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Rating: HANDMADE RUGS AND FALLING TOWERS, TRUTH AND FICTION.
When I enter the theatre, my very young Afghan friends are all in the same row, in the center of the audience. I sit in the second row, taking advantage of the absence of someone who had reserved a seat, and listen to an elderly architect commenting on images projected on a screen behind him.
He started visiting Afghanistan over 40 years ago, and is still involved in restoration and consolidation work on some architectural works that have survived the troubled history of those lands.
He manages to avoid excessive rhetoric, slipping a few curious anecdotes into his speech. But the image of a handmade rug (Afghanistan has a centuries-old tradition of great refinement) depicting the crash of airplanes into the W.T.C serves as an opportunity for a somewhat overused, albeit true, warning: how the boundary between reality and fiction has become increasingly blurred, especially in the perception of “our children or grandchildren.” Unbelievable yet hyper-realistic stories internalized as true, planes piercing skyscrapers viewed as one of the many special effects of a video game.
So later, after concluding the long speech and leaving the stage, he draws a smile from me when, before the prolonged applause from the audience dies down, he returns to the microphone to clarify: “What I said is all true.”
It takes no more than ten minutes for two diligent young men to clear the stage of table and chairs and lay down a large carpet on which they place some percussion and a stringed instrument.
A few minutes later, this gray-bearded man with a traditional multicolored cap and a hyper-haired young man in a long golden robe enter.
Sitting cross-legged, in the absolute silence of the theater, they begin tuning their instruments. The beep of a cell phone produces the young man's immediate and silent reaction: raising his gaze from the tablas, he directs it towards the audience and with simple yet explicit gestures, he first mimics the act of telephoning, then that of a firm prohibition, and finally the more direct and effective gesture of throat-slitting. The audience responds with laughter, but from that moment on, no sounds will be heard other than those produced by their instruments.
CROSSROADS OF CULTURES, POEMS WITHOUT WORDS.
Daud Khan is a virtuoso player of the robab, a sort of lute with three main strings and others in resonance. His repertoire is based on Afghan tradition and reworks purely instrumental pieces originally also vocal, but his executional skill can deliver a version rich in melodic nuances almost materializing the song.
In the long pieces performed, I often find affinities with traditional Indian music, as if they were ragas traversed by greater rhythmic dynamism, with more pronounced and sophisticated melodic lines and interweavings. And echoes of Persian classical music, which I had the opportunity to listen to many years ago. I will later discover, conversing with Khan, that such affinities are indeed present and are part of the inevitable influences of the history of that area.
The Indian percussionist accompanying him (Edourd Prabhu) is also a virtuoso: the perfect symbiosis between the two gives us almost hypnotic moments, with constant variations in the timbres of the percussion and a refined touch on the robab strings by the Afghan master, who moves from rhythmic melodic emphasis to pianissimo of such precise delicacy to reach the audience clearly even in the absence of amplification.
The pieces follow one another almost without interruption and I confess that after initial hesitancy, in the face of many reprises of themes with infinite variations, far from the idea of “development” of the piece to which we are accustomed, the “sense” of this music imposed itself in all its power: meditative and epic, refined and hypnotic, it is TRUE music.
Born, in some cases, to host the centuries-old tradition of sung poetry (ghazal), it retains its centuries-old poetry even in the absence of words.
The problem, if anything, is in the listening. Too much reification of music, too many habits to stereotypes, often simply prevent us from listening, from “hearing.” We mistake “special effects” for music and start listening only if other traditions are flavored with some gadget familiar to us.
ANOTHER WORLD.
But when the last notes of the encores faded away, I would have gladly started all over again an immersion in that clear sound sea, so far from what we are used to (I will settle for the record, purchased at the exit).
Instead, with the lights on, I went up on stage, along with my very young friends, to greet and thank the two musicians. The Afghan kids fled a few years ago, alone like frightened lambs and without a precise destination, from the nightmare of a war-torn country. They have no memory of this music, storing only some funny pop songs downloaded from the internet on their mp3 players, where often traditional melodies are added to naive electronic bases. But it was almost moving, for a cynical western observer, to catch the sincere emotion of the meeting between them and an unknown past (their past, the history of their country) represented by that gray-bearded man and a music that tonight they will listen to before falling asleep, dreaming of a home that no longer exists, in a land they hope to see again and fear they have lost forever, as they become men in this city that hosts them, in this other world they are learning to understand.
It is possible to listen to the excellent work of Daud Khan (who has been residing in Germany for many years) thanks to an Italian label, which I have long wanted to mention, for the seriousness and richness of its catalog. You can find the link in more info.
The free concert was part of the rich schedule of “Settembre Musica,” which you can consult at the address: http://www.comune.torino.it/settembremusica/2006/index.htm
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