Taliban burn musical instruments in the name of morality. It is an attack on the entire culture music

TThe horrors of Taliban rule in Afghanistan are universal. New laws effectively legalizing domestic violence mean that every woman in the country now lives with the threat of state-sanctioned violence. In the context of the dual tragedies of the Taliban’s fundamentalist zeal, and the silence of the rest of the world in the face of the atrocities committed by this movement, the fate of cultural life in Afghanistan may seem like a smaller disaster. Yet it is equally devastating.

The recent burning of hundreds of musical instruments and equipment – announced on Afghan national television last week – marks the latest stage in the ongoing mission by the Taliban’s morality police to destroy all these artefacts. Last week’s incineration included tabla and harmonium, instruments that form the cornerstone of Afghanistan’s unique tradition of classical music, as well as keyboards and loudspeakers.

“Since their return in 2021, the Taliban have waged a war on music, claiming it causes ‘moral turpitude,’” Sarah Daoud wrote in the Music Censorship Index. “The Taliban bans music, criminalizing 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.”

This silencing of musical culture is another humanitarian abyss imposed by the Taliban, an attempt to create a sharia-compliant, music-free state, unprecedented anywhere.

The bravest musicians I have ever met are the women of Zahra, the Afghan women’s orchestra of the Afghan National Conservatory of Music – now based in Portugal. Through its orchestras and training, ANIM works for the “musical rights” not only of the institute’s 300 members, but also for the culture of the country as a whole. In their orchestras and ensembles, there is a mix of Western orchestral instruments and traditional instruments – such as the oud-like Afghan rubab, whose repertoire is among the treasures of world music, a tradition of repertoire and playing methods passed down through the generations and which today is as endangered as ever, preserved only in exile.

At the same time we can help keep their music at the forefront of our listening lives, and renew this extremist activity that no one in Afghanistan is legally allowed to do. Listen to Mina Karimi’s Cry of Hope at Dawn, composed for International Women’s Day 2021 and dedicated to Afghan women’s struggles for equality, or listen to talented Rabab artists like Humayun Sakhi and Ustad Rahim Khoshnawaz. There is no more urgent music emergency on the planet.

WHat means listening? I mean, really to He listens To the infinite possibilities of every moment of our sonic lives? No composer in twentieth and twenty-first century music has asked this question more sensitively, or more profoundly, than Eliane Radigue, who has died at the age of 94.

Radigue was a vocal pioneer. Before 2001, her music was intended exclusively for composers, because technology allowed her to enter the world of sound, extending individual notes to infinity of slowness and concentration, in a way that traditional compositions did not. Listen to the epic scales of constant change—a paradox that makes sense when you encounter her music—in Trilogie de la Mort to experience what I mean. As Pascal Wise wrote in his interview with her, Radeguy’s use of synthesizers means that “the music does not contain sound: the sound contains the music.”

Radigue’s exploration of working with acoustic instruments—and human performers—in the 21st century, and in her Occam Ocean scores, brought a lesson in how to listen. These works are full of slow, superficial sounds but release an overwhelming energy from their musicians.

TThe Bafta winners have been overshadowed by a row over TV coverage, but congratulations to Ludwig Göransson, whose original score for Sinners won a Bafta on Sunday night. For me, the defining moment in Ryan Coogler’s filmography was Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson’s Oscar-nominated I Lied to You. Five delirious minutes on screen, in which Sammy’s (played by Myles Caton) dancehall performance draws the spirits of black music from African rock and shamans to blues, jazz, hip-hop and DJ culture to appear, all seamlessly woven into the dancefloor shots. You feel like you’re there with the dancers and singers, a fixed point around which the roots and future of the blues revolve, a celebration of the fact that the song is about: that Sammy loves the blues more than the Bible his preacher father threw at him on the Mississippi trail. This is the film’s closest reference to the legend of real-life blues pioneer Robert Johnson, in the legend of his supposed deal with the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi, where he gave him his talent in exchange for his soul.

The film’s vampires are as musical as they are supernatural: Sinners combines blues with folk songs, often Scottish and Irish, sung by the white vampire band outside the dance hall. In addition to the blood and gore of its final act, Sinners is a satire about how the blues has lost its soul to the vampiric forces of commercialization and appropriation: “White people like a good blues, but not the people who make it,” says Delroy Lindo’s character, Delta Slim.

This week Tom was listening: Beethoven’s Zur Namensfeier Overture (try Riccardo Chailly’s recording with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra). Six minutes of some completely unpredictable orchestral music by Beethoven – and yes, that’s saying something! – This wasn’t played enough.