 Ok. Wel, ddwy'n ein gwybod be'r fwn i'r ddysgu efallai, ddigonno cymdangos cymaint. Wel, ydych chi'n celynol y rhai a'r lyfan y flwyddyn hynny yng Ngharou Gw幫 Antony Hymn. Fyd ddewch ddim yn ymdweud i ddedig i ni'n gwybod. Wel, fe oedd y gallwn hynyn, mae'n gyffredin. Dw i gyd, dyma gweithio i'r ffaith yma. Ddyouch ar y cyflau. Ydw i mi gilyd i gyd, a'r eich adrodd y Prifesau Johnathan Goodhand yn ystod, dywed yn dod yn dros, yn cael ei gweithio'r llun o'r llun, i'r llun ymlaen i Afganesdan, i'r wych i'r ffr�u hynny, fyddai'n bo llwyddoch i'r ddigon i ddweud y ddweud i ddweud o'r ffaith gyntaf Afganesdan, wedi ymchwil o y blaen ffyffent o dxinедиwys hon allan gyda outsloedol o bobln i fynd yn cael ble o'r cyfrydd typ關係. Diменno fy e cookiriwyd. Fy fydden nhw'n gwneud o sy FM diddyl harlynu'r cyfr хоч yn enhymel o'r cyfridd yno, lle mae oedd yn rhoi g altar iawn budgets felly rydyn ni wedi bod hynny yn edrych yn ein ffasinataeth a chael cerddur y bydd Afganistol a fyddech chi'n gweld ond nifer i fy nghymru ar y ddiwrnod ac ar all. A dwi'n rydyn ni'r gweithio'r monograph yn y galaxydd y llun o'r byddig i ddweud ei Maesafol yn ddweud yr aelod ac er fyddwyd yn gwneud â fyddwyd yn Llywodraeth, gweithio'r cyd-dweud ar gyfer hyn o'r meddwl gweithfyr y gweithfyr rhagol. If there was a slow build-up to the state of affairs, recovery has not been rapid and is far from complete, especially in areas where Taliban influence prevails. It is with aspects of this recovery that we're concerned tonight. Do you come and find yourselves a nice seat over here perhaps? We'd like to see a full house. In part, this recovery, which is considerable, is due to the phenomenal rise in independent radio and television stations after 2001. As described by David Page and Shirazudin Siddiqi's report, The Media in Afghanistan, the challenge of transition published in 2012. Until 2002, radio and television broadcasting was tightly controlled by the Ministry of Information and Culture. Western countries saw free media as a pillar of the new democracy they sought to bring to Afghanistan. The government granted broadcasting licences more or less on demand. According to Page and Siddiqi, in their report by 2010, there were 75, do come in, 75 terrestrial TV stations, 30 of them in Kabul, 18 in Herod. There were 175 FM stations in the country, 34 of them operated by the Ministry of Information and Culture. There was also an extraordinary growth in the use of mobile telephones. A country that had been dogged by poor communications for so long suddenly had the resources to enter the modern world. A range of financial backers and audiences supported these radio and TV broadcasters. External donors funded some local radio and TV stations advertising financed others. There were the so-called Warlord Channels connected with former militia and Mojahedin leaders such as Dostam, Hekmachiar and Rabani. And some channels had specific religious or political affiliations. There was and remains the problem of a lack of regulatory framework. Only occasionally was a channel closed down because of its promotion of sectarian propaganda and then only for a short while. Music was regularly broadcast by some of these stations, perhaps notably by Tolo TV, which concentrated on Afghan popular music of a kind appreciated by young Afghans. This is the new fast music or music en masse, which was developed by young musicians in the Afghan diaspora, especially in the USA and in Germany, inspired in part by Western pop music. Tolo has, for some years, held an annual pop idol type of music competition, Settare Afghanistan, Afghan Star, which achieved a degree of notoriety through including young women vocalist competitors. Some radio stations concentrate more on recordings of older popular singers such as Amazair, sometimes dubbed the Elvis Presley of Afghanistan. And there is a station, I think, in Kabul that only plays the recordings of Zaya Shah, and it's very popular with taxi drivers, so you get Zaya Shah whenever you get into a taxi there. Maybe that's right, maybe it's wrong. Another factor in the revitalisation of music was the return of musicians who were in exile, some to resume their working lives in Afghanistan, others to make family visits. Several of Afghanistan's superstars of popular music in the diaspora visited Afghanistan to give large-scale concerts. Farhad Daria's concert in Kabul on 14 May 2004 was held in the football stadium to a crowd estimated at 45,000. Farhad Daria later described the event to Simon Broughton for Songlines, the world music magazine. He said, it was like a national day in Kabul, in the stadium I felt like a cloud flying over the sky of the crowd. What was amazing was the presence of women. Men and women were sitting next to each other for a concert right where they had seen their beloved ones executed. Many of them were dancing and crying. It looked like they had forgotten the misery and pain of the past decades. Even the 700 armed security guys started to dance to the music and enjoy the new wave of hope. I wanted a fresh start in Afghanistan with music and we did it. Well that should give you the general idea of what's been going on. Now I'm going to concentrate on two educational institutions in Kabul, the music school run by the Aga Khan Music Initiative, ACME and the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, ANI. They represent the most significant developments in the field of music education in recent years. And it should be remembered that music was never part of the school curriculum in Afghanistan in the past. After the defeat of the Taliban government in 2001, we at Goldsmiths University of London established the Afghanistan Music Unit. With the intention of researching the state of music in Afghanistan and determining what should be done to encourage the regeneration of Afghan music culture. To this end, I visited Kabul in 2002, supported financially by the British Academy's Committee for Central and Inner Asia. Razir, I think you remember them. I was equipped with my indispensable research tool, the mini-DV camcorder. In the old city of Kabul, near to the former royal palace, there was an area known as the Kutcheh Harabot. It is in effect a musician's quarter where in the past many families of hereditary musicians lived. Some of their ancestors came from India in the 1860s during the reign of Amir Sher Ali Khan and were employed as entertainers at his court as singers, musicians and dancers. They were conversant with various genres of Hindustani music and dance, and their instruments were mainly tabla, sarangi and rabab. While they performed Indian music and dance as practiced at that time in India, in the context of the Kabul court, priority was laid on the art of Ghazal singing in a distinctive Afghan style that laid emphasis on mystical Sufi poetry, combined with dramatic changes of tempo and the use of rhythmic cadences that arguably derive from Pashtun regional music. The term Kutcheh Harabot means Harabot Ali, and the word Harabot has a very interesting semantic field. It derives from the word Harab, broken, destroyed, and can mean a tavern, a gaming house or a brothel, somewhere to go to get broken down. But in Sufi terminology, Harabot is an important and frequently used word that implies the destruction of the Sufi's self-will at his or her complete subjugation, subordination and obedience to God. Thus, the term is infused with ambiguity, mixing the sacred and the profane. By the mid 20th century, many dozens of professional musicians lived in the Harabot, local Afghan hereditary musicians had joined those whose ancestors came from outside Afghanistan. The musician community included all the great ustads, master musicians of Kabul, such as Ustad Khasem, Ustad Gohan Hussein, Ustad Nebi Goh and Ustad Sheyda. The deniers of the Harabot constituted an important musical resource in Afghanistan. Many of them worked full-time at Radio Kabul when it became operational in the 1940s. Some ran private music schools in their homes. They taught youngsters from within the Harabot who learned through an apprenticeship system in which they paid through service to their teacher. They also taught amateur musicians from outside, people like me, who paid for their lessons in cash and gifts. As a collective, the musicians constituted an occupational guild with their own protocols and with Mohindin Chishti as their patron saint. His mazar is in Ajmer, outside in India. During the coalition period, much of the Harabot was destroyed in the interneesine fighting between rival Mujahideen groups battling for control of Kabul. Many of the musicians and their families from the Harabot sought refuge in Pakistan, especially in Peshawar, where they set up business premises in Khalil House on University Road, which became a sort of conservatory in exile. With the new dispensation following 2001, many of these Harabot musicians returned to Kabul. During my visit in 2002, I was conducted by Ustad Golan Hussein, the rabog player on a tour of the ruins. Now we're going to put the lights down here. From now on we have a series of video clips and we thought it would be better to have these in a slightly darkened room so Charles is adjusting the lighting. Ok, video clip on 10th of the summer. Hussein plays the rabog and sounds just like our teacher, Ustad Mohammad Omar. He's younger than me. He used to serve the team when I had my music lessons in Ustad's house. Now he's back after 10 years of exile in Pakistan. So this is where I first learned to play the rabog all those years ago. So Golan Hussein's speech addresses some of the issues facing the community, especially the loss of its elders and the prospect of the next generation taking on that role. Today, most of those ruined houses have been rebuilt by the Harabot families with no external funding as far as I know. In the process, the Harabot has resumed its role as a centre for musical activity and learning. In that year, 2002, I also visited the stage-owned Afghanistan Radio and Television Station in Kabul. Being particularly interested in the music archive, which BBC correspondent William Reeve, who I'm delighted to know is with us tonight, discovered that the archive had survived more or less intact. There was a very low level of musical activity at the radio and television station with no broadcasting of women singers, not even videos or audio recordings from the past. The faculty of fine arts at Kabul University, which now had a small music department, was struggling with very limited human and instrumental resources. The music department of the Ministry of Information and Culture had recently received a gift of western electric instruments and recording studio equipment from the Goethe Institute. I visited the private orphanage, Horosan House, run by Sima Ghani, a former student in London who encouraged the children in her care. Here they are, performing the famous patriotic song associated with Awal Mir, Das Amu Zibawatan. This is a patriotic song composed by Awal Mir, which today is the unofficial national anthem of Afghanistan. This remarkable song serves as the unofficial national anthem, often played at concerts of Afghan music in the diaspora. It seems to appeal to many Afghans, even though they may not be pushed to speakers. As for the children, it expresses surely a message of hope for the future and forms a poignant contrast to the destruction of the Haribot. On my return to the UK, I wrote a report for my sponsors with a list of recommendations. It seemed to me that the musical heritage most in need of support was the Afghan classical music, Ghaz al-Khani, that had developed in the context of the Royal Court, in contrast to the new music that had grown up in the diaspora. Sending the report and a copy of my film, a Kabul Music Diary, to the person in charge of the Aga Khan Music Initiative, ACMI, resulted in my being invited to organise a tradition bearers programme to support the art of Ghazal singing in Kabul. I made a start in 2003, appointing four ustads, master musicians, as teachers. Salim Bash, vocalist, Ghulam Hussein al-Rabab, Amruddin Ghulabzadeh, Delruba and Waleen Nabizadeh, toddler. They were provided with a teaching room in the compound of the foundation for culture and civil society in central Kabul and provided with a small number of instruments. I did not instruct the ustads to follow a particular music curriculum, I left it to them to teach in their own way using Indian sargam and tabla ball notations. In doing this, I followed the Ustad Muhammad Amar model that I had experienced as his student in 1973. I had also observed teaching sessions in Peshawar and knew these musicians were used to teaching and to running their own music courses. No other subjects were taught besides music in this fledgling ACMI school. I am going to show you the four ustads playing at a house concert in a moment. The song they perform is entirely appropriate, a Jani Kharabotam. I am the beloved of the Kharabot, the signature tune of the musician's quarter. Just to give you a taste of the lyrics here, I am the slave of the saint of Kharabot. His kindness lasts forever unlike that of the muller or theologian whose kindness comes and goes. Sometimes I am heaven, sometimes I am negation, sometimes affirmation, sometimes I am a mosque, sometimes I am a church and sometimes I am Kaaba and Mecca. O Sufi, listen to the essence of my sayings. I am the mirror of the essence of God. I am the son of the skies because I am the soul of Kharabot. I am the beloved of the Kharabot. So this on the left is the tablet player, Wally Nabizade. He is Salim Bachsh with his harmonium. Ghulam Hussein is behind and this on the right is Amradin playing the Delruba. Here next to his father is Rafi Bachsh and a son of his who is there. He is there to experience a musical performance. That performance, although it isn't actually a razzal, has got many of the aspects of this carboly classical music that I love so much and which I really felt needed support to develop further. In 2005 I gave up my consultancy with ACMI thinking I had done as much as I could at a distance and was replaced by Mirweis Siddiqi, who took on the role of coordinator of the tradition bearers program and has done a marvellous job in developing the school over the next 10 years. Visiting Kabul in 2006 I was impressed by how much progress had been made with Mirweis in charge. The program had now become a fully fledged school housed in a modern building with more students and many more teaching rooms and instruments. The original four Ustads were still teaching. Mirweis Siddiqi had also established a regional music instrumental group, Ghuldas de Charrabot, under the direction of Ustad Ghulam Hussein, which brought together instrumentalists from various parts of the country. The mode of teaching had also changed markedly from my original concept. Instead of one-to-one interaction between Ustad and students with other students observing and learning from one another's mistakes, they had emphasised group teaching with up to a dozen students practising exercises and conversations in unison together. A curriculum had been established and examinations that had to be passed before the student proceeded to the next level. In 2009, a second Akmi school was established in Herat, with local Herati musicians as teachers of Ghazal Khani. So, here's Ghulam Hussein's Robab class in 2006. For students are learning a composition in the Karbaly classical style, a piece attributed to Ustad Muhammad Ammar. It's not easy to play being in a metrical cycle of ten matters, ten equal time units. When I last visited the school in February 2014, I found that teaching had been extended to some of the regional music of Afghanistan, with teachers of Tambur, Khaychak, Dothar, Tulak and Dambura. So this was very much a growing enterprise. So, that brings me now to the second music school that I want to talk about, and that is the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, ANIM. In 1974, a vocational school of music was opened in Kabul, staffed by a number of Afghan musicians who had been trained in western art music in the USSR. Prominent amongst them was Salim Salmasd, an important figure in radio Afghanistan as composer and conductor of the orchestra Bozorg, an ensemble of 38 musicians playing western, Indian and Afghan instruments. The school was closed when the coalition government came to power in 1992. In 2004, Amad Salmasd, a son of Salim Salmasd, was awarded a PhD in musicology by Monash University in Australia and set about planning to revive the vocational music school where his father had worked. This project received strong support from the Monash Asia Institute, whose director Marika Vicciani wrote about the difficulties in gaining financial support from the Australian government. She wrote, music is not a priority for rebuilding Afghanistan. Rebuilding roads is perceived to be much more important and music education must take a lower priority than general education and literacy. These reasons reveal a shocking misunderstanding amongst policymakers of modern pedagogy, of the cultural importance of music to the various ethnic groups in Afghanistan and the healing powers of music. In an interview with The Guardian in 2013, Dr Salmasd expressed a strong belief in the incredible power of music and specifically in its ability to bring restoration and peace to Afghanistan. Music is a tool that can bring about social changes, contribute to the emotional healing of Afghan children and youth and establish a just and civil society. With generous funding from the World Bank and many other sources, especially in Germany and the United States, Dr Salmasd has been able to recreate the former vocational school of music. He hired a number of international staff, mostly young American music educators, to teach Western music and acquired a large stock of new musical instruments, Afghan, Indian and Western. In 2010, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, ANIM, was officially inaugurated, teaching a broad educational curriculum with heavy emphasis on music, and it was also fully coeducational. ANIM's emphasis on teaching Western music is justified by the fact that it has been part of Afghan music culture since the early 20th century. But there are other reasons. As Salmasd explains in the film, Dr Salmas Music School made by an Australian director, some people told me, why does Afghanistan need Bach or Beethoven or Mozart? We should concentrate on Afghan traditional music. But Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, they don't belong to Europe. They don't belong to America. They belong to all the world. And I want Afghan kids to have access to the musical heritage of the world. In 2011 I made an informal visit to ANIM on behalf of the Society for Education and Music Pedagogy Research, otherwise known as Semple, and for two weeks I enjoyed free access to the school. Back in London's Institute of Education, Dr Evangelos Himolides, who is here with us tonight, and I edited a short film about ANIM called Return of the Nightingales. Here's a shot from the class of Indian music run by Ulstad Irfan Khan, from an illustrious musician family in India who taught Sitar and Surod. So the students' rapid progress and dedication is shared by many of ANIM's pupils who develop a passionate commitment to music. And one could understand this in terms of the healing powers of music as music therapy in action. Here's another clip from ANIM, the Wind Ensemble, taught by Ulstad Sheftar, an Afghan who studied music in the Ukraine. Here's ANIM's choir master and also teaches woodwind. This shot is from a day of end-of-year performances. Ulstad Sheftar introduces the children and names the pieces that they're going to play. He conducts sitting cross-legged on the floor, and the brief pound to the audience gives a sense of the occasion. He gives an indication of the excitement and enthusiasm of the end-of-year performances, and the strong support fellow students give each other. Remember, this is after a year or a year and a bit of learning this music. In 2013, an ANIM Ensemble visited the USA with sold-out concerts in the Kennedy Centre and Carnegie Hall, a residency at the New England Conservatory in Boston, and a concert at the Department of State and World Bank headquarters. In 2017, the Afghan Women's Orchestra Ensemble Zurra performed at the Davos World Economic Forum, followed by a concert tour in Switzerland and Germany. ANIM is a successful and much-admired initiative, and in 2013 Dr Amad Salmast was awarded honorary membership of the Royal Philharmonic Society in London. Finally, I take you to a special event in Kabul. My visit in 2011 coincided with the first national folkloric music seminar and festival held in the historic and recently renovated Babel's Garden in Kabul. The organisation of this important event brought together a number of institutions, notably the Ministry of Information and Culture, the Aga Khan Music Initiative, ACMI, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, ANIM, the Foundation for Culture and Civil Society, and the Music Department of Kabul University. On the mornings of both days, Afghan scholars, intellectuals and academics presented 20-minute papers on various regional music in Pashto and Dali. In the early afternoons there were discussion sessions and a number of resolutions were passed concerning matters such as copyright and censorship. In the late afternoons and early evenings it was time for the festival when 20 groups from many parts of Afghanistan performed their local regional music. Here is a short clip from the seminar. Dr Rahimi is reading a paper on music in Kandahar and has brought a famous singer along to perform his musical examples. Unfortunately, the person who had agreed to translate this for me was unwell and what I have is at the last minute. Of the two songs, one is a wedding song. The translation is, The Camel is ready, standing outside of Bablailai. My darling, come out, the camel is ready, so get into your palanquin. All the family and friends are here waiting, asking you to come. Today is your wedding, come out, get on the camel. The other song goes, My beautiful, sheen halai, dark green beauty spot. Stand on the balcony, in the scenery from the balcony, your beauty stands out. In order for our love not to fail, do not make the mistake of becoming blind through pride in your own beauty. I have to say that very little ethnomusicological research has been conducted in Kandahar. But it's obviously, historically, a very important cultural centre. After the seminars came the festival concerts with musicians from many different regions. And here I've selected the group from Herat performing Olang Olang, a wedding song which is the unofficial regional anthem of Herat. And the song text goes, A leaf from the green tree in the eyes of someone wise, each is a page from a book of wisdom. O meadow, meadow, the excited nightingale, may God give his blessings to everyone. High in the upper room, your bed is made, may God give his blessings for your good fortune. The percussionist, who you see in a moment, is none other than Bulbul Herawi, the Herati Nightingale, famous for his birdsong imitations which you will hear from time to time. So the seminar and the festival were significant events. They showed that local traditions were not, as many might have supposed, moribund after years of armed conflict, but had gone underground to be replaced by the new keyboard-based popular music in the post-Taliban outburst of musical activity. Now, despite the political uncertainties of the current situation, practitioners of these traditions were feeling confident to come out from under the shadow of ultra-orthodox disapproval and repression to make their contribution to the gradually strengthening life of music in Afghanistan. Moreover, we see the emergence of an indigenous Afghan musicology with local experts studying and writing about their local traditions. One could connect all this with hopes for a renewed sense of national identity. For while distinct in themselves, the regional musics have many elements in common, comparable to local dialects of a single language. Collectively, they are an important part of that intangible notion of what it is to be an Afghan citizen, despite variations of language and ethnicity. The seminar and festival and the work of the schools are markers of deep processes of national cohesion. As my mentor John Blacking put it in somewhat old-fashioned terms, music is essential for the very survival of man's humanity. Music symbolises the many good things that have been taking place in Afghanistan since 2001 in the domains of health, education, freedom of speech, freedom of expression. And it does not simply symbolise these positive developments, it has an important role in making them happen. Afghan music today, despite recent attacks, is the bellwether of better things to come in terms of reconciliation and political stabilisation. Thank you very much.