Young Afghan musicians showcase talent and resilience after being forced from the country

Since its founding in 2010, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music has provided unique music training to Afghan children. In 2013, the group made a triumphant visit to the U.S. This month, three years after the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, they returned amid a changed world. Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. For more information visit anim-music.org.

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Amna Nawaz: Since its founding in 2010, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music has provided a unique education and music training to Afghan children.

Back in 2013, the group made a triumphant visit to the U.S. This month, three years after the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, they returned, amid a completely changed world.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas. A recent evening at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, young musicians from Afghanistan age 14 to 22 joined by members of the D.C. Youth Orchestra playing a mix of Western and traditional Afghan music, joyful sounds, a hugely appreciative audience, but never far off, says the founder of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, Ahmad Sarmast, a sense of grief and pain.

Ahmad Sarmast, Founder, Afghanistan National Institute of Music: We come here to let the world know that Afghanistan is today a silent nation.

Jeffrey Brown: A silent nation?

Ahmad Sarmast: Yes, because Afghanistan is the only country today in the world where its people are denied all their music rights and cultural rights.

Jeffrey Brown: From its founding in 2010 until the Taliban regained power and reimposed its ban on music and a crackdown on the rights of women and girls, the institute, known as ANIM, offered Afghan children a free secular coeducational curriculum and musical training, the only such school in the country.

Ahmad Sarmast: Afghanistan National Institute of Music back was quite often called the happiest place in Afghanistan.

Jeffrey Brown: Students studied violin, cello and other Western classical instruments, also rubab, sitar and more from the Afghan musical tradition.

Ahmad Sarmast: There was two objectives, to encourage Afghan people to pick up their own instruments and to learn their own musical culture. There was to show them that the Afghan instrument is capable to be used in any context.

We also wanted the world to know that Afghanistan is committed to musical and cultural diversity.

Jeffrey Brown: Drawn from Afghanistan’s ethnically diverse population, ANIM’s student body included girls like now 20-year-old violinist Sevinch Majidi from Mazar-e-Sharif, whose childhood experience was common for girls, with parents desperate to find a path to a better life.

Sevinch Majidi, Student, Afghanistan National Institute of Music: And my mother just think that I don’t want to be — grow up my girls like other girls, that they are thinking, oh, when I grow up, I have to marry, I have to cook, I have to make a baby, like that things.

Because of that, she sent me to the orphanage to grow up in another way.

Jeffrey Brown: And now 20-year-old percussionist Shogofa Safi from Jalalabad.

Shogofa Safi, Student, Afghanistan National Institute of Music: You know, we’re from different cities, but we come together and we play together. So that’s why we say that music has power to bring people together.

Jeffrey Brown: Among the boys, 16-year-old Samir Akbari from Kandahar, who fell in love with the viola. It was a new instrument, but also a very new experience.

Samir Akbari, Student, Afghanistan National Institute of Music: Everyone was in the same class, boys and girls. They were eating together, playing together, making music together.

Jeffrey Brown: Soon ensembles were formed, first the Afghan Youth Orchestra, which Sarmast took on tour to the U.S. in 2013.

Ahmad Sarmast: We wanted to show to the world that how far Afghanistan moved after the Taliban regime has been ousted in Afghanistan.

Jeffrey Brown: Then, crucially, the Zohra Women’s Orchestra.

Sevinch Majidi: I think the main idea of that to show the Afghan men that girls also can go without men, without taking help from them. They can do everything.

Jeffrey Brown: They can do anything without the men?

Sevinch Majidi: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: And they can make music together.

Sevinch Majidi: Yes, of course. They can do everything.

But on August 15, 2021, everything changed.

Samir Akbari: I went to my school. There’s a lot of people running, and they said that Taliban is now in Afghanistan — in Kabul. They’re in Kabul. Go to your home.

Jeffrey Brown: Within hours, the invading Taliban targeted the school, burning books and destroying instruments. A week later, the ransacked buildings were turned into a Haqqani Taliban barracks.

Sevinch Majidi: We went to the safe house. And we were there for like one month. I couldn’t see outside. And it was too hard for me. I had a hard depression and — yes.

Jeffrey Brown: After several months in hiding, Sarmast negotiated the evacuation of students and staff, most leaving family behind, first to Qatar, then to Portugal, where ANIM has been based since, first in Lisbon, now in Braga.

There, Portuguese conductor Tiago Moreira Da Silva began working with them. He knew nothing of Afghanistan or its music, he says, but was completely transformed at the very first meeting.

Tiago Moreira Da Silva, Conductor, Afghanistan National Institute of Music: I start to cry, like, because it was so special to be around them.

Jeffrey Brown: You started to cry?

Tiago Moreira Da Silva: Yes, yes. It was really — I don’t know, it was too much, because you see that people were, like, suffering a lot different country, in a very difficult situation. But they found through music something that could make them happy.

Jeffrey Brown: Happy, yes, but also, says Shogofa Safi, a deep sadness.

Shogofa Safi: I didn’t want to leave Afghanistan, but my father said that: “You’re a musician. You’re a girl. Like, there’s no future in Afghanistan for you.”

But I accept that and I left Afghanistan, first of all, to saving my own life and on the other hand save music of Afghanistan.

Jeffrey Brown: With the world’s attention turned elsewhere, that focus on preservation is an even more urgent goal of the musicians.

Ahmad Sarmast: All the performances that we are doing and all the speeches and the interviews and publicity and media publicity that goes around, it helps to bring back Afghanistan to the radar of the international community.

Jeffrey Brown: It was a message they brought this time to Carnegie Hall in New York and to the Kennedy Center, where they were joined on stage by internationally renowned American soprano and longtime supporter Renee Fleming.

Renee Fleming, Singer: I know you’re having a wonderful time because I was in the audience listening too. You sound fantastic.

Jeffrey Brown: And they performed for an audience that included many from the exiled and emigre Afghan community.

Shogofa Safi: I feel really, really good when I see my Afghan people that support us and they clap for us. I think, I mean, an Afghan Youth Orchestra is a — it’s a symbol of hope.

Jeffrey Brown: Ahmad Sarmast is now working to bring several hundred family members to Portugal, including younger siblings he hopes will take up instruments and keep the music alive.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.