Hampshire College

Friday, March 5, 7:30 p.m.
Hampshire College Film/Photo Building
Screening of John Baily’s film, A Kabul Music Diary
Conversation with the filmmaker and reception to follow.

Renowned experts on music, culture, and censorship in Afghanistan will serve as scholars in residence at area campuses during the first week of March, performing a public concert, screening two of their films and visiting college classes, hosted by the Five College Ethnomusicology Committee.

As musicians, filmmakers, authors. and ethnomusicologists, John Baily and Veronica Doubleday have changed the way the world thinks about music and gender in Afghanistan. They spent two and a half years in Afghanistan in the 1970s conducting extensive ethnomusicological fieldwork, with Baily focusing on the public world of men’s music and Doubleday on the very different world of women’s music in the Muslim country.

During the years of the Soviet occupation and Taliban control of the country, the pair shifted their focus to diasporic communities around the world. In 1985 Baily premiered his award-winning film Amir, documenting the life of an Afghan musician living as a refugee in Pakistan. Three years later Doubleday published Three Women of Herat, describing her relationship in pre-Soviet Afghanistan with three Muslim mothers who shared with her the music, customs, and details of their everyday lives.

In 2002, after the fall of the Taliban, Baily and Doubleday established the Afghanistan Music Unit at Goldsmiths College in London and began returning to Afghanistan, giving Doubleday an opportunity to catch up with the subjects of her book and write an epilogue to it. In 2003 Baily released A Kabul Music Diary, documenting what was happening in the world of music there one year after the defeat of the Taliban, and has since followed it with two additional films exploring different aspects of Afghan music in Afghanistan and around the world.

On Sunday, February 28 at 7 p.m. Amherst College will present Baily’s film Amir: An Afghan Refugee Musician's Life in Peshawar, Pakistan. At the University of Massachusetts on Wednesday, March 3, at 4 p.m. Baily will present a lecture entitled “Music and Censorship in Afghanistan, 1973-2003.” Using clips from his documentaries shot in Afghanistan, Baily will discuss the Taliban's prohibition of live music and musical instruments and the cultural and political implications of this ban. Baily and Doubleday will perform a concert of Afghan music at Smith’s Sweeney Concert Hall at 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 4, joined by virtuoso tabla player Samir Chatterjee. On Friday, March 5 at 7:30 p.m. Hampshire College will screen Baily’s film, A Kabul Music Diary. These events are free and open to the public; for locations see schedule below. For additional details visit fivecolleges.edu and follow the ethnomusicology link.