relaying your message to the world.

Therefore, I do not suggest canceling your event, but rather, changing its form. By pure coincidence, September 11, 2010, falls during the celebrations to mark the end of the Muslim Holy Month of Ramadan. Instead of burning Korans, I hope you will instead consider inviting Muslims to celebrate Eid ul-Fitr with you, thus giving both of you an opportunity to freely and frankly share views over a delicious meal.

Tomorrow, in spite of the continued counter-protests planned for my city, I will teach music to Muslim children. You will continue preparing for the event you have announced for September 11. I only hope that you consider an alternate form for this is event, one that is in keeping with the implications of the name Dove World Outreach Center, with the message of Christianity, and with the tolerance, compassion, and empathy that have always characterized America at its best.

Sincerely yours,
William Harvey
Music Teacher in a Muslim Country

Image-changing media

2010-08-29T19:45:00.005+04:30

NATO TV produced an excellent story about our school in Kabul. If your perception of Afghans involves war and terrorism, watch this video and perhaps you will develop a more complex view of what it means to be Afghan in 2010.

For instance, if you put "Afghan violist" in quotes in Google, you may not be surprised to discover that there are no results. This is because last Wednesday, August 25, was a historic day in Afghan music: it was the first day in the history of this country that an Afghan had formally studied the viola! Three of my oldest and most responsible students were thrilled to see the beautiful new violas by the gold-medal-winning German luthier Gottfried Raabs that were donated to our school by the Society of Music Merchants. They exclaimed at the richness of the C string and can't wait to get started playing music! Check out pictures here and here.

If those three young men in Kabul will eventually give Google some results for "Afghan violist," I'm proud of a couple of musician friends, neighbors to the east, whose success may soon produce Google search results very different from the grim news you may find from a Pakistan-related query. Whatever good or bad you may think about Pakistan or what it means to be Pakistani, Adil Omar's extraordinary, pulse-pounding, pull-no-punches rap video, Incredible, is likely to shatter every stereotype you had. The hype is real: "Incredible" is incredible.

At the other end of the musical spectrum, singer-songwriter Natasha Humera Ejaz has created this charming video of her playful, wistful, and haunting song "Today is a Place." Thank you, Natasha, for showing that whimsy and delight have a place everywhere.

Although images of violence inevitably influence our varied opinions of the military, this video of American soldiers participating in musical exchange and this video of German military band officers training an Afghan military band affirm music's transnational connective power. In so doing, the videos remind us of the humanity of every person in Afghanistan, whatever his or her beliefs, country of origin, or purpose here.

I'm pleased to be a part of the cloud of pictures and videos of musicians swirling around the internet, a cloud that gives the lie to the assertion of rigid, sharp differences between people.

Music: more precious than chocolate

2010-08-24T12:46:00.004+04:30

The pace of life slows down refreshingly during Ramadan. I was stunned when I treated a colleague from ANIM to the iftar meal. As we drove through Kabul at dusk, the streets were nearly empty. We zoomed down streets through which we usually crawl through the madding crowd of vans, cars, donkeys, pedestrians, fruit sellers, and beggars.

On a daily basis, school gets out earlier. Everyone has a little less energy, but it's also a creative challenge: how can we make the best use of this time from a pedagogical standpoint? What is that one thing we can focus on and improve?

It is a transitional time for our school. Dr. Sarmast and the whole team at the Deputy Ministry worked hard to establish many of the policies and procedures before Ramadan. Dr. Sarmast is now on leave, and when he returns after Ramadan, our new piano teacher and cello teacher arrive, and the orchestra begins preparing for a major concert in October.

I try to interest a few kids in cello. At first, they think it is some sort of bizarre punishment; they have never heard of one. On a whim, I summon a couple students, one by one, and play the Bach C Major Prelude on viola. When I finish, their eyes are shining with delight. "Did you like that piece?" I ask in Dari. "Maghbul," they say. Beautiful.

"Actually, it's written for cello." Suddenly they can't wait until the cello teacher arrives. One girl who cannot yet read music even asked for a copy of the score.

Perhaps this month will be when my older boys solidify their sense of rhythm. I have started asking them to imagine that a small tabla player lives in their stomach. "Da din din da da din din da," I say in a comical singsong voice, making hand motions to imitate this hypothetical three-inch-tall man, busily playing tabla in the student's abdomen. They laugh, but the more they imagine this tabla player, the more solid their sense of the beat becomes.

I also hope that this will be the month when my little girls finally understand what it means to practice. With the help of the principal translating, I gave them a little speech today.

"Do you see this exam?" I said, holding up the mid-year exam of one of my older boys. "Five, five, five, five. He got everything perfect. You can too. All you have to do is practice, and when you take this exam in November, you can easily do well." I pause to let this sink in.

"But right now, none of you will do well, because you don't practice. I see you sitting in the same room as the violin, but that's not practice. I see you laughing with each other, but that's not practice. Practice is when you play, on your violin, the song you learned at your lesson, and think about fixing the things I pointed out. All you have to do to succeed on the exam is practice.

"Yet there is a more important reason for you to practice than the exam. Before you all came to this school, you led a difficult life working on the streets. Do you know it is possible for you to make a living in music instead? If you work hard and practice at this school, we will all work hard to make sure that when you leave us, you will be able to study music at any university in the world. And then, you can work playing violin instead of selling things on the street. Which would you rather do?" They all quickly said they would rather play violin.

"Yet there is an even more important reason to practice, more important than money. Do you love violin?" They all nodded. "Well then, isn't it amazing that it might be possible for you to support yourself and your family doing this thing that you love? Isn't that wonderful?" They smiled.

"Never let anyone tell you that your future is not bright. On my wall, you will see pictures of five men." They all looked at the pictures of Beethoven, Schubert, Bartok, Tchaikovsky, and Debussy. "Those pictures are there because those men were great musicians. I see no reason why in ten or twenty years, your picture cannot join them."

I looked one girl right in the eye. "Beethoven wa shoma, yak jai." Beethoven and you, together.

Before Ramadan, I had made a habit of rewarding my students with chocolate. It had gotten out of hand, to the point where it seemed as though they enjoyed studying with me because chocolate might be in the offing. Of course, I suspended this practice during Ramadan, informing them that it might start up again after the month of fasting.

Two of the girls filed out to practice, and the third remained behind for her lesson. She was more obedient and learned more than in any lesson she's taken. She's painfully thin, and had been among the students who most appreciated the chocolate rewards. At the end of her lesson today, just as she was about to leave, she turned around, her eyes blazing from her pinched face, "Bad az Ramazan, cacao na mi khoham." After Ramadan, I don't want chocolate.

"Violin mi khoheen?" I asked.

Bale. Yes.

Two more articles

2010-08-10T07:42:00.002+04:30

AOL News and Instep both have articles about my recent trip to Pakistan.

A class at CAPA

2010-08-05T16:30:00.003+04:30

The violence sweeping Karachi kept me confined inside on Tuesday and compelled the National Academy of Performing Arts (NAPA) to cancel my planned concert with teachers and students from Pakistan's premier music school. I ventured outside only for lunch at Espresso.

Yesterday I headed to Children's Academy of Performing Arts (CAPA). The school, founded by the affable and enthusiastic Aqueel Premjee, offers music classes to children much younger than the young adults who comprise the majority of the student body at NAPA (which does actually range from 8 to 50 years of age). I sat in an a class of adorable little guitarists, two of whom had made up their own rock song but couldn't figure out the chords. I told them to try E Major, B Major, and A Major, based on what they were singing.

I gave a master class for a young violinist, focusing on rhythm, cues, and position. Everyone seemed to enjoy it.

In the evening, I headed back to The Second Floor for an exhibition of artworks by Uzair Akram. I appreciated the swirling, colorful lines and surrealistic jottings of his vision, which is influenced by his attempt to perceive and render dimensions beyond the third dimension in which we all live.

Now, I am back safe and sound in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Looking out our own window

2010-08-03T10:41:00.005+04:30

"So what happened?" I asked a group of Pakistani musician friends. I was holed up at my location last night until the chaos outside died down. I had heard that a political leader had been assassinated resulting in city-wide violence here in Karachi, Pakistan.

I soon regretted I'd asked. They each tried to tell me their own version of the background to this tragic event (the only position I take by calling this tragic is that murder is never the way to express your disagreement with a politician). Soon, my friends switched into a political argument with each other, first in English for my benefit, then sliding into Urdu. I became worried, but fortunately, one of them, a tall, lanky fellow from up north, threw his arms around the others and said, "But we are all Pakistanis, we are brothers, we condemn violence, and we make music together."

Any story hitting the international media from Pakistan this week will probably contain few such inspiring moments. The big story is the devastating floods which have killed hundreds and displaced millions. Then, there was that horrific plane crash in Islamabad. And now, an assassination followed by related violence in Karachi. All of this set against a backdrop of stories about war, terrorism, and religious extremism.

That's why I've become a regular reader of Chup, Kalsoom Lakhani's extraordinary blog where she does her best to present a different image of Pakistan.

It's also one of the reasons why I'm here: because my experience of Pakistan last year and this year is quite different from the image presented in the media. I'm not sure my experience is representative either, but can any one American experience a country of 175 million people in two weeks?

That's not to say it's been entirely roses. On Friday, I came down with a debilitating food-borne ailment that still has me unable to eat most foods, but that pales in significance next to my gratitude at the numerous friends in Islamabad and Karachi who have shepherded me through the various disasters that have buffeted their country these couple weeks. I owe my life and security to them.

Since arriving in Karachi early Friday morning, my schedule has been action-packed. I gave a lecture at Aga Khan University at which I spoke about music and medicine, the ties connecting them, and the limits both disciplines face when they are applied to the field of conflict resolution or used in regions of conflict. The lecture was well-received, particularly a medley I performed to demonstrate the universality of music. I chose four rhythmically and harmonically similar tunes and played them so that they flowed right into each other: Mor Tor Tillay Rana (Sindh, Pakistan), Imeda Mbre Idi-Oh (Aka Ibom, Nigeria), Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (composed by Mozart, who was Austrian), and Yankee Doodle (United States). I was grateful for the opportunity to lecture at the beautiful, immaculate campus of such a prestigious university.

On Sunday, I performed with Zoe Viccaji and the band Bell in a well-publicized concert at The Second Floor, the sort of cafe where a male ballet dancer/author and a female contemporary dancer/painter are likely to take a break from their cappuccinos and break into a spontaneous rendition of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance.

I loved the place immediately: the clean, wood floors; the crisp, cool, fresh-scented air from the numerous air conditioners; and the menu at the cafe where I saw "bagel and cream cheese" for the first time in this part of the world. I regretted that I didn't have hours on end to look at the bookshop, with a whole host of volumes ranging from the moderate to the politically radical. I settled on buying a T-shirt with the motto: "I think therefore I'm dangerous."

Zoe did a superb job promoting the concert. The music area (actually on the first floor) was tightly packed with Karachi's hippest crowd: models, actors, dancers, photographers, musicians, filmmakers, etc. They seemed to like everything, roaring their approval, taking pictures and videos. I played six solos: Caprice No. 5 by Mark O'Connor, Fantazy El Mansora by the Egyptian composer Attia Sharara, Music for the Violin by Nicholas Csicsko, my own arrangement of an Afghan tune, and Paganini Caprice 20 and Caprice 21. Even the modern sounds of the Csicsko, written for me in 2007, went over well.

I loved working with Zoe and the Bell. Bell's guitar sounds are atmospheric and groovy, and their song "Desire" amusingly sets their desire for peace in Pakistani to a waltz theme. Zoe and her sister Rachel have heavenly voices: perfectly in tune, softly textured, alluring. Zoe also writes songs with astoundingly ingenious harmonies, sounds resembling clouds of memories merging into one another.

Last night, I performed a more conventional violin-piano duo recital with Usman Anees, a virtuoso Pakistani pianist whose family does yeoman work promoting Western classical music in Pakistan. We offered a small but enthusiastic audience a program consisting of Beethoven's Spring Sonata, a brand new piece composed by Usman entitled "Lonely Reflections," Franck's Sonata, and my own arrangement of the popular Sindhi tune Mor Tor Tillay Rana.

After we finished, we had to remain at our location for a couple hours until the city quieted down. I headed back to the place where I'm staying, checked e-mail, went to sleep, and woke up to the view from my window of the Indian Ocean, gently rolling through the mists to break upon the beach, where camels lazily strolled. Who could imagine anything but peace from such a picture?

Sadly, I forced myself to remember that though the international media may offer one picture and I may offer another--of concerts, of good friends, of men and women respectfully and freely interacting--we are each of us merely looking out one window.

Articles in the media

2010-07-27T09:27:00.003+04:30

I am having a wonderful time in Islamabad. Please check out the excellent article about last Saturday's concert in Dawn News. And here's another article about the concert in The News.

I am grateful to my hosts and friends here for making my stay so enjoyable, and to Natasha Paracha, Miss Pakistan 2008, for traveling from New York to show her support for this project.

A rapper and a rock concert in Isloo

2010-07-25T10:42:00.003+04:30

Pakistan's most prominent rapper doesn't fit the stereotype. A tall, skinny fellow, he's got the requisite collection of badass T-shirts and jeans, but he's exceptionally polite and soft-spoken until he grabs the mike and cuts loose with a blistering streak of intensity flowing from a dark place in the soul.

I met Adil Omar during a rehearsal at Nysa Lounge, which was recently pronounced "the center of gravity for Islamabad's hip young set" by no less than the bureau chief of one of the largest international news organizations. Adil brought his iPod cued up to the song he thought would work with violin, and to my delight, it was immediately clear what I needed to play.

Later, I rehearsed with my old friend Taimur Khan, creator of the world's largest website devoted to the sarangi, his beloved and extraordinarily beautiful instrument, in which the bow releases the haunting resonance of numerous sympathetic strings. The sarangi is a sound to express the innermost longings of the spirit, and I enjoyed the fact that my two collaborations on the benefit concert for Afghanistan National Institute of Music would feature South Asian classical music on sarangi and tabla...and rap.

Kuch Khaas is a new venue that has done much to contribute to the dynamism of the Islamabad social and musical scene by offering classes, concerts, a cafe, and a venue to hang out and express yourself. They attracted a good crowd of about 50 to fill one of their rooms for the benefit concert. After my first piece, a caprice by the fiddler Mark O'Connor, I introduced Mursal Sarmast, the niece of Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, founder of ANIM. She gave an eloquent speech about the need to support the sponsorship program there.

The collaborations with Adil Omar and Taimur Khan provided a unique and varied way to show the audience and my community back in Afghanistan that Pakistanis stand shoulder to shoulder with Afghanistan in its quest to bring back the musical culture.

After the concert, I was prepared to settle in for the night when my host got a phone call. A rock concert was going on at the Open Air Theater. Did I want to play with the band Irtaash in front of a couple thousand screaming rock fans?

I threw on a Cultures in Harmony T-shirt, grabbed my fiddle (it was no longer a "violin" for tonight), and hopped in the car. We had to park quite a distance from the venue, and the roar of the screams, whoops, and hollers from the stadium did nothing to calm my nerves. As we threaded our way past smokers, families, and couples to the entrance, I glanced at the black-shirted security team.

Then, I glanced again. Their shirts did not say "SECURITY," like they would at a rock concert in the US. They said "ANTI TERRORIST SQUAD," and these men, way taller than me and with faces and bodies that meant business, toted assault rifles.

The lead singer of Irtaash talked us past security and to the backstage area, which was crawling with stage crew, musicians, and groupies. I met the band for a quick rehearsal. One song: C-sharp 9 chord and F-sharp 7 chord. Cool, got it. The other song: E major, A Major. Nice, I'm with ya. Ready? Ready. Let's go.

We stood backstage as the previous act finished up. Clearly they were very popular: the crowd was on its feet, swaying back and forth, clapping. A little boy had squeezed through the barbed wire to clap onstage until security gently tossed him back to a waiting parent. The crowd chanted and stomped as the previous act finished, and before you knew it, it was time for our soundcheck.

Not only was this the first rock-and-roll concert I've played in, it was the first I've attended. My experience of the aesthetic is limited to glimpses of movies and TV shows. So I figured out that simple tuning wouldn't do, and did a G Minor riff for my soundcheck, hoping I wouldn't sound too much like a prim and proper classical musician. It seemed to do the trick: the crowd roared their approval.

I stood back while Irtaash did their first song ("make some noise, Islamabad!"), and then the lead singer gave me a lengthy introduction in Urdu, speaking about how 9/11 inspired me to use music to create peace, and then asking the crowd to "give it up for William Harvey from Afghanistan!"

Do I bow? Probably not. Just a head nod. There. Do I look cool? Probably not. Whatever.

The songs went very well, especially considering that we had about 10 minutes of rehearsal and we played the songs half a step lower than we had rehearsed them. During my first solo, I sensed that my bucolic ramblings based on the two chords were not really thrilling the crowd, so I kicked it up a notch with rapid-fire octave tremolos, ascending in a complex rhythmic pattern towards the stratosphere. The crowd screamed and roared, and for the first time, I understood what rock music has to offer the performer that classical music never can. I rapidly slid down to an open string and closed out with a fast arpeggios on all four strings before relaxing into the entrance of the singer.

All in all, it was a thrilling experience and an honor to perform with these guys, who create beautiful, soulful music and also happen to be really nice people.

We were to be followed by the biggest Pakistani rocker in the world, Atif Aslam, so my host recommended that we head out. "Can we stay long enough for me to acquire a groupie?" I pleaded, looking longingly at the large crowd of glamorous girls hanging out backstage. "Come back next year," he smiled, and we headed off for a delicious, cold milkshake at The Hot Spot.

Exams and Pakistan

2010-07-23T09:43:00.002+04:30

I regret that I have been too busy to update here. As our students have prepared for their first semester final exams, ANIM's role within the Kabul community has grown. Our students performed at the Goethe Institute, an American brass band visited our school for a performance, and myself and two other teachers were interviewed on Killid Radio.

Exam preparation took over my life for a while. This was the first exam I had designed since my arrival, and I was very anxious for all my students to do well. I offered them all as many lessons as they wanted after school, and to my delight, the girl who needed the most help, a painfully thin and shy child from an impoverished background, asked for an extra lesson every day. I am proud to report that after a huge amount of work, she received 84 of 100 points on her exam, which was to perform "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" with all variations.

Now, I write from Islamabad, Pakistan, where I just arrived yesterday to begin the Cultures in Harmony project there. I'm looking forward to a benefit concert on Saturday, since the proceeds from this concert will benefit ANIM's sponsorship program, enabling girls like the one who showed such dedication in preparing for her exams to continue studying at our institute in Kabul. This concert is an excellent way to combine my passion for ANIM, to which I have been very dedicated since my arrival in Afghanistan in March, and my work with Cultures in Harmony, the non-profit I founded in 2005.

Parents' Visit

2010-07-11T21:32:00.007+04:30

I clasp and unclasp my hands, waiting by the barbed wire fence in the dust at the airport, surrounded by families. The sun beats down already at 7 a.m. "Are you sure we can't get any closer?" I ask my driver. I can't see anything that even looks like an airport.

He reluctantly says yes, he's sure. I berate myself for telling my parents I could meet them at baggage claim, where they always meet me at the airport in Indianapolis. I buy a cold drink; my driver declines.

Eventually, my parents show up. I can't believe it's actually them, walking toward me after three days of travel, finally here in Afghanistan. They look exhausted. My mom is hard to recognize at first. I've never seen her with a headscarf.

We hug, and I eagerly pick up my mom's old suitcase from the trolley, so we can head towards the air conditioned van. I have a busy day planned for them, hoping that this will keep jet lag at bay.

We check them into the guesthouse, and after a delicious breakfast, we head straight to ANIM. We barely have time to settle in before the gong strikes for my 10:30 class: Ensemble. This group of teenaged guys came to me a couple months ago, saying they wanted to play the Blues. They showed me their version, and I thought they could benefit from some coaching from my dad, who writes about jazz for the Indianapolis Star. He lectures from notes, and although my guys don't know much English, they eagerly listen. They particularly connect with Bag's Groove, a blues riff he introduces them to, and the trumpet student loves learning more about Louis Armstrong. Their blues sounds much more interesting underpinned with the harmonic variety my dad urges them to explore.

After lunch in the faculty lounge, my mom helps me with my studio class of young girls from Kabul's streets. These girls are all wonderful and I get along with all of them, but although a couple of them are very talented and work hard, I have been unable to get the others to progress as quickly as I'd like. My mom, who has been teaching piano since roughly a decade after Cristofori invented it at the beginning of the eighteenth century, quickly identifies the problems. I expect too much too soon, and do not include enough games to solidify a sense of rhythm for girls whose grasp of rhythm was more tenuous.

Soon, she is playing hand clapping games and marching with them. They all grin and love every minute of it. Before the end of class, all of them request a maternal hug at least once.

From school, we go straight to Babur Gardens, my favorite spot in Kabul. They love the beautiful layout, planned by Emperor Babur himself half a millennium ago, but I keep accidentally bounding ahead until I catch myself, sadly reminding myself that my mom does not move as fast as she used to.

The next day is our concert at the British Embassy. The Land Cruiser picks up my parents, myself, and my colleague Norma early, with plenty of time to adjust to the sound at the garden within the Embassy where we will perform. We begin more or less on time. Britain's Deputy Ambassador enthuses about how happy he is that we will begin with the great British work for violin and piano, The Lark Ascending, because the Deputy Ambassador's grandmother was a violinist and played the piece for Ralph Vaughan Williams, the composer!

My mother plays the soft opening chords. I reflect how lucky I am that she agreed to play with me and is playing the accompaniment so well despite her jet lag and our limited rehearsal time. I take a breath and begin Vaughan Williams' soft, rootless, soaring cadenza, a hushed and magical beginning that uses the pentatonic scale to approximate bird song. The work is suffused with an unreal, impossibly pure beauty that we do our best to capture. I am grateful that at the end, as the violin disappears into the stratosphere, the sound of our instruments fades into the sound of real birds singing in the trees around the garden.

My colleague Norma improvises percussion parts to some half-forgotten Pashto melodies I selected from a book compiled by an Afghan musicologist and published in 1991. After that, I take the stage for a half hour: Bach's D Minor Partita. I begin the Chaconne only to stop immediately. "We pause for the call to prayer," I tell the microphone, standing respectfully for several minutes until the otherworldly, haunting adhaan of the muezzin comes to an end and I launch into the monumental Chaconne.

Two more colleagues, ANIM's rubab and tabla teachers, join me for four Afghan pieces they have taught me. I was thrilled by the opportunity to learn these pieces from them, and eventually I summoned up the courage to add some harmony. The concert ends, and as musicians do, we gather afterwards at a Lebanese restaurant, sipping fresh, cool fruit juices under the stars and eating what my mom avers is the best hummus she's ever had.

Friday, our day off, is the ANIM faculty picnic at Lake Qargah, just outside Kabul. I've spent a while organizing this. It is important to me to encourage our faculty to think of themselves as one unit, and I thought we should have some time to socialize outside school. I enjoy my first excursion outside Kabul since my arrival over three months ago, and am glad that the other faculty took the invitation to include their families seriously. One teacher shows up with his adorable four-year-old boy, who loves shaking my hand, and another brings his daughter.

As a pleasant surprise, the rubab and tabla teacher bring their instruments and entertain us during the long wait for our food. I would never ask them to take this busman's holiday, but we all love their music as we take in a view of the lake and the surrounding mountains.

School begins early the next morning, and immediately, we all head to Radio Television Afghanistan. Historically, this mammoth compound of recording and TV studios set among gardens formed the locus of Afghanistan's cultural scene, employing and engaging the country's most important musicians, such as Salim Sarmast, the father of the founder of ANIM, known as Afghanistan's first conductor. I admire the enormous artistic portrait of him just above the stage, baton seemingly at the ready to bring in the next orchestra to grace the stage of RTA after his orchestra fell silent long ago.

We wait for a long time as the stagehands set up the microphones. My mom stays with the young girls to make sure they behave, and I seek out the canteen to buy them each a cookie and juice. Eventually, Mr. Shefta records his pulse-pounding arrangement of "Dareen Watan," and I get to record my orchestral arrangements of the Afghanistan National Anthem and Ustad Guzalman's "Da Watan." Scarcely does the actual recording begin than it's time to leave. It is a great honor to record for national television at a site that did so much to celebrate and preserve Afghan music throughout communism, war, terrorism, and Taliban.

The last day of my parents' visit is here. Far too short. When I tell my little girl students that it's time to say goodbye, they don't believe me at first. "Ten more days!" one says in Dari, holding up ten tiny fingers in an attempt to get them to stay. More hugs, More pictures. Then, school is out.

We go first to the Fourth of July celebration at the US Embassy. We pass the security barriers, surrender our passports, collect our temporary IDs, and walk onto the Embassy lawn, greeted by the welcoming scene of red, white, and blue bunting, milling crowds of happy people, hot dogs and hamburgers, and babies holding balloons. We enjoy some American camaraderie before browsing at the Shah Mohamed Book Company, Kabul's famous bookstore that carries every imaginable book in every language on every subject even tangentially related to Afghanistan. I knew my parents would love this, and am thrilled that they buy a couple books.

At Chicken Street, my mom searches for a lapis lazuli necklace. For 7,000 years, Afghans have extracted the luscious blue stone from a mountain in Badakhshan that is the oldest continuously operated mine in the world. That mountain supplied the lapis on King Tut's death mask, so anything with lapis is the perfect souvenir of Afghanistan. My mom has a necklace in mind, and is delighted when she finds one that matches her mental image exactly. The owner knows he won't have to bargain too much.

A final dinner at the fancy Italian restaurant brings their visit to a close. Six days later, I still don't let go. I type on my blog, writing in present tense, knowing it sounds pretentious but hoping that the very now-ness of the present will bring the visit back into life. I'll see them in November, of course, but as I work 8,000 miles away from home in a culture I still struggle to understand, their five days in Kabul had a more powerful effect than their trips to New York, even if we sometimes went longer between visits when I lived there.

Two images in particular stay with me. One of my girl students is painfully shy, and always seems to fade into the wall. I'll never forget how brightly she smiled when my mom worked with her to finally get her to do a rhythm that had always eluded her. I'd never seen this girl smile that brightly before. I hope to see that smile on her more often as I apply what I learned from my mother.

The other image is a picture. Emperor Babur carefully designed his gardens along an axis, which he intended to be filled with water (to avoid extravagance in drought-prone Kabul, it is usually dry these days). We had just climbed to the top of the hill in which the gardens are inlaid. The axis stretches out far below, with Kabul bustling beyond the peace of the gardens and the Hindu Kush mountains rising in the distance. I suggest a picture, my dad on one side, my mom on the other.

"Let's hold hands," my dad says to my mom.

News from Tunisia

2010-06-28T22:30:00.003+04:30

Lilian Belknap sent me the following report from Cultures in Harmony's project in Tunisia:

We are here, arrived safe and sound yesterday around noon. Mafoud met us at the airport and after a complicated maze in the airport parking lot (seriously, 15 minutes or forward and backward and arabic out the window and multiple bumped curbs) we headed off to Hammamet. The new hotel is beautiful (there were flowers on our beds) the staff is friendly and the food is excellent. We are being treated exceptionally well so far. Guess what was delivered this morning: TWO acoustic pianos!!! Joel and Shoshi are great, the schedule is almost entirely in place and we're all looking forward to the students coming tomorrow. Dani arrived this morning and we had a lovely reunion at lunch and made plans to all hit the beach later this evening while we still have some free time. The beach, by the way, puts the other hotel to shame. Beautiful water, beautiful sand... I could stay there all day if I didn't have so many eager violinists showing up tomorrow.

Anyway all is well and we're having a great time. Feel free to publish any of this to the blog. The hotel has no internet but there's a cafe around the corner (where I am now) so we'll do our best to stay in touch.

Inauguration

2010-06-25T17:41:00.005+04:30

Last Sunday dawned bright and clear. The car picked me up an hour earlier than usual, but I hardly needed any extra coffee: this was the official inauguration of the only school of music in Afghanistan. Students milled about in excitement or waited under trees, talking. Members of the rock band checked and double-checked the sound system: "Bale, yak do se; bale, yak do se." The sarod and sitar players retreated to tune their instruments, and Dr. Sarmast was everywhere at once, making sure all the students were here, welcoming dignitaries who arrived early, offering suggestions about balance during the dress rehearsal, and more.

The famed singer Ustad Guzalman arrived in full regalia, and policemen crowded around for a picture with him. Mr. Shefta and I ran through our selections with the orchestra as big, beefy security agents in fatigues poured out of enormous, bullet-proof Land Cruisers, the ambassadors they protected not far behind.

I took my position backstage with the five solo musicians who were about to make history. After a recitation of the Holy Quran, the master of ceremonies informed the audience of my philosophy behind the arrangement I made of Afghanistan's national anthem: "Never before today has the National Anthem of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan been heard with both Afghan and Western instruments joining forces. The rubab, which is the national instrument of Afghanistan, leads this new arrangement, soon joined by other instruments historically associated with Afghan musical culture, such as tabla, sarod, sitar, and ghichak. The Western instruments join later in a supporting role, symbolizing the central role of Afghans in the future of their great and beautiful country."

I took a deep breath and walked around the stage. The soloists and I bowed, but the audience was already beginning to stand in respect. The first initial chords glimmered in the distance, minerals in distant Afghan mountains catching the morning light. Then with a flourish, the tabla brought in the rubab, its sympathetic strings vibrating with the plaintive forcefulness of Babrak Wassa's ingenious melody that hovers somewhere between minor and major, between sadness and hope. Slowly, the other instruments joined in a tremendous crescendo, before the trumpet soared over everything, triumphantly declaiming the final notes. It must have been received well, since we were later invited to record it for national television.

Then, Ustad Guzalman and his chorus took the stage for my arrangement of his famous song, "Da Watan." I was so proud of the orchestra for mastering the difficult arrangement, and in particular I was proud of my little girl violin students. Though they just started violin, they brilliantly executed the simple ostinato I wrote for them. I took a water break afterward and stayed backstage during the speeches. I particularly enjoyed Dr. Sarmast's speech. Though I don't have a copy of the whole thing, here is a portion of it as prepared for delivery:

"If you see a story in the international media about Afghanistan, you might learn about many tragedies from our past. However, you might have missed the story about the girl who used to sell chewing gum on the streets and is now learning violin. How did she get this opportunity?

"When I came back to Afghanistan in 2005, I found a musical culture with tremendous needs. Historically, music had been a vibrant and important part of Afghan culture, but war and neglect had left students without teachers, teachers without resources, and professional musicians without a context for their art.

"Seeing this, I felt that Afghanistan deserved to hear again the music of hope. To the lasting benefit of the children of this country, many people have agreed with me. Monash University encouraged and supported this project. The Ministry of Education of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan agreed to include this project in their work, and the success you see today would not be possible without the work of everyone from the Minister and Deputy Minister to the ASDP team. My family has given their unending support, and their love gives me strength for my work. Words cannot express my gratitude to them.

"The World Bank and Goethe Institute contributed major funding, and the Society of Music Merchants donated five tons of the highest quality musical instruments and electronic equipment in the world. The Government of India, Embassy of the United States, Royal Netherlands Embassy, National Association of Music Merchants, Yamaha Gulf, and Taiwan Reliance also provided many important supplies and services.

"Thanks to them, this school shines a light into the world. For Kabul, it is a cultural center. For Afghanistan, it shows the greatness we can achieve when we work together. For the international community, it demonstrates the beauty of our culture and our capacity for understanding. Many people deserve our heartfelt thanks for building this school. Yet as they know, it is not for them.

"It is for the girl who used to sell chewing gum. It is for the young man who eagerly downloaded videos of violinists, but never knew if he would be able to join that number. It is for that group of friends who dreamed of making a living as musicians. It is for all talented Afghan youth—regardless of gender, ethnicity or social circumstances—to have the opportunity to study in a world-class music institute.

"Every note they play is a note of hope, a note of understanding, a note of friendship. Let these notes sound throughout the world and push back against darkness. To all of you who have come to support us today: thank you for doing your part to bring beauty to Afghanistan."

It brought down the house.

Next, our sarod and rubab teachers played extraordinarily beautiful selections. I took the stage briefly for my own arrangement of the popular Afghan song "Let's Go to Mazar." My Mexican colleague, percussion teacher Norma Ferreira, led her students in an ensemble piece she arranged. The rock group offered their pulse-pounding version of "Let's Go to Mazar," Mr. Shefta led the orchestra in the inspiring patriotic song "Dareen Watan," and some guest students from another school did the National Atan dance.

As the dignitaries began their tour, I made sure that I was teaching two of my little girl students in my studio. They played Twinkle, Twinkle wonderfully, so received a little chocolate in gratitude. After the tour, the adults thronged the reception area, so I snaked my way through and emerged with plates of cake so that some of the more timid students could have some. Exhausted, I then trudged my way home, stunned and honored to be a part of the greatest day for music in Afghanistan's history.

This week featured a couple other delightful occasions. On Tuesday, I took a cab to Turquoise Mountain to hear Norma's extraordinary recital of contemporary percussion music. It was a rare treat to sit on cushions laid out on plush Afghan carpets spread out in the grass in an Edenic garden, surrounded by an old fort. I'll have to go to Turquoise Mountain more often. I was proud to call Norma my colleague: her renditions of intriguing works by modern composers from Serbia to Puerto Rico were mesmerizing, particularly as she seamlessly combined vocal sounds with magisterial command of the djembe, bongo, and other instruments.

Yesterday, the student ensemble I coach, Afghan Guys, had their first gig: a performance during a social hour at the British Embassy. The "Guys" were deliriously excited, partly because I had treated them all to pizza immediately after school. We finished rehearsing and waited for the car from the Embassy to come. Finally it did, and we all packed in. After taking a while to clear security at the Embassy, we received a light supper and set up the sound equipment, creatively hanging microphones from a tarpaulin when necessary.

I had repeatedly emphasized to Abbas, leader of the Guys, that he should print business cards, so I was pleased when he pulled out a bag of two hundred. Throughout the hour-long performance, I mingled with the assembled crowd of diplomats and proudly handed out Abbas' brand-new cards. An Iranian woman requested her favorite Persian song, and swayed back and forth as the Guys played it even though they'd never rehearsed it. I hope they get a lot more gigs from this occasion, and I was very glad to have the opportunity to help launch what will hopefully become Kabul's hottest new group.

Today in New York City, a team from Cultures in Harmony leaves for Tunis, Tunisia, for our fifth project in that country. And later this weekend, my parents leave the US to visit me here in Kabul. Bon voyage!

A new Cultures in Harmony video

2010-06-17T22:36:00.003+04:30

Most of my week in Afghanistan was devoted to preparing for the inauguration of our school, so I'll save the inauguration report for next week's entry. Al Jazeera came out with this well-done story about ANIM, focusing on the little girls who used to work on Kabul's streets and now study music.

Now, here is some important Cultures in Harmony news. First, check out this dynamic, 90-second video describing what we do:

In just over one week, a Cultures in Harmony crew leaves for a project in Tunisia. This is our twentieth project total, and our fifth in Tunisia.

Finally, check out this extraordinarily well-written blog entry by cellist Peter Myers about his visit to Mongolia with Midori. Scroll to the bottom for English. His experience typifies what cultural diplomacy can accomplish at its best.

Inspiring students, painful loss

2010-06-11T12:53:00.009+04:30

My students continue to inspire me. I was teaching one of the little girls from the streets how to play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." One of the variations proved difficult and her face fell. "Moshkel! Man ghamgin astom." (Difficult! I am sad.) "Man piano mi khwahom, man guitar..." I gently cut her off and told her in Dari that I wanted her to play violin. She can be excellent, I said. It took me a while to explain, but I also told her that I could have chosen any student to play for the World Bank visit, but I chose her because she's talented. It's possible for her to make a living in music, but only if she practices and sticks with violin.

It took me a while to get this last concept across, but once I did, her reaction was precious and unforgettable. Instantly the dejection vanished from her little face, she straightened up, put her violin in playing position, and said: "Tamreen, tamreen! Kor mi konim!" (Practice, practice! Let's work!)

It appeared as though another one of the talented young girls would have to leave the school for reasons beyond her control. After a stretch of absences, she came to school yesterday all in black, looking like a shadow of her usual self. At the bell for recess at 10:15, she came to my room and asked for a lesson. I never teach on Thursdays and I knew she had classes she was required to attend instead of taking an extra lesson, but of course I welcome her into my studio.

I ended up teaching her until noon. That's right: I gave an 11-year-old girl a lesson for 1 hour and 45 minutes, and her concentration didn't seem to flag once. She seemed desperate to learn. When she came in, she barely knew the first variation of Twinkle. Now, she had some trouble with the second variation, but by the end of the lesson, she could do all four variations and the theme of Twinkle. It took me nearly a year to do that. True, I was much younger than her, but I had infinitely more advantages. This girl learned Twinkle in 1 hour 45 minutes. Fortunately, we made a few calls, and it looks like she will be able to stay with us.

After many weeks of rehearsing, the orchestra played "Da Watan" with its songwriter, the famous septuagenarian Afghan singer Ustad Guzalman. He wanted more percussion and guitars, but was basically happy with the arrangement I made and the work the kids put into it. After that rehearsal, I ran into a 19-year-old student from my ensemble class while he was riding his bike in the street. He spontaneously invited me for tea, so I accepted. I loved his living room with the beautiful hand-woven Afghan carpets and enjoyed meeting his brother, Afghanistan's first male model, while sipping the delicious cardamom-infused tea from a china cup.

I woke up on Wednesday to tragic news that reminded me that horrible things can happen anywhere. Before Cultures in Harmony, the thing that defined me most was my dedication to new music. In that area, Omar Hernandez Hidalgo was my hero. I met him shortly after arriving at Indiana University in 2002; he was 11 years older than me. He was always calm, modest, and kind, but when he got onstage, the performances were electrifying. He played Bruno Maderna's "Viola" and George Benjamin's "Viola, Viola" (with Yuval Gotlibovich), both of which are so difficult that the people who can play them in the world can probably be numbered on your fingers. We toured the West Coast with New Music Ensemble together in March 2003.

Omar was recently found dead in his hometown of Tijuana, Mexico, a few days after he was kidnapped. This is senseless and devastating, not just for his family but for Mexico and for modern music. He was the first Mexican violist in history to get a doctorate, and the tireless champion of works by composers most people either will not or cannot perform. The evil thugs who killed him do not have the intellectual capacity to comprehend what they have destroyed. I admired Omar and wanted to be like him when we sat side by side in New Music Ensemble. I haven't seen him since I left IU in 2004. His death shows that terrible senseless violence can happen anywhere. May he rest in peace.

World Bank Visit and Queen's Palace Concert

2010-06-04T08:55:00.003+04:30

The much-anticipated visit of the World Bank to our school went very well. They are our largest donor, so we all cleaned the school and aimed to impress. I arranged to be teaching a girl student around the time they would be coming by, knowing the high priority now given to girls' education in Afghanistan.

I was worried that her lesson would end before the big group stopped by my studio, so I held her over a few minutes and sure enough, they showed up. She is the adorable tiny girl who used to sell chewing gum on the street and whose father was paralyzed when he was beaten with an electric cable a decade ago.

I had alerted her earlier to the fact that important people who gave money to the school might observe her lesson. This was hard to do given the fact that she speaks no English and my Dari is limited. Once she understood, however, she demanded I immediately stop teaching her "Twinkle" and that we rehearse "Handal Choo" and "See A Little Camel." That's one of the amazing things about her: with no awareness of the outside world of music and after playing the violin for just a month, she already knows that it's a better idea to perform the pieces you know well than the one you just learned. There are college students at music schools in the United States who don't know that.

So suddenly, Dr. Sarmast, the Deputy Minister, numerous people from the Deputy Ministry, and many important World Bank representatives came into my room, and she gave a flawless performance of her two pieces. Everyone just loved it.

I felt so grateful to her for doing well that I gave her chocolate, which she loves. Just as I'd finished giving it to her, Dr. Sarmast ducked his head into the room. "Can you do an orchestra rehearsal now?" he asked. With considerable student help, I rounded up about a fourth of the orchestra. Fortunately, I was able to get three of my beginning girl students in the room. I wrote a very easy part for them: open E string, over and over again. ("Da Watan" is in E Phrygian). The delegation came in just as the rehearsal was getting very focused. They were thrilled to see the little girls included.

The next day, my oldest and most advanced student got to Allegro in Suzuki Book 1, which gave me confidence that he will finish Year 1 of my ten-year curriculum in one semester. This speedy progress is good, because it validates for him that he made valuable progress before I arrived. I still have many students who haven't gotten to Twinkle yet.

As carefully as I pay attention to my students' musical progress, I am often shocked into realizing that Afghan kids are like kids anywhere: for better and for worse. I became concerned when I was trying to simultaneously teach two girls a rhythm for Twinkle, and one of them refused to play a clapping game with the other one. I repeated my request, saying "Dostetan ast." (She is your friend.) The girl who refused shot back, "Nist," with a smile. I was shocked. The other girl looked hurt; she had just been brazenly informed that she was not the other girl's friend. I was very confused and told the girl who refused to play that I would keep her violin if she didn't do the clapping rhythm. Smiling, she waltzed out of the room without her violin.

Later, we got to the bottom of this. Apparently, the student who refused to play the clapping game enjoys teasing the other girl, which makes her very upset. Being told she wasn't the other girl's friend and the cumulative effect of all the teasing was too much for her: she began to cry. I gave her a couple Kleenex. "Kay man shagard bud, digar shagardan khub nist ba man," I said in my rudimentary Dari. (When I was a student, the other students were not good with me.) "Man [crying motion] bisyar zyad wakht." (I cried many times.) "Hal man khub ast; shoma khub khwahad bud." (Now I am fine; you will be fine.) She stopped crying and seemed to be feeling better. At orchestra rehearsal after school, she was positively radiant.

After the rehearsal, I attended a phenomenal concert of folk music from Badakhshan. It's hard to imagine a more spectacular concert venue for this than the Queen's Palace at the top of Babur Gardens. The Gardens ascend dramatically up one of the many hills surrounding Kabul, and the Queen's Palace, magnificently restored by the Aga Khan Foundation, sits at the very top.

The grassy courtyard, ringed by rosebushes, commands a view of all of Kabul, which I enjoyed briefly before the sun set. Hand-woven carpets, plush pillows, and chairs faced an outdoor stage richly decorated with more carpets and fiery lanterns. As the musicians ascended the stage, it occurred to me that from their point of view, they are literally playing for the entire city. It's not just an optical illusion: the city is fairly quiet at night, and it requires little imagination to picture their sound soaring beyond the palace walls for the listening pleasure of 4 million Kabulis.

And what sound it was! These musicians, each clad in a shalwar kameez, vest, and traditional woven hat, carried the soul of remote, mountainous Badakhshan into the heart of Kabul tonight. From wizened old men with beards to young, clean-shaven fellows, each of their faces glowed with pride in their culture and passion for performing. Sometimes one of them would spontaneously leave his instrument on a cushion, stand up, and dance, a beatific expression ennobling his features as he whirled around, his arms moving freely around one another, the audience gleefully clapping and whistling in 7/8 time.

The music is always mesmerizing: love songs on the plucked qushqarcha, the keening wail of the ghichak, the primal throb of the daf drum. They closed with an extraordinary suite of wedding music. I hope the joy conveyed at the Queen's Palace tonight, conveyed with such a sacred sense of living tradition, may spread throughout this country. Afghans need only look to other Afghans for joy, inspiration, and hope.

Australian story about ANIM

2010-06-01T17:55:00.000+04:30

Check out "School Solo", a wonderful story about our school in Afghanistan on Australian national TV.

Teachers' Day and Peace Jirga

2010-05-28T20:04:00.004+04:30

Monday was Teachers' Day, a national holiday here. I vaguely recalled teacher appreciation days in the USA, but usually such occasions were modest and not very memorable. Here, the students talked about Teachers' Day for a week before it happened.

I understood why when the day finally dawned. Girls skipped around in colorful, sparkly headscarves. Small crowds of students huddled in corners, wrapping presents. Custodians set up chairs in the hallways, and small ensembles rehearsed pieces they had prepared. It was all a bit mystifying to me, that a day is set aside when students are expected to give their teachers gifts and show appreciation regardless of whether or not that emotion is genuine. The only appreciation I expect is prompt attendance and hard work. Still, I didn't want to spoil the festivities, so I stood at the back during the concert and congratulated those of my students who performed on a job well done.

I was deeply touched by the gifts I received. Two of my older male students gave me a pakol (the Afghan hat made famous by Ahmed Shah Massoud) and a watch. Two of the young girls who come from very poor backgrounds each gave me a pair of socks, a gift which left me touched beyond words. From what I know of the circumstances in which those girls live, such a gift represents tremendous sacrifice. A king could not wear gold raiments with more pride than I will wear those socks.

Twice this week, we interrupted our routine to go to the loya jirga tent. I was tremendously excited about our school's opportunity to perform at the upcoming Peace Jirga, the most important event for Afghanistan in 2010. I would join our students as a member of the orchestra, and on the first trip there, I was positively giddy with anticipation. The intense security (over a week before the event) did not disappoint, and neither did the walk to the tent. Colorful banners fluttered in the breeze on either side of the sidewalks at Kabul Polytechnic University, and the several dozen students and teachers excitedly toted saxophones, trumpets, violins, and percussion beneath the beautiful banner displaying the logo of the Peace Jirga: a sunlit dove hovering in the center of a map of Afghanistan. Once inside the dimly lit tent, filled with a couple thousand chairs, I saw to my delight that we would perform on the same stage where President Karzai and other dignitaries would preside.

In the end, it was decided that we would not perform, in order to respect the views of those conservative attendees at the jirga who are opposed to music. With reluctance, I accept this reasoning. Music can help bring about peace, but if music itself is an obstacle to peace, then let us first have peace.

The experience of Afghanistan

2010-05-21T16:58:00.003+04:30

I practiced Bach this morning as a bee buzzed inside my room, repeatedly circling and tapping against the window. I kept my eye on the bee: I could no more imagine what it is like to be that bee than I can imagine what it would be like to hear Bach without my musician's awareness of the names of the chords and sequences he uses. What a privilege it would be to be an outsider peering into the world of music, seeing only cascading sounds of bewildering beauty!

In Afghanistan there are many outsiders, struggling to find the logic, the coherent story. What does it mean to truly experience Afghanistan? Every day after my hard work at the music school I retreat to my idyllic guesthouse for chats with other foreigners working here: the veterinarian from Kansas, the Namibian business expert once tasked with locating a German murderer in the Maldives, the Argentinean revolutionary journalist and toy maker. Their tales are fascinating, their insights perceptive, and perhaps this motley crew of adventurers and laborers each struggling to improve their little corner of the world would feel just as alone in their home country; certainly I often have. Yet even those who work without cumbersome security restrictions find that Afghanistan manifests a complexity impenetrable to the outsider. Doesn't every place do that? Set up rhythms and rules across generations that reverberate across the spectrum of human experience? How would a kid from Kabul react to Kansas?

The journalist is not tasked with describing the indescribable: millions of unique individuals interacting in ways they alone determine. The journalist must simply present the experience as accurately as he or she sees it, while telling a story easy to reduce to a headline. Two major stories about ANIM came out this week: an Associated Press story that ran all over the world, and a story in a major US paper. In the last blog entry, I linked to many versions of the AP story because it told a narrative that resembled the reality I experience. I won't even mention the name of the paper that ran the second story, because it is so inaccurate I don't want anyone reading it.

In that story, a man whose connection to our school is tangential at best is presented as running the Afghan Music Department at ANIM; a friend of mine runs this department. The article exaggerates the dangers of life in Kabul, implying that people change drivers all the time because they don't know whom to trust. Actually, most organizations maintain a large stable of drivers so that no one driver is overworked. The article implies that drivers take serpentine routes for security reasons. Actually, Kabul's streets meander around one another in a manner typical of old cities all over the world.

The Associated Press story I love; I have been forwarding it to friends and posting it on Facebook. Every detail matches my truth. Yet even that story is just that: a story. The elements build together and form an emotionally compelling arc. The story concludes with an anecdote about one of my students, a girl who used to sell chewing gum on the streets.

How easy, how nearly mandatory it is to idealize such girls and speak of their courage in attending school! Am I therefore allowed to suggest that they are children with the same small foibles as children anywhere? Once I gave out a couple markers and pens, now many of the school's least privileged children routinely stop by my studio to demand markers and pens. Am I callous for becoming irritated? I don't have the Dari to explain that I was not brought here as the Free Pen Dispensing Man and that my extremely busy schedule doesn't allow me to engage in Pen Shopping Sprees.

The girls in my class giggle too much, like girls everywhere. My mother sent me advice based on her experience directing a girls' choir in Indianapolis; I'll try it out next time. Yes, these girls are heroes. But world, I ask you: is it OK if they are also little girls?

Later in the week, Al Jazeera and Afghan National Radio came by. Al Jazeera caught me teaching one of my students and struggling to accompany him on the electric keyboard. Their viewers will experience an Afghanistan of tremendous promise…and inept, bearded American pianists. Our school is often presented as the beacon of hope which it is, but we have our mundane problems that don't fit easily into stories of hope or despair. I've had a hard time getting good attendance at one of my classes, so I posted a sheet outside my door where I give each kid an attendance score: the students with a string of zeroes are in for an unpleasant surprise when the semester ends in July, but attendance has improved dramatically.

And then, there are our efforts to implement a fair practice policy…but are you still reading? Have you gone on to check out humorous postings on Craig's List? I am speaking of minor problems any school would face, not Hope or Despair. A country like any other…is this the Afghanistan you want to experience? Is this even a sufficiently full picture to justify the outrageous title of this blog post?

On Tuesday morning, I was in a meeting when a loud sound reverberated off the surrounding hills. I started. "A bombing," an Afghan colleague commented dryly, preparing to go back to work. "Are you sure it's not a truck backfiring?" I asked.

Sure enough, it was a terrorist attack, the first major one in Kabul since my arrival two months ago today. It shocked me into remembering that occasionally, the dark stories in the Western media do reflect this country. It angered me to think that in a city of such beauty, someone could take their own life and those of others. Do the terrorists ever think about the innocent Afghan Muslims who die in these attacks? The dead included Afghan men in their cars caught in rush hour, and a woman holding a baby. Now that baby will grow up without a mother. I could understand why some Afghans don't want foreigners here. Well, have they heard of Gandhi? Did he appreciate the presence of the British in India? He didn't go around butchering mothers of tiny babies.

A week ago, students at a school in Michigan paid close attention to the computer speakers from which my voice answered their questions about My Experience in Afghanistan. I spoke of teaching students who inspire me, the sublime Edenic beauty of Babur Gardens, and waiting for my mushroom pizza to arrive. I can present to them and to you only the microscopic slice of Afghanistan I see.

The bee buzzing against my window increasingly distracted me. I grabbed the curtain, twirling it like a lasso to feel its heft. With a thwack, I hit the window next to the bee, to let it know it was no longer in safe territory. Immediately it flew out of the room.

Associated Press

2010-05-16T17:28:00.002+04:30

The Associated Press has released this fantastic article. about our school in Kabul. It is available at Yahoo, Salon, ABC, CBS, and numerous media outlets all over the world.

The German handover ceremony

2010-05-14T21:51:00.000+04:30

"I need some ukuleles and a bunch of guitars!" I shouted out above the students milling around one of the rooms in the library late on Wednesday afternoon. "Quick, someone get me another old clarinet! No, we don't need more recorders. In a minute I'll get the five-string violin. Can I have a pile of miniature conga drums please? Here, let's move the flute closer to the electric guitar."

As ANIM's teacher of orchestration, was I about to illustrate the weirdest possible orchestra? No, I was helping direct students as we hurriedly set up an elaborate display of the finest instruments donated by the Society of Music Merchants. The next day, national media and German diplomats would come to ANIM to officially hand over the five tons of instruments they had donated.

During the past week, the children had slowly grown used to the fact that they were now playing on world-class instruments. In my advanced group class, we played Twinkle Twinkle Little Star together for the first time. This is a proud moment for any teacher, and I was especially pleased that given my emphasis on drawing a straight bow and the quality of their instruments, they actually sounded really good.

Of course, some of the little ones still have a lot to learn about instruments. My littlest student burst into my room in tears when a string broke; she thought her nice new violin was totally destroyed. Seeing her smile when she realized it was an easy repair was like seeing the sun come out.

On the other hand, I had to suppress a smile when I spoke to one little boy about possibly playing cello when our cello teacher arrives in a few months. He bounced around so much that I thought maybe he would benefit from having to sit while playing. He also started crying: "Violin man mi khwahom! Hamesha een! Hamesha hamesha hamesha! Ghichak nami khwahom!" (I want violin! Always this! Always always always! I don't want ghichak!) I tried explaining to him that he has never seen a cello and that it is not really like a ghichak, the small fiddle with the keening, nasal tone that is played in Central Asia. Our double bass arrived this week in an enormous case: perhaps I should refrain from showing it to him.

In Ensemble class, I'm helping my students arrange Simon and Garfunkel's "Sound of Silence" for sitar and guitar. In Orchestra, I'm getting stricter about discipline and attendance as I refine the rehearsal techniques I use for our unusual combination of rubab, sitar, ghichak, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, guitars, electric bass, percussion, violins, and piano. My female violin students are all beginners, and at the last rehearsal (their first orchestra rehearsal ever), they never got lost, while I had to send the saxophone players out of the room, telling them to come back when they knew their part.

A typically perfect blue Kabul sky embraced ANIM yesterday morning. I made sure that the students selected to sit in the chairs during the handover ceremony knew what was expected of them, and Norma gave an impromptu percussion class to some girls who had nothing to do.

After a little private violin practice, I helped arrange the students in their chairs as Dr. Sarmast welcomed the diplomats and the press into the school. I was acting incredibly silly in a vain attempt to get the kids to smile, since the media was about to enter the room. Suddenly, a peal of laughter suggested that I had succeeded…until I turned around and saw that the German Cultural Attaché was right behind me. A seasoned diplomat, she pretended not to notice my antics and commented: "It's so nice to see the children and the instruments! Usually these handover ceremonies are just politicians giving speeches."

Our ceremony began in typical fashion then. Dr. Sarmast introduced the Deputy Minister for Technical, Vocational, and Educational Training and then the Deputy German Ambassador, each of whom gave a speech. From then on out, I'll wager the ceremony was a bit different than these events usually are.

First, the Deputy Ambassador symbolically handed one of the violins to the Deputy Minister as cameras flashed. Then, I played a beautiful little piece by Bach (Germany's greatest composer) on one of the violins that had been donated. The ceremony closed with a lively, sinuous Afghan piece written by our new clarinet teacher.

The media started to interview the students while Dr. Sarmast started giving the diplomats a tour. "This was the first time I've heard Bach in Afghanistan!" one of the Germans exclaimed happily as she passed by.

Quickly, I summoned one of my female violin students so we could race down to my studio and I could be giving her a lesson by the time the tour stopped by. As always, Dr. Sarmast's timing was perfect: they entered just after my student had played the Ants song perfectly with the bow, so she was able to do it again, to their obvious delight.

Tchaikovsky's birthday

2010-05-07T21:56:00.004+04:30

How is Tchaikovsky's 170th birthday celebrated in Afghanistan? BBC's Dari service sent a reporter to our school yesterday to interview students and teachers about him; I played Tchaikovsky's Melodie into her digital recorder. What do you think of the future of music in Afghanistan? she asked.

This week gives reason for hope. The inventory completed, we finally started handing out the extraordinary instruments from the German shipment. During each student's lesson, I welcomed him or her with a big smile and said, "Emruz! Violin-e naw baraye shoma!" After locking my studio, we would run upstairs to the instrument closet. I pre-selected four or five violins that I thought each student would like. They had previously used violins that were barely playable, and now they would get to play ones I would be happy to use. As they sawed away, astonishment and delight spread across their faces.

This sudden acoustic leap was particularly dramatic for the girls, many of whom used to sell plastic bags or chewing gum on the street before they began studying here. Thanks to the generosity of numerous individual sponsors found by violinist Mikhail Simonyan and Edie Holbrook, their families are able to live without the income the girls had previously brought home, and now they get the chance to learn violin on outstanding instruments. "Ehtiaht!" I shout anxiously. Careful! I point to the violin and make rocking motions like a baby, to show them how careful they need to be. My littlest student took this literally, and started walking around my studio hugging her tiny violin.

Yet all is not perfect. My orchestration class got off to an inauspicious start when just one student showed up last Saturday. I decided to make a pop quiz. He would get the question right, and everyone else would fail since they weren't there.

1. An orchestra usually has:
A. Instruments
B. Chickens
C. Televisions
D. None of the above

He speaks English very well, so I figured he would have no trouble. I was wrong.

He stared intently at the question and all of the answers. He considered each in turn. No, he had no problem with the English. He genuinely wanted to consider each possibility.

Finally, to my horror, he circled B. I stared at him incredulously. "Chickens? An orchestra usually has chickens?" Then I imitated a chicken and he started to laugh hysterically, correcting his answer. In retrospect, maybe the word "usually" fooled him; perhaps he thought it meant something else. I gave him a 10/10, and then we just couldn't stop laughing as we imagined an orchestra with a section full of live chickens and he did his own chicken imitation. "Teacher," he said as he left, "I will never forget this, never."

After the quiz, I made sure he benefited to show how the other students how much they missed. I gave a complete explanation of what orchestration is, why we study it, what we need to know about each instrument and each combination of instruments, and more. It was as close to condensing a full curriculum to one class as would be possible.

Nearly every day this week, I stayed a couple hours after school to conduct the orchestra (though the chicken section proved notoriously unreliable). In addition to my arrangement of the National Anthem, we will prepare the patriotic song Da Watan. On Sunday, Dr. Sarmast arranged for that song's aging composer, the famous singer Ustad Guzalman, to come to our school to teach it to me. Many of the Afghan teachers wanted to hear him, so they crowded into my studio as someone raced to get him a harmonium so he could sing this stirring march. His voice leaves an indelible impression: filled at once with the sadness and the strength of Afghanistan.

My ensemble class is enthusiastically preparing for their first-ever gig: an Embassy performance in a couple months. I'm guiding them through preparing a set list, and helping them discover that not all instruments need to play on every song, and those that do play don't need to be loud all the time. They are curious about everything, but sometimes hesitant. "Go on," I encourage them. "Try conga drums instead of tabla. See what happens." Tabla probably worked better in that particular case, but if you never try, how do you know for sure?

In the last orchestration class of the week, nearly everyone came, so instead of postulating the existence of a chicken-filled orchestra, we watched a DVD of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim, play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in Ramallah, Palestine. The piece is imprinted on the subconscious of every Western classical musician, yet these teenage boys had never heard it before. They loved it. With each movement, they tried to find the rhythmic pattern until they got it, smiling triumphantly. They nodded their heads in time to the thrilling last movement and burst into applause at the end.

What is the future of music in Afghanistan? The great Afghan song "Da Watan" will thrive in a new arrangement, and judging by the gleam in the eyes of my students as they left the room, an all-Afghan performance of Beethoven's Fifth can't be too far away.

Qatar collaborator featured

2010-05-01T22:12:00.003+04:30

Congratulations to Dr. Hayat Khalil Hassan Nazar Heji, who is profiled at length in today's New York Times. I had the honor of meeting Dr. Heji on April 30, 2008, when Cultures in Harmony performed at the Al Noor Institute for the Blind as part of our project in Qatar.

Dr. Heji is a tremendous inspiration to everyone who meets her and is a great credit not just to her country, but to humanity. The profile does a good job of describing her extraordinary accomplishments. The children at Al Noor are lucky to benefit from her phenomenal leadership, as we felt privileged to perform for such inquisitive and appreciative children. We also enjoyed connecting with their gifted music teacher, the Syrian oudist Shadi Fauzi.

Cultures in Harmony poses with children at Al Noor Institute for the Blind after performing for them

Check out the projects page of the website, which has been updated with revised concept papers for all 2010 projects.

Happy to play violin

2010-04-30T13:36:00.004+04:30

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

2010-04-23T15:36:00.002+04:30

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

2010-04-17T16:45:00.002+04:30

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

2010-04-16T18:21:00.001+04:30

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

2010-04-09T21:36:00.009+04:30

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

2010-04-02T12:25:00.003+04:30

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.

Falak

2010-03-31T19:58:00.003+04:30

How can I capture the sadness of a Badakshi falak? The music had cut into my heart.

I sat in a chair in front of my colleague, the ghichak teacher, my digital recorder capturing the soundwaves, puzzling out how I could write down the pitches and rhythms. Soundwaves, pitches, rhythms: no, this doesn't capture it. I asked my friend if the recording could be excerpted on radio so that Americans could hear something about Afghanistan other than war, and he eagerly said yes. Not only that, he wanted me to write it down. He actually wanted my help in imprisoning this raw emotion in a cage made with the five bars of the musical staff. And on top of that, I was even planning on how I would make an arrangement for string orchestra. How could I?

On the other hand, would the falak be so effective if I didn't know that it is the only Afghan music traditionally used for mourning? Would it be so searing if not for Afghanistan's recent history?

After all, much of Badakhshan only belongs to Afghanistan because of the Durand Line, the border that Britain and Russia drew in 1893 to prevent their empires from touching. Badakhshan is one of Afghanistan's most peaceful (and beautiful provinces), its remote, verdant land proudly guarded by immense mountains.

The ghichak, a small, two-stringed cello-like instrument with a nasal, keening tone, seems an unlikely vehicle for a tragic musical form. Yet as soon as it begins the falak, the ghichak ends awareness of anything but the sense of memory and of vast, lonely space its timbre evokes. The falak, sung at funerals in Badakhshan, begins with a slow chant, in which the notes move by such small intervals that you feel as though moving by a larger interval would simply be too painful. Abruptly, the chant leaps into the abyss of silence, before resuming.

Ornaments, used by European composers three centuries ago as the musical equivalent of curlicues in Baroque architecture, here act as a tremulous variation on the lengthy, sustained tones of the falak. Just as the pain makes the musical intervals so small, it also makes the mere act of sustaining difficult.

Suddenly, the falak enters a fast dance, which increases in frenzy as it continues. But as my colleague put it, this is a "tragic dance," as though the grief has pointed the way towards insanity. Eventually, the ghichak begins slowing down, disappearing. A painful, accent minor second (the most dissonant interval in Western classical music) resolves to the perfect fourth formed by the two strings, before the sound returns to the void from which it came.

The sandals off his feet

2010-03-30T20:57:00.000+04:30

At a female student's lesson, I complimented her on her henna tattoos. Afghan girls seem to love applying these temporary orange curlicues to their hands. Reluctantly, I had to ask her to refrain from applying them to her fingertips in the future, so that the dye does not rub off on the violin. She agreed, and also mastered good posture, though her wrist remains tense. My Dari is slowly improving as I find myself teaching entire lessons in it.

My next student, a boy, proved to be one of my quickest learners yet. He began by playing the theme from Love Story with some twists straight out of the Indian violin tradition. I didn't really know how to proceed from that point, so I asked if we could start from the beginning of Western music, assuring him that he would probably progress rapidly at first. He humbly agreed, and in the first lesson, he sailed through two of the pre-Twinkle songs, I taught him the difference between a 5th and an octave, and wrapped his fingers around a small yellow ball to teach him a relaxed bowhold.

If I'm pleased to be able to give what I can, I'm occasionally embarrassed by the extraordinary displays of generosity here. I used to think that the phrase "he would give you the shirt off his back" was an expression. The friendly librarian saw that my sandals were damp, and so he took off his beautiful hand-woven Afghan sandals and wanted me to take them. I refused and could not believe he was actually willing to go home barefoot for me.

What Tchaikovsky and Pakistani pop have in common

2010-03-29T19:55:00.002+04:30

The first day of my "routine" was anything but. My first student speaks excellent English, and though he is quite proficient in South Asian classical music, he humbly asked to start at the beginning with Western music. With him as with all my students, I am using a revised version of the beginning violin curriculum created by Indiana University's Brenda Brenner for Fairview Elementary School in Bloomington, Indiana, USA.

I love the philosophy of Brenda and Mimi Zweig, my former teacher, but in Kabul, it might not be a good idea for an American to ask Afghan children to imitate the Statue of Liberty, which works so well in the US to prepare kids to bring the violin into playing position. Instead, I ask them to look like the combined Arabic letter for lam and aleph. Arabic script is used to write many languages, including Dari, just as the Roman alphabet is used to write languages including English. All three of my students immediately got the concept.

Brenda and Mimi draw a "Magic X" on the thumb side of the knuckle for the left first finger in order to get kids to maintain good contact with the violin. As X is a Roman letter, I again fell back on the letter for lam and aleph, which has a convenient small loop that kids can use as the focal point of contact. I must commission a local calligrapher to create a framed lam/aleph (or "la") for display in my studio.

My first student learned so quickly that I taught him rest position ("maqiyat-e rawhat"), proper posture, tapping on the high dot, sliding on his Magic La (formerly Magic X), the Ants Song, and GDG (which became Sol-Re-Sol) with left hand pizzicato at his first lesson.

I also taught my first female student. Other than her hijab, her lack of English, and her unusually high level of intelligence and motivation, the lesson was like any other. She learned astonishingly quickly, but since my Dari is still elementary, she only got to the Ants Song.

When my Dari fails to communicate the all-important concept of relaxation, I trot out Zak (short for Zakarya), an adorable camel marionette puppet I bought on Amazon. I am already quite fond of Zak and will put on puppet shows in my studio window during breaks between classes. My students immediately see that gravity compels Zak to be relaxed at all times. If Zak can't hunch up his shoulders unnaturally, why can't they do the same? They smile and get it right.

Yesterday, I learned that I was supposed to teach ensemble, and agreed without knowing what it was. Today I found out: sitar, three guitars, violin, trumpet, and piano. "You guys are making history!" I exclaimed. "Do you realize that there has almost certainly never been an ensemble exactly like this?" I decided we would start by talking about what makes an ensemble work. We compared and contrasted a recording of the first movement of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings by A Far Cry to the song Chup by the Pakistani pop duo Zeb and Haniya (I'm proud to be friends with both groups). "Why is it hard to work without a conductor?" I asked. "How do they play together without one? What role does breathing play?" The students weren't entirely sure. They kept saying that both A Far Cry and Zeb & Haniya play together because they have experience. I urged them to look deeper. "Notice how both the Tchaikovsky and the song Chup have long silences. What happens in those silences?"

After school, I tried working with a friend on the staff to adjust future parts of Brenda's curriculum for the Afghan culture, but it took me longer to explain what I was trying to do than it took my students to grasp the violin concepts, so after asking someone else how to rename the See-Saw Song ("Handal-choo" is the Afghan game closest to see-saw) I figured I'd call it a day.

A new proverb

2010-03-28T18:37:00.003+04:30

I arrived at the studio, hoping that today the routine would finally begin. One of the teachers entered the room, bringing in a student as a translator. Despite the translation, I couldn't make head or tail of the schedule. While I was chatting with the Australian film crew that arrived soon after, an impish little girl arrived at the door. Using my limited Dari, I established that she was a violinist but had no violin.

I emphasized proper posture: "Kala bala, shana payin" (head up, shoulders down). We did the IU sign exercise (stand against a wall, form the symbol for Indiana University with your arms and body, and slowly stretch your arms upward and back). I asked her to hold a ball, then withdrew it and replaced it with a pencil, then withdrew that and replaced it with a bow. Within minutes, she had a proper bowhold and was standing correctly. Then, she seemed to say something about needing to go, and vanished. Since she was there such an odd amount of time, I wonder if someone sent her knowing that the film crew happened to be in my room.

Dr. Sarmast arrived with a copy of the timetable, neatly printed in tiny Dari on a huge sheet of paper. After a comprehensive explanation, I began to understand. Three main groups of students each have three 45-minute periods blocked off for violin on their schedule each day. In that time block, I will give them one 45-minute group class and one 45-minute private lesson per week; the rest of the time, they will practice. I'll teach an ensemble class and an orchestration class three days a week. For the latter, I immediately thought of the wonderful textbook by my former composition teacher.

For the rest of the day, I had just enough time in each class to explain my system, assign private lessons, learn all the names, establish how old everyone was, and tune and adjust the violins of those who had them. The girls impressed me with how confident they were when the boys weren't in the room.

In one class, I was concentrating intently on tuning a new A-string I had just put on, when one of the advanced students said, "Teacher, I think that is Re." Less than a second later, the string popped, slashing across my thumb and drawing a minute amount of blood, as the video camera documented my bull-headed focus.

When I had bandaged myself, I stared in amazement at the student whose words I had not heeded quickly enough. "The string came in an A-string package, yet it was clearly a D-string. How did you know?" At first, he demurred modestly, but then said, "I listened to the voice." Perhaps I should start listening as carefully as my students do. Either my students' potential or my thumb's tiny scar could teach us a new proverb: don't judge a string by its cover.

Circling Around

2010-03-27T20:07:00.003+04:30

I had barely arrived at my studio this morning when the male students started pouring in, asking questions about everything under the sun. One of them opened his cell phone to show me a video of Anoushka Shankar playing with Joshua Bell. To an older student who wants to become a teacher, I gave a copy of the String Pedagogy DVD-ROM, which he seemed excited to explore.

I asked a student to gather the others. Soon, the boys crowded my room, so I requested that the female students be brought to the studio as well.

I worked on learning their names and had started to teach them about posture when I was called out for a faculty meeting. I quickly set up my laptop and a copy of Circling Around, a documentary about the Violin Virtuosi, a violin ensemble founded by Mimi Zweig, my former teacher and the creator of the String Pedagogy DVD which is the basis for my teaching. Starting the video, I left the room.

When I came back, all the girls were gone and all the boys were watching the documentary. Confused, I asked where the girls went. I was surprised to hear that they were taken for a class: classes have not formally started yet. Yet again, I asked for them to be summoned.

We watched a bit more before I stopped the documentary and asked for reactions. When no one spoke, I asked for each person's reaction. The responses, translated by Dr. Sarmast, were deeply moving. Showing a movie in class can be an act of laziness, but I was blown away by how much these girls and boys got out of a documentary that shows children their age perfecting their art and working together as an ensemble.

Their responses included the following: "I saw what hard work and practice can accomplish." "I saw how they moved their fingers and their bodies and I want to do that too." "I used to think that learning music meant putting the music in a corner and playing it, but now I see that is not enough. As soon as they get up in the morning, they practice. It is a part of their life. Violin needs to be more a part of my life too." "We need an ensemble like that here in Afghanistan."

I set them up in a circle to teach the name of each part of the violin and bow and how to take care of it. After making them repeat each part four times in English, I would ask them the name of that part in Dari, so learning that gushak are pegs, kharak is bridge, and desta is fingerboard. When I quizzed them individually, I addressed a girl as often as a boy, although the girls are a minority. When I asked the group in general, a girl was frequently first to answer.

After a lunch of beans and bread, I practiced a little Boulez before inviting them back. Once again, I had to invite first "the students" and then "the girl students" to come to the studio. The girls disappeared soon after arriving, and this time, a few boys left as well. I realized that only the students who could stay after the normal departure time were left in my room, desperate to learn even though our academic routine had not yet begun.

I did not want to give them too much of an advantage, but yet I could not throw water on their enthusiasm. So, I taught them the importance of stretching and relaxation before interviewing them for an upcoming radio special in the United States. I asked them why music is important, and for the second time that day, their answers to a simple question astounded me. "We can grow with music." "Music is in our human hearts." "Music is food of soul." "Music is taken from nature." Music takes us to "another place, another globe."

Equally astonishing was their mastery of South Asian classical violin. Two students played for me in this style, and I confessed that I cannot do it and cannot possibly teach them in a style in which their knowledge far exceeds my own. They hastened to assure me that they want to learn Western music. I'll have to learn your music, I responded.

Students will teach, teacher will learn. Like the title of the documentary, like Mimi Zweig students from Joshua Bell to Sarah Kapustin who have returned to work with her students, I am circling around.

Babur Gardens

2010-03-26T22:49:00.004+04:30

For half a millennium, Kabul's families have flocked to the Babur Gardens to picnic. Entering through the heavily secured lower wall, the scope of Babur's vision takes your breath away.

Who was this man? History books in American high schools barely mention him, if at all. I certainly don't remember learning about him. Reading Rory Stewart's The Places in Between, in which Mr. Stewart describes his daring 2002 walk across Afghanistan using Babur's memoirs as a guide, gives you an appreciation of the unusual humanity of the founder of the great Mughal empire. E. M. Forster wrote: "What a happiness to have known Babur! He had all that one seeks in a friend. His energy and ambition were touched with sensitiveness; he could act, observe, and remember; though not critical of his senses, he was aware of their workings, thus fulfilling the whole nature of man."

His gardens must be his greatest monument. Carved into the side of one of the mountains surrounding Kabul, they gradually ascend through a series of grassy terraces. Spring is still stretching its legs at this point in the year, but rose bushes indicated the promise of a glorious May, and trees burst with purple flowers. The central water channel anchors the symmetry.

Though not as crowded as it was on Nawruz, the many terraces still teemed with families toting thermoses, portable grills, and rugs. Little boys giggled happily as they slid down the short, steep hills dividing one terrace from the next. Gangs of young men strolled around aimlessly. Occasionally, one of them would get out a wooden flute and play it.

Babur saved the most stunning view for himself. His tomb at the very top of the many series of terraces looks down at the gardens he laid out, past the wall and over the city he made great, and over at the mountains through which he walked, alone and unsupported, to found an empire. Seldom is the effect of awe realized as fully as it was intended.

After leaving the gardens, we drove to the kharabat. Ever since I read that Kabul has a quarter that historically belonged to musicians and dancers, I was excited about my first visit. We turned off the main road beneath the Bala Hissar, the ancient fortress overlooking the city. The car carefully straddled either side of an open sewer as it inched up the narrow street. Kids quickly surrounded the car, waving cheerfully. Some were dressed in colorful, sparkly outfits; other wore tattered clothes.

We reached a point where the car could go no further, so we walked towards an ancient shrine. In the eighteenth century, the first musicians formally invited to the city camped out there, and the kharabat quarter grew up around the shrine. Bearded, turbaned old men smiled and welcomed us into the dimly lit interior, where intricately worked timber lined the walls. In the center, beautifully ornate wood in a lattice pattern completely surrounded the graves of three small children descended from the Prophet. As one of the old men kindly unlocked the wood surrounding the graves and showed us the three painfully tiny stone markers, I felt a sense of reverence overpower me, knowing that I stood at a place sacred to both musicians and Afghan Muslims.

Back in the car, we drove past the Bala Hissar to the graveyard. The Bala Hissar stood more or less intact from the time it was built in the fifth century until 1992. Now, its hilltop ruins eerily crown Kabul's skyline. Thousands of feet in the air above us, a security blimp cast a wary eye over the city. The graveyard air sizzled with smoke as families who had come to pay their respects cooked a light meal.

We had come to visit the grave site of Ahmad Zahir, the Afghan Elvis. On his death anniversary, the site is mobbed by his female fans, though today, just a few young men were hanging out. We took a picture and left for a restaurant guarded by two ANA soldiers with machine guns. The shrine and the grave showed what Kabul was, the restaurant showed what it is, but old as they are, Babur's gardens point the way toward the future. As the sunlight glints off the marble walkways and families picnic in the shade of purple-flowered trees and the great emperor magnanimously watches over all, nothing else but beauty can be imagined for this country.

Lucky studio

2010-03-25T15:59:00.001+04:30

Today I began moving into my studio. Though the school's renovation is still in progress, I found a corner room finished with plush brown carpet and gorgeous wood paneling. I began tacking up posters of great composers, a large advertisement for a concert I did in Germany a couple weeks ago with The Arcos Orchestra, and a violin poster.

The fellow who gave such a moving performance on Tuesday poked his head in the door. He recognized Tchaikovsky from one of my posters but hadn't heard of Debussy; as I unpacked my CDs, he had heard of Zeb and Haniya and was impressed that Cultures in Harmony worked with them in Pakistan.

He is motivated to the point of downloading videos of violin performances onto his cell phone. Before long, my violin was out and I was teaching him Yost shifting exercises.

Nonetheless, I realized I would need to start from the beginning. Yost proved challenging, since his bowhold still needs work. Also, as other boys gathered to watch, I realized I would have to make a supreme effort to ensure the girls were always included.

I apologetically asked the piano and guitar students to leave, and told them to tell all the violinists to come to my new studio, especially the girls. The girls arrived in a bunch, and after initial shyness, I realized they might actually be more confident than the boys. Still, the boys and the girls all act like the other group is not actually in the room.

A faculty member summoned me to meet some prestigious visitors: one of the three judges from Afghan Star and a maker of sarangis, ghichaks, and rubabs whose family has been making these instruments for 300 years. The latter fellow and I agreed that we will give him one of the bows to see how good of a job he does rehairing it. He normally rehairs sarangi bows, which are rather different, but hopefully he can figure out how to handle violin bows, so that the students can maintain their instruments in good condition.

At one point during a lull in their tour, I offered to play for both gentlemen. I confess to feeling a bit nervous during the Bach as I wondered which of his American Idol counterparts the Afghan Star judge would more closely resemble: Paula Abdul or Simon Cowell. Fortunately, his comments were very kind.

Soon, another group of visitors arrived from the US Embassy. I was thrilled to see fellow Americans, and they seemed much more likable and engaging than some State Department people I have dealt with. I hope that my Embassy will remain a strong supporter of my school.

One woman from the Embassy had kindly agreed to help me ship items here, so after they left, I unpacked the boxes I had sent about a month ago. My studio still needs a desk, but as I looked at my music, teaching materials, and the camel marionette studio mascot neatly stacked against the brand-new wall, I had a good feeling about this. And why wouldn't I?

The studio I chose is number 13.

The violins in the shipping container

2010-03-24T23:51:00.004+04:30

A couple friends from the Ministry of Education took me around the city to take care of various tasks. The radio kicked it Pashto style as we threaded our way through the thick of downtown. Along one of the nicer sections of the Kabul River, fathers in suits held their small sons by the hand, women in burqas headed on errands, and an old man struggled to push a huge cart topped with towers of toilet paper rolls. A staircase in the sidewalk led down to the zerzameni, where people walk underground to avoid the traffic and dust of the street.

We spent a lot of time waiting in small offices before hurrying through the halls to get someone else's signature on yet another form. My experience of Afghan bureaucracy was no different than American bureaucracy, with a pleasant exception: the Afghans serve tea.

Banks in the US have security, but my new bank has them beat: towers of sandbags, concrete barriers, soldiers with their fingers just near the triggers of automatic rifles, and every man gets a full body pat-down. The main room overflowed with people waiting, so I stepped outside so that I could play with the little boys of an Afghan customer who was also applying for an account.

After one of my Ministry friends kindly treated me to a lunch of kebab and bread, I headed back to Dr. Sarmast. I was thrilled to learn that a German shipment of new violins will soon arrive for the students, yet I thought I should see what they had been playing on.

A few employees of the school guided me toward the back of the campus, past the table from which cooks serve a simple lunch to the students. They opened the lock of an old shipping container, and the door creaked.

Sticks of bows lay like twigs on the bottom of the container, wisps of horsehair wrapped around them like gossamer shrouds. The broken-down cases were coffins holding what once were violins. Many had no pegs, strings, tailpieces, or bridges. I jiggled one, hearing the soundpost rattle around. I shook it some more in disbelief, until a short, kindly fellow who had helped me began to dance along with a gleam in his eye. He was right: this object's only future in music was as a toy percussion instrument. He proceeded to help me inspect all the instruments in the container.

In the cabinet up at the school, I found one out of 37 that did not need to be thrown out. I also found one so marred by dirt and scars that I held it up to my growing beard and mimed shaving for some male students, who grinned: the surface of the violin was just about rough enough to take care of my emerging stubble. By the time I got to the bow held together with tape, I was getting discouraged, so once again, my short friend cheered me up by pretending to play the violin with the stout, fuzzy, and misshapen bridge with the taped bow. I borrowed them and got in on the act.

Really, I should not have been sad. These children will soon get the beautiful new violins they deserve. But at no point should a violin look like these did. Any well-maintained violin, no matter how cheap, would never get to this point: I know what the topic of my first group class will be.

It is wonderful that these children will soon get good violins, but tragic that it took one of the longest wars of recent history (and the astonishing toil and commitment of Dr. Sarmast), to get the funding to give these children the instruments they deserve.

Menuhin

2010-03-23T21:34:00.005+04:30

I needed to fill out some paperwork this morning, so went to someone's office. After two hours of waiting while studying Dari, reading a magazine, and going over the music curriculum, I decided to walk to the music school.

It was a glorious, sunny day in Kabul. A couple boys kicked a soccer ball around the ridges in the dirt road before rinsing it off from a hose. The friendly librarian ushered me onto the campus. Though classes had not started yet, the students had shown up in droves. Within seconds, a mob of curious boys surrounded me. One by one, I asked "Nam-e chist?" and they told me their names. It may take a few more times before I remember, but each fellow beamed when he told me his name.

I found Dr. Sarmast and asked his permission to play for the students in the yard. I hopped in a car with the school principal, grabbed my violin, and returned to find the boys waiting. I set my violin case on top of a rusted oil drum that served as a trash can, got out my violin, and handed my camera to one of the students. I am making a video to promote the school, raise funds for a Cultures in Harmony project to help the students, and close the Paganini Caprice Challenge.

The performance conditions for Paganini's 24th were less than ideal. The sun baked me in my suit, I had not warmed up at all, and my future students crowded around, staring at me intently. Sweat began to trickle down my face as variation followed variation, and when I finished, they burst into smiles and applause. "Who wants to play?" I said, holding up my violin.

A young man about 17 or 18 stepped forward. With a gentle vibrato that caressed each note, he began to play an aching, mournful tune from an Iranian film. It traces out the minor mode before a two-note rocking motive slowly sinks to earth. The melody arced over the dusty, unfinished ground, over the barbed-wire-topped walls, past broken down bombed out buildings, and beyond the sympathetic mountains, yearning for a place of peace. The sincerity of his music making stopped time. This was a moment when the pain of loss cut through the clutter of our daily experiences. Though I will begin teaching this fellow in the next couple days, his performance was unquestionably the performance of the day.

By this time, Dr. Sarmast had finished his work, and pointed out that beyond the huddle of boys, a small group of hijab-clad girls had just arrived. No one had noticed them. Apologetically, I repeated the last variation of the Paganini and then played the Afghan tune "Let's Go To Mazar." I'll have to work hard in the future to make sure that the female students are not neglected.

As I prepared to leave, a boy shyly asked me, "Didn't Yehudi Menuhin play that piece you played?" I started. "Why, yes, he probably did." The boy smiled and opened his cell phone. "Is that the composer of the piece?" To my delight, he had a portrait of Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840) as the wallpaper on his cell phone. "Yes, it is. Soon we will begin lessons, and if you work hard, eventually you might play some Paganini." He beamed.

During lunch, I learned that some students might not be able to practice at home, since some of their relatives are unaware that they study music. Music still carries the stigma of immorality in Afghan culture, and we will need to formulate ways to convince people that one can be simultaneously good, decent, Muslim, Afghan, and a musician.

On the way home, I stopped by a guardhouse. Since my arrival, I have tried to develop friendly relations with the Afghan police and soldiers who are increasingly responsible for the security. Their job is difficult, and they keep me safe. Yesterday, I stopped for a cup of tea and limited conversation in Dari at one guardhouse. At another, a policeman jovially demanded that I take a picture with him.

Today, they were delighted to see my violin, so I immediately got it out and played the traditional song "Pistachio Seller." The guard with a beard called the younger one over, and they both listened as I played the lilting, seven-beat love song that compares the lover's lips to the pistachio nut as it is opened. The older guard closed his eyes and nodded his head to the music, transported to another world.

Back home, I sat outside and read the book "Music of Man" by Menuhin as the birds and wind made sonorous the stillness of the trees. Juilliard students might be quick to disparage Menuhin for not retaining his adolescent brilliance, but I was not surprised that if one of my students knew of a Western musician, it was Menuhin. For children like these, he is the great Western performer. Who else but Menuhin had genuine empathy for the non-Western experience? He loved exploring the meaning of music at the most profound level, whether he discussed the music of Greece, Syria, India, China, Nepal, or Gambia. In his words, music becomes the essence of the human experience. This book, his love of humanity, and his faith in music will be guiding lights for our school in Kabul.

Over dinner, I learned from a fellow expatriate about the gemstone problems here. For 7,000 years, a mine in Afghanistan has continuously provided the world with lapis lazuli for everything from King Tut's death mask to contemporary jewelry. Yet today, rudimentary explosives have replaced the techniques that worked until modern times. This means that workers light a fuse and have forty seconds to run. Many have needlessly died, and over seventy percent of the gem deposits are destroyed. Adopting even slightly more sophisticated techniques (or even going back to the old ones) would yield three times the amount, and this exceptionally rare and beautiful stone is lost daily.

American Idol and pizza

2010-03-22T19:44:00.002+04:30

Last night, I caught the season finale of American Idol...I mean, Afghan Star. Similar idea: occasionally caustic judges, amateur singers, voting by elimination, and a large audience which displays all the same enthusiasm but contains more hijab-clad women waving glowsticks. I liked the first fellow I saw, but the second one sang really out of tune and took himself way too seriously, so, feeling a bit of jet lag, I went to bed.

This morning I took care of some bureaucratic business before heading to the school to check out the library. International donors have really come through, though occasionally they may have overestimated our needs: our library has a copy of The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen. I knew people in the Master's of Music program at Juilliard who would have a tough time with this extraordinary, cerebral writer. I was also disturbed by a book haughtily titled "A History of World Music" which featured exactly one chapter about ancient music of China before proceeding to devote the rest of the voluminous tome about classical music from Germany, France, Italy, and a few other European countries.

Slowly I realized that we will need to reinvent music education from the ground up. In music theory, our children will need to make the connection between Afghan and Western modes, learning more thoroughly than most children that minor and major are just two of the old church modes, many of which resembled Afghan modes still in use. They will learn that the violin is a cousin of the rubab. They will learn the Western folk tunes and easy classical pieces I played at a young age alongside selections from the large body of Afghan folk music, which I will need to arrange in order of difficulty.

Browsing in the library is a pleasure. The walls are lined with beautiful wood cabinets many American homeowners would envy. The librarian takes his job seriously, carefully making a note of all the books I borrowed. He treated me with such respect that I felt embarrassed: when he saw me browsing, he quickly grabbed a chair and dusted it off, ashamed that he had done something wrong by not offering me a seat.

Yet I felt that only today did I glimpse how very high the mountain is, and understand so completely that I am at the very bottom. To steel myself for the metaphorical climb ahead, I ordered a pizza. It arrived on time in 20 minutes as promised, and was delicious.

Nawruz

2010-03-21T18:48:00.006+04:30

Due to an optical illusion, the wingtip of any plane approaching Kabul appears to clip one of the snow-covered mountains that paternally cradle the city. Both the majesty of the surroundings and the pilot's skill inspire an awe that quickly translates into nervous excitement as the plane touches down and you realize: I'm in Afghanistan.

My amiable, highly energetic, and intelligent new boss, Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, picked me up at the airport. Dr. Sarmast is the first Afghan with a doctorate in music and is the founder and director of the school where I will teach, Afghanistan National Institute of Music, conveniently known as ANIM.

Our driver whisked us through streets that laugh at the very idea of traffic laws. Cars careen along an invisible slalom course along both sides of the road, while cars going in the opposite direction compete with donkey carts and ambling pedestrians for the center. At a roundabout, three money changers ran like madmen towards our car, which gave us the opportunity to change my dollars to afghanis at a good rate.

My tour of ANIM was inspiring and motivating. The campus is a secluded island of peace, and though the renovation is not finished, I could easily imagine Dr. Sarmast's vision as he enthusiastically described it. He gestured towards an empty patch of dust: here is where the dining hall will be. The sections of ANIM that are finished impressed me tremendously. Many music schools in the world would be lucky to have the beautiful wood paneling and soundproofed doors that ANIM already boasts.

Next, we checked me into the guesthouse that will be my home in Afghanistan. It is a lovely place, blending modern conveniences like WiFi and a superb DVD collection with Afghan carpets and cabinetry. I enjoyed a refreshingly familiar breakfast: peanut butter and jelly, yogurt, cheese, dried fruit, nuts, a chocolate croissant, coffee, and a banana. The only nod to our location was a compote made of seven fruits in celebration of Nawruz, the Afghan new year, which is always the first day of spring.

Since I had happened to arrive on the biggest holiday of the Afghan calendar, Dr. Sarmast invited me to join him and Hank, an affable, urbane European friend of his, for a day on the town. We bounced slowly along dusty roads scarred with potholes, passing crumbling buildings that gaped with dead space where bombs had fallen at some point over the past thirty years.

As we neared our intended destination, the famed Babur gardens, the streets teemed with Kabuli families heading there to picnic. The road began to resemble a parking lot as cars ground to a halt, surrounded by hundreds of people pressing forward. A young girl giggled as she adjusted a special headscarf, covered with bangles for the occasion, over her long black braid. Colorful henna tattoos snaked up the arms of teenage girls, while their older sisters wore glittery black abayas that failed to hide their eye make-up. Women in burqas held the hands of little boys in adorable embroidered vests. Fathers threw open the trunks of station wagons, making sure that someone was carrying the rug, the food, and the baby. Large groups of teenage boys sauntered along, showing more physical affection towards each other than young men in America: they walked with their arms around each other, held hands, or engaged in playful fistfights that ended in hugs. As this mass of humanity surged towards the gates of the gardens Emperor Babur laid out half a millennium ago, the Afghan National Army skillfully maintained order and vendors hopefully hawked balloons, inflatable yellow bears, and orange popsicles.

Dr. Sarmast decided that it was just too crowded, so we left for a high hill topped by the old campus of the Kabul Polytechnic Institute. Built by the Soviets, it has long since been thoroughly destroyed. Bullet holes riddled the walls of what had been classrooms, and an empty swimming pool was filled with rubble and trash. A short distance away, an old tank used during the 1990s civil war rotted away. I scrambled on top and posed for a picture with the entire city yawning beneath me.

Next, we drove over a road riddled with bomb craters towards a palace built by King Amanullah in the 1920s. He tried to achieve equal rights for women, most dramatically when his wife appeared in public with bare shoulders. He was deposed soon after. Just enough of the palace is left to impress the tourist with its former opulence, but so much has been bombed to smithereens that the overall impression is wrenching and eerie.

We gladly tore ourselves away from these specters from Kabul's recent past to lunch at a fine hotel, approachable only through multiple security checkpoints. Their buffet of Afghan food was superb: three different kinds of aromatic rice, one flavored with carrots, raisins, and almonds; the next with oranges; the third with tomatoes and butter. The lamb, veal, vegetable soup, and dumplings were excellent. An apple, an orange, fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice, and cardamom tea rounded it off nicely.

We ascended a nearby hill to take in yet another spectacular view of the city. Given the security at the hotel, the hill was nearly deserted. A girl's long hair streamed behind her as she laughed and chased her little brother around the hill. The calm air bore joyous sounds of the holiday from a nearby park: children screaming in delight, men whooping, drums beating out the infectious seven-beat mughuli rhythm. As we circled the top of the hill, peach trees softly shed their white translucent petals on the stone path, each one fluttering down to the stone path like something out of a dream.

"This is what Afghanistan needs," Hank observed. "A reason to celebrate."

The day before Afghanistan

2010-03-20T20:07:00.001+04:30

I asked the driver if this was the bus to the NH Airport Hotel. It was not, he responded in an officious manner. As he looked at my shalwar kameez, an outfit commonly worn in Central Southern Asia, he lit up, his professional veneer melting like winter's last snow. "Where are you going today?" he asked hopefully. "Afghanistan," I responded. He beamed, "I am from there!"

I was at the airport in Frankfurt after the conclusion of The Arcos Orchestra's whirlwind concert tour of Germany. Each day had been a variation on a theme: hotel breakfast, long bus ride, rehearsal, concert, dinner if we could afford it, sleep if we had time. Now that the tour had ended, I wanted to go to the magnificent restaurant created by celebrity chef Ferran Adria for the NH Airport Hotel for one last gourmet meal before I moved to Afghanistan to teach violin to children. I needed time to reflect.

The Afghan driver talked to me while I waited, telling me to be sure to learn about a genre of music he particularly loves. When the bus I needed arrived, I chased after it. "I was waiting back there," this new driver irritably exclaimed. He refused to help move my luggage.

Unfamiliarity bred silence. After I heard the driver chatting on the phone in a language that sounded like Dari, I asked him tentatively, "Afghanistan?" He nodded. "Man ba Kabul emruz mi rawam," I said tentatively. Today I am going to Kabul.

The second Afghan bus driver I had met in five minutes suddenly smiled. I tried out what little Dari I could manage as he recommended foods to try. "Kabul is safe now," he said, but added with concern, "Is someone picking you up at the airport?" When we got to the NH Hotel, he walked in with me and pulled my luggage to the front desk, urging them to take care of it while I ate lunch.

Ferran Adria is a genius who compels us to consider familiar foods in unfamiliar contexts. Remembering my mother's constant admonition to eat more vegetables, I ordered the salad. The absence of dressing was surprising and refreshing, as it forced me to taste, as though for the first time, the crisp bitter lettuce, the meaty nuts, the succulent berries, and the harsh parmesan cheese.

Similarly, the knowledge that I am moving to a nation ripped apart by thirty years of war has forced me to experience the past few months with heightened sensitivity. Walking down the streets of New York last month or in a variety of tiny German towns this month, I savored the freedom to meander as I chose with no thought to the security implications. Last night, as an unusually enthusiastic audience in Munich prompted us to offer Sibelius' bittersweet Impromptu for Strings as an encore, I held back tears as the violins and violas etched out his spare, mournful lines that sift through the shadows of memory. "Thank you for the Sibelius," I told our beloved conductor, John-Edward Kelly, as I gave him a hug. "It will be the last time I make music like that for a while."

For a main course, I selected a lightly breaded chicken stuffed with ham and cheese with a side of braised tomatoes. Adria re-imagined what could have been a pedestrian dish as a brilliant triple pun. It most closely resembled the Chicken Cordon Bleu of classic French gastronomy, but the Spanish cheese and ham evoked the nation of his birth. Yet the chicken was pounded so flat that it looked exactly like the schnitzels that are popular here in Germany. Like so many of us in a world of shifting borders, this rooted yet rootless dish hardly seemed to know where it belonged.

I have been teasingly accused of the same. "Are you going native?" my Arcos colleagues asked when I mentioned my plans to grow a beard, learn Dari, and wear mostly the shalwar kameez. "Will you forget who you are?" was the implied question.

Perhaps I am going to unusual lengths to demonstrate my respect for my soon-to-be adopted culture. However, I will never forget my dedication to peace. I will never cease striving to overcome my personal limitations. I will always do my best to help build a world where cultures and nations never resort to violence to resolve their conflicts.

Even many of us who are secure in our renunciation of violence are as unwilling to assert a heritage as my lunch entree. I have always vacillated between my brother's principled opposition to multiculturalism and my liberal friends' unquestioning adherence to political correctness and their eagerness to denigrate everything the West has done while celebrating everyone else.

I am aware of the awkwardness lurking just beneath my chance encounter with that first Afghan bus driver. Had I been wearing a suit, he would have had no idea where I was going, yet because I wore a shalwar kameez, he correctly suspected that I was headed to his part of our planet. My culture's ideas, language, and clothing have come to dominate the globe, not his, and while Jared Diamond offers excellent reasons for this in his masterpiece, Guns, Germs, and Steel, he cannot provide us with a roadmap out of the thicket of resentment, arrogance, insecurity, and hostility created by such disparities of cultural influence.

When I started Cultures in Harmony in 2005, I was aware that the organization would be at once part of the problem and part of the solution. Our musicians have access to the donors who could send them around the globe; musicians in Zimbabwe do not. Our projects exist to facilitate a mutual understanding sorely needed between citizens of the most powerful nation and everyone else, yet the need to build that trust is not as urgent for every nation. No one in Moldova hates people from Suriname; the exigency of Americans traveling on missions of cultural diplomacy stems from the disproportionate and frequently devastating scope of our power. Finally, since my colleagues and I are trained in Western classical music, unfortunate echoes of music's historical role in colonialism might follow us.

My upcoming work in Afghanistan suffers from the same problems. I go to Afghanistan as an American man playing Western music and teaching Afghan girls and boys. Just like the suit I chose not to wear today, my culture's music is what other cultures end up importing, even when they have a choice. I come to Kabul at the invitation of the Afghan government, just as non-European governments have eagerly supported the founding of symphony orchestras while their young people listen to Lady Gaga and Michael Jackson. My intention to publicly learn from and perform with experts in traditional Afghan music becomes vital in this context, so much so that one might wonder why I agreed to teach Western music in Kabul, given my awareness of the way such an act may be perceived.

Yet I cling tenaciously to my middle path. I respect all cultures, but see no insult in preferring my own. I love many kinds of music, but remain proud to belong to the tradition of Bach and Beethoven. I understand the tragic consequences of America's military and corporate imperialism, but I am a patriotic American who loves my country in spite of its flaws. I respect many paths towards peace, but remain convinced that music most easily reminds us of our common humanity. I see no problem in Americans learning Afghan music in Kabul while teaching Western music, just as there should be no problem in Afghans coming to New York to do the reverse.

Perhaps the only qualifier my chicken dish needs is "delicious." I claim the identities of man, musician, and American, while knowing that my most important identity is that of someone who seeks to improve both himself and the world around him.

After this meal, I chose an espresso for its Janus-like ability to prepare us for what lies ahead while catalyzing memory. We order it in the morning in the hopes that the caffeine will kick-start our day; we ask for it after dinner in order to reflect. I ordered mine without milk and sugar: bitter, like the fleeting island of time in which I find myself—-between America and Afghanistan, between free-lancing in New York and teaching in Kabul, between liberty and tradition, secularism and Islam, security and war, comfort and suffering.

People who meet me recently and have never heard of Cultures in Harmony ask why I am going to Kabul. The espresso reminds me of the coin in my violin case, the coin that I showed to John-Edward Kelly before last night's Munich concert, saying "This is my most valuable possession."

I received that coin on September 16, 2001, when I performed for members of the Fighting Sixty-Ninth Regiment as they returned from a long day of rescue and clean-up work at Ground Zero. That experience showed me that great music deserves more than being a nice entertainment for the wealthy. It is a reason to live, a force to propel society towards truth and love. I started Cultures in Harmony in 2005 with the goal of promoting cultural understanding through music. Since then, we have done 19 projects in 11 countries. The director of another cultural diplomacy organization, American Voices, recommended me for the job in Kabul, and on America's 233rd birthday (July 4, 2009), I received my formal job offer.

As the espresso reminds me of the past, it reminds of what I will miss. Moments shared with friends in the US come to mind, as well as moments with my father, mother, and brother. I also think of the moment that makes me most patriotic: my first visit to Washington DC in December 2006. In spite of the cold, I thrilled to see the flags snapping in the sharp wind around the Washington Monument, and I cried at the Lincoln Memorial as I read a book about Marian Anderson's famous performance there, a book which enabled me to reflect on the enormous obstacles which we Americans have overcome and must still overcome on our march to the promise implied by our founding ideals.

The espresso effortlessly glides my focus towards what awaits me in Kabul, for my lack of concern for the cold in Washington reminds me of others who do not notice the cold: my students in Kabul. In a meeting at the State Department last month, a bureaucrat told me that he met some student musicians during his brief visit to Kabul. One impression stayed with him: "The building where those students practiced was so cold, you needed to go outside to warm up. Only their love of music kept them warm."

Right now, 35 young people in Kabul await the arrival of the first violin teacher to nurture new generation of Afghan violinists in 30 years. Perhaps they are practicing as I type. I dare not speculate too much about them, but I know this: my dedication to music, and that of everyone I've met, pales next to that of those who risked their life to be musicians. Their zeal will humble me, and I hope they will learn as much from me as I will learn from them.

I finish my espresso. In 12 hours, I will be in another world. Spring is coming to the US, Germany, and Afghanistan: today was the first day I walked without a winter coat, enjoying the comfort of my shalwar kameez in the crisp air outside the airport. Yet even when a chill returns, I will remember how I didn't feel the cold during that DC visit in 2006, and how my students ignore a far more severe cold when they are making music. Whatever the winds of weather or war may attempt, they cannot chill the fingers, still the voices, or numb the hearts of those of us who seek to live together in peace. We will always draw warmth from the dream of peace, liberty, and understanding.

A common greeting in Afghanistan is "Chetor hasti ba hawa?" which loosely translates as, "How do you feel about the weather?" I suspect that for me, the standard response will be sincere: "Khub, tashakor."

Fine, thanks.

ICD, museum, and visa services

2010-03-17T11:00:00.002+04:30

On Monday in Berlin with The Arcos Orchestra, I met with Mark Donfried, Founder and Director of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. Touring their elegant, cavernous, modern offices, filled with staff working on projects, I was blown away by their achievements since Mark started ICD in 1999. They do everything from connecting young German and Turkish people to bringing current and former world leaders to their headquarters for public forums. It was exciting to see that cultural diplomacy can consistently attract support from donors, and I was inspired to observe the prestige which ICD has acquired. Hopefully, ICD and Cultures in Harmony will be able to collaborate more in the future.

Yesterday, I toured the Pergamon Museum. The depictions of musicians from throughout history moved me deeply. I saw friezes depicting musicians from 4,000 years ago in Babylonia; another frieze showing Assyrian musicians following soldiers from 2700 years ago; Mughal paintings of musicians at a Muslim court from 300 years ago; and an 800-year-old ceramic plate showing a rubab player in Iran. This last was particularly affecting, as the rubab is still played in Iran and Afghanistan. If anyone in Afghanistan says "Muslims don't play music," I can show them the picture I took of that plate.

While checking email here in Braunschweig, I read this article about the important work done by Tamizdat in bringing musicians to the United States for cultural exchange. Thanks are due to Tamizdat for helping foreign artists navigate the labyrinthine US visa requirements.

Article re-posted

2010-03-12T13:46:00.002+04:30

Hello from Oberhausen, Germany! I am pleased to report that Foreign Policy in Focus has re-posted my article about Cultures in Harmony that originally appeared in The Mantle.

Mailing address and tour

2010-03-08T03:05:00.001+04:30

1. Cultures in Harmony now has a mailing address! Tax-deductible donations and other materials may now reach us at P.O. Box 1244, New York, NY 10163.

2. I am on tour playing concerts with the Arcos Orchestra and am writing from Epinal, France. After the tour, I will move to Afghanistan to teach violin at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music.

Operations Manager

2010-02-25T18:59:00.003+04:30

After five years of operating without any salaried staff, Cultures in Harmony is thrilled to welcome Geoffrey Hamlyn as our first ever Operations Manager. Geoffrey will be a fantastic addition to our volunteer team of Eric Hanser, Artist Services Coordinator; Eva Grzesik, Social Coordinator; and Adam Weinstein, IT Consultant. He will work with our wonderful board of Amanda von Goetz and George Stelluto to facilitate the continued growth of the organization. He will handle donor acknowledgment, vendor payment, logistics coordination among our many volunteers in the US and abroad, and much more. Welcome, Geoffrey!

Big Changes Coming to Cultures in Harmony!

2010-02-23T05:59:00.004+04:30

Big changes are coming to Cultures in Harmony, but for the first time, you won't read about them here. Log into Facebook and read about them on the Discussion Board of Cultures in Harmony's Facebook group. If you're not a member of Facebook, please join; if you're not a member of the Cultures in Harmony Facebook group, please join that.

Why am I asking you to join Facebook in order to even read about these big changes? Because the Cultures in Harmony Facebook group is the largest online community of people who care about Cultures in Harmony. Unfortunately, the comments section on this blog has never really taken off. So, in order to be sure that everyone can comment in a truly interactive way, and in order to ensure that the resulting changes accurately consider all viewpoints, I believe that the Cultures in Harmony Facebook group is the best venue to discuss the proposed changes.

Of course, you could post a comment here suggesting the following Big Change: replacing the Facebook group with another online venue for discussion! That would be entirely within the spirit of the Big Changes proposed.

Article about Cultures in Harmony

2010-02-22T06:46:00.001+04:30

Shaun Randol heard my speech at the Fourth Universalist Society on January 31 and invited me to prepare a version for publication in the journal The Mantle. Here is my article. I hope you enjoy it!

Paganini Caprice Challenge

2010-02-09T18:31:00.002+04:30

Since September, the Paganini Caprice Challenge has raised $11,000 for Cultures in Harmony's projects in 2010. While playing through Paganini's devilishly difficult masterworks, I've provided the soundtrack for an extraordinary film about a lost dog, failed to impress a New York woman, advertised Nutella, stood in the Caribbean, gotten decorated like a Christmas tree, and played for strangers on a speeding train. You, in turn, have opened your hearts and your wallets to the cause of promoting peace through music. Thank you for what you have done so far, and check out the videos here.

For the last two videos, we're raising the stakes. Caprices 23 and 24 will each cost $1,000. That means that donations must total $1,000 before we post #23 and another $1,000 before we post #24. I know that you will respond, and I thank you in advance for heeding the advice of the Pakistani music student who told me in Karachi last August: "Don't just make a link. Build a relationship. You are feeding an entire nation."

A couple other things: belated congratulations are in order for Ming Tanigawa-lau, who won the Hawaii Youth Symphony Essay Contest with this essay about Cultures in Harmony and other initiatives to use music to change society. Congratulations to Ming, whose future seems bright, especially since her high school (Punahou) can boast at least one alumnus who has done rather well.

This BBC article movingly discusses what is lost when a language dies. Want to help preserve the world's linguistic heritage? Then donate to Cultures in Harmony, so we can complete this project in Papua New Guinea.

Iran's cultural diplomacy

2010-02-04T18:19:00.003+04:30

The New York Times has this excellent critique of Iran's cultural diplomacy. The writer is correct to quote those who question the value in sending an orchestra abroad to perform laughably trite music when protesters are beaten and killed at home. I'd like to add that it is absurd to export some musicians when other musicians are banned from performing at home and radios are given a list of banned musicians. I can't find the article just now, but not so long ago I read another article about a musician who was arrested for playing in a public park in Tehran.

If the Iranian regime is unfamiliar with irony, they are also unaware of the historical imperative of exporting quality culture when you choose to do it. The Soviets sent some of history's greatest musicians, and the Iranians send this jingoistic, derivative symphony? Why not use compositions by the great Iranian composers Behzad Ranjbaran or Kayhan Kalhor, or even an excellent student composer such as Gity Razaz? Freed from the regime's clutches, these expatriates might have said no, but as exemplars of the quality of Iranian music, these composers indicate that the regime might have found composers whose music would win an appreciative ear outside Iran simply by double-checking the list of musicians they had banned.

After a few days spent in Washington trying to find money for cultural diplomacy, I'll say this: at least Iran is trying. America has a government and culture worthy of representing abroad, and the quality cultural diplomats to represent it, but places little value on culture or cultural diplomacy. Iran has an oppressive regime but respects the powerful role of culture, whether they are busy banning it or exporting it. If a broken clock is right twice a day, I guess a working clock breaks every now and then.

Presentation at Unitarian Church this Sunday

2010-01-28T01:44:00.002+04:30

If you live in New York, please come to the Fourth Universalist Society at 160 Central Park West (and W. 76th St.) this Sunday, January 31, at 10:45 a.m., to hear me present about Cultures in Harmony. I will deliver a 3-minute children's message, a 5-minute speech to the adult members of the congregation, and I will join pianist Tom McGinnis to perform selections by Mozart, Schumann, Rachmaninov, and Leclair. A special collection will be held to benefit Cultures in Harmony.

Fundraiser at a bar on Thursday

2010-01-18T21:20:00.002+04:30

Cultures in Harmony is the featured non-profit for January's installment of Shenanigans for Charity!

The concept is simple:
1) Show up at any time. There's no cover charge!
2) Order a drink and tip your bartender well - ALL TIPS GO TO CULTURES IN HARMONY!
3) Rinse, Repeat
4) Enjoy a live DJ and mingling with old and new friends

So please join us for a cocktail or a beer (Bar XII has 20 beers on tap) or soda or juice! And bring friends!

When: Thursday, January 21, 2010, from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.
Where: Bar XII, 206 E. 34th St., New York City

On national radio in Dominican Republic

2010-01-13T22:06:00.003+04:30

Greetings from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where I am playing in the violin section of the National Symphony for the annual Altagraciano concert, which will be this Friday at 8:00 p.m. at the Cathedral in Higuey.

I was just interviewed on national radio about Cultures in Harmony. Thank you to Yanela Hernandez and Guillermo Ricart Calventi for interviewing me, Juan Freddy Armando for connecting me to them, and Jorge Pina for connecting me to Juan Freddy. The program is a daily show called "Voces a los 4 Vientos" and airs on 98.9 FM from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. every weekday. I spoke in Spanish about Cultures in Harmony and the state of music in the US and the Dominican Republic. I urged young Dominican musicians to consider their art as central to society, rather than as something nice that exists at the fringe or as an afterthought, "como el postre" (like a dessert).

Tomorrow, January 14, I will perform before a lecture on the making of the marimbola, a Dominican folk percussion instrument. If you're in Santo Domingo, please come to the Sala Ramon Oviedo at the Secretaria de Estado de Cultura at 6:00 p.m. for the lecture.

My heart goes out to the people of Haiti. Fortunately, we are OK on this half of the island of Hispaniola, but the scope of the devastation from yesterday's earthquake there is only just coming to light. May the relief effort be swift, adequate, and well-coordinated.

Happy New Year and Happy Birthday, Cultures in Harmony!

2010-01-01T09:40:00.004+04:30

Happy New Year! May 2010 bring you much happiness, and may it bring to the world's cultures the harmony which their hearts, in anxious counterpoint, have long been seeking.

Today is also the fifth birthday of Cultures in Harmony! Five years ago today, I wrote a concept paper for a project that seemed just crazy enough to work. That project turned into Project I of Cultures in Harmony. I am deeply indebted to Everold Hosein, Communications Advisor for the World Health Organization, without which that project would never have happened. He is the godfather of Cultures in Harmony.

Please celebrate the auspicious beginning of a decade and our birthday with a $5 donation to Cultures in Harmony. You can donate through the usual means, or pledge to donate to our Papua New Guinea project over at Kickstarter, a new site that helps non-profits raise money.

And now, for the sake of nostalgia, here is that concept paper of five years ago. Notice that it bears only a scant resemblance to the reality of the project it launched six months later:

January 1, 2005

Proposal:
A concert tour of refugee camps, children’s hospitals, and other venues, to be conducted under the aegis of the United Nations, in the summer of 2005.

Personal background:
I am a 22-year-old violinist studying in the graduate division of the Juilliard School. I have participated in numerous outreach activities, the highlight of which was a concert on September 16, 2001, when I performed for members of the Fighting Sixty-Ninth regiment as they recuperated from a long day of rescue and clean-up work at Ground Zero. As the first violinist of the Anne Stern Quartet in 2003, I presented fifteen concerts in elementary schools throughout Maine. In Manhattan in 2002, I played at the Ronald McDonald House and at the Jewish Home and Hospital for the Aged. During my high school years in Indianapolis, I presented many concerts at healthcare facilities, public schools, and a young women’s correctional facility.

I have performed solo with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and served as concertmaster of the Juilliard Orchestra, as well as performing with that orchestra in Carnegie Hall. My recital experience includes public and private recitals in Paris and Istanbul as well as Chicago, Indianapolis, New York, Orlando, St. Louis, and Santa Barbara. I have performed solo on national radio (From the Top and Performance Today, NPR) and national television (The Judith Regan Show and Fox News Magazine, Fox). In May 2004, I earned a Bachelor’s of Music with highest distinction from Indiana University.

Reasons for interest:
After my 2001 performance for the Fighting Sixty-Ninth regiment, I became convinced that there are many people who do not normally have access to classical music but can benefit greatly from the emotional solace it provides. A couple months after that experience, I came across a November 20, 2001 article in the New York Times that confirmed my belief about music’s power to comfort. A 16-year-old named Ajmal from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, was quoted as saying, "We are searching for any kind of music. It's been six years since I heard music. There are no words to explain the happiness I think I will feel when I hear it."

In September 2003, during my last year at Indiana University, I joined the Bloomington Muslim Dialogue Group (www.bmdg.org). The group’s discussions and lectures led me to realize the importance of dialogue between faiths and cultures, especially in a post-9/11 world. The group sponsored a tour of Turkey in June 2004, during which I played violin for an esteemed ud teacher. I could not speak his language, and he could not speak mine, and yet through our combined music making we were able to communicate. This experience affirmed music’s role in dialogue and its ability to transcend the barriers between people.

Uniqueness:
This project would fill a void. On July 15, 1997, Maxim Vengerov became the first classical musician to be appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Since then, he has been joined only by the pianist Lang Lang. Obviously, I am not famous, as they are, nor do I seek to be a Goodwill Ambassador. But I believe that much good could be accomplished by musicians who are not as prominent or as renowned, and currently, I am not aware of any program which would connect such musicians with the performing opportunities such as have resulted from Vengerov’s association with UNICEF. The United States Information Agency used to offer a broad range of concerts abroad, but this program has been reduced.

Funding:
The Juilliard School offers a Summer Grant Program, to which I could apply. I have contacts at Grantmakers in the Arts, Lincoln Center Consolidated Corporate Fund, and the Thirteen Fifty Foundation, as well as a few patrons in the private sector.

The Tour:
I would be available between Monday, May 23, 2005 and Friday, August 12, 2005. Because of my interest in and respect for Muslim culture, I would be primarily interested in going to countries in Northern Africa and the Middle East, but would also be eager to go to destinations throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe. I would be willing to present one or two performances per day.

The concerts themselves would be approximately 45 minutes to an hour. The repertoire would be broad-ranging, including the unaccompanied violin repertoire (Bach, Paganini, Ysaye, and others) as well as fiddle tunes. Also, I would use venues such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to research folk music from the regions in which I would present the concerts, in order to perform that as well. The concerts would not consist entirely of playing, but would also include interaction with the audience, both before, during, and after the concert.

I would record my experience by keeping a diary, taking pictures, making recordings, and maintaining a website.

The Future:
If successful, this tour would lay the groundwork for future tours by other young classical musicians from renowned schools, universities, and conservatories such as Juilliard, Curtis, Indiana University, New England Conservatory, and others. I believe that the experience will provide further proof of the powerful role music plays in reminding people of the glory of which humanity is capable and the bonds we all share.

First competitive grant received

2009-12-27T04:57:00.002+04:30

I am pleased to report that the Aaron Copland Fund for Music has awarded Cultures in Harmony a grant of $1,000 in support of our performances of contemporary American music.

One of the ways in which Cultures in Harmony represents the United States abroad is through performing its greatest classical music. We have performed the Quartet No. 5 by Philip Glass in Pakistan and the Philippines; Barber's Adagio for Strings in Tunisia and Pakistan; works by Virgil Thomson in Cameroon, Egypt, Papua New Guinea, and Qatar; and many other American pieces. We have also given premieres of works by a wide variety of American composers.

To listen to Cultures in Harmony perform American music, head over to our MySpace and check out the world premiere recording of Sextet by Ricardo Romaneiro, written especially for Project IV in the Philippines.

This grant is a momentous occasion for Cultures in Harmony, because it is the first time in our five-year history that we have ever received a foundation grant from a competitive application process.

We are so grateful to the Copland Fund for this recognition of our work. Thanks to their generosity, we are well positioned to return to the countries where we have forged friendships in the past. We have added the Copland Fund to our donors list, and of course, each of our projects in 2010 will also feature America's greatest contemporary music.

Article in Sing for Hope

2009-12-18T19:37:00.003+04:30

Sing for Hope, the non-profit of which I am honored to be an artist member, has featured the origin story of Cultures in Harmony in this lovely article by Kelley Rourke.