The horrors of the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan are all-encompassing. New laws that effectively legalise domestic abuse means that every woman in the country now lives with the threat of state-sanctioned violence. In the context of the twin tragedies of the Taliban’s fundamentalist zealotry, and the rest of the world’s silence in the face of their atrocities, the fate of Afghanistan’s cultural life might seem a smaller catastrophe. Yet it’s equivalently devastating.
The recent burning of hundreds of musical instruments and equipment – reported last week on Afghan National Television – is the latest stage of the Taliban morality police’s ongoing mission to destroy all these artefacts. Last week’s pyre included tablas and harmoniums, instruments that are the bedrocks of Afghanistan’s unique tradition of classical music, as well as keyboards and amplifiers.
“Since their return in 2021, the Taliban have waged a war on music, claiming that it causes ‘moral corruption’,” writes Sarah Dawood in Index on Censorship. “The Taliban outlaws music, and criminalises performing or even listening to music. Musicians in the country live in fear of discrimination, humiliation, torture, imprisonment, sexual violence in the case of women and even death.”
double quotation markThe Taliban criminalises performing or even listening to music. Musicians live in fear of discrimination, humiliation, torture, imprisonment and even deathIndex on Censorship
This silencing of musical culture is another humanitarian nadir the Taliban are enforcing, an attempt to create a sharia-compliant, music-free country for which there is no precedent anywhere.
The bravest musicians I’ve ever met are the women of Zohra, the Afghan women’s orchestra of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music – based in Portugal now. Across its orchestras and its training, ANIM works for the “musical rights” not only of the 300 members of the institute, but for the country’s culture as a whole. In their orchestras and ensembles, there’s a mix of western orchestral and traditional instruments – like the lute-like Afghan rubab, whose repertoire is among the treasures of world music, a tradition of pieces and ways of playing passed down across the generations that’s today imperilled as never before and is sustained only in exile.
Meanwhile we can help keep their music in the forefront of our listening lives, renewing that radical activity that no-one in Afghanistan is legally allowed to do. Listen to the cry of hope of Dawn by Meena Karimi, composed for International Women’s Day 2021 and dedicated to Afghan women’s struggles for equality, or hear rubab virtuosos such as Homayoun Sakhi and Ustad Rahim Khushnawaz. There’s no more urgent musical emergency on the planet.
Listen to the Zohra orchestra
What does it mean to listen? I mean, really to listen to the infinite possibilities of every moment of our sonic lives? No composer in 20th and 21st century music asked the question more sensitively, or more profoundly than Eliane Radigue, who has died at the age of 94.
Eliane Radigue at work in Paris in 1971. Photograph: Yves Arman
Radigue was a sonic pioneer. Pre 2001, her music was made exclusively for synthesisers, because the technology allowed her to get inside the world of sound, stretching individual pitches into seeming infinities of slowness and concentration, in a way that traditional composition didn’t. Listen to the epic scales of ever-changing changelessness – a paradox that makes sense when you encounter her music – of her Trilogie de la Mort to experience what I mean. As Pascal Wyse wrote in his interview with her, Radigue’s use of synthesisers meant that “the music didn’t contain sound: the sound contained the music”.
Radigue’s epiphany of working with acoustic instruments – and human performers – in the 21st century, and in her Occam Ocean pieces, brought a lesson in how to listen. These works are full of sounds of superficial slowness but they release teeming energy from their musicians.
The Bafta winners have been overshadowed by the row over the TV coverage, but congratulations to Ludwig Göransson, whose original score for Sinners won the Bafta on Sunday night. For me, the standout moment of Ryan Coogler’s film was Rafael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson’s Oscar-nominated I Lied to You. Five delirious minutes on screen in which Sammie (played by Miles Caton)’s performance at the dance-hall draws the spirits of Black music from African griots and shamans to blues, jazz, hip-hop, and DJ culture to appear, all seamlessly woven into the shots of the dance-floor. You feel you’re there with the dancers and singers, a still point around which the roots and futures of the blues swirls, celebrating the truth that the song is all about: that Sammie loves the blues more than the Bible that his preacher father threw to him on that Mississippi road. That’s the film’s closest reference to the legend of the real-life blues pioneer Robert Johnson, in the mythology of his supposed deal with the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi, giving him his talent in exchange for his soul.
The vampires in the movie are as much musical as they’re supernatural: Sinners juxtaposes the blues with the folk songs, often Scottish and Irish, that the band of white vampires sings outside the dancehall. And as well as the blood and gore of its final act, Sinners is a satire on how the blues has lost its soul due to the vampiric forces of commercialism and appropriation: “White folks like the blues just fine; just not the people who make it”, as Delroy Lindo’s character, Delta Slim says.
This week Tom has been listening to: Beethoven’s Zur Namensfeier Overture (try Riccardo Chailly’s recording with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra). Six minutes of some of the most unpredictable orchestral music Beethoven ever wrote – and yes, that’s saying something! – that is just not played enough.
