Classical School for Kabul

Afghanistan is to get its first classical music school, at the University of Kabul. It is to be set up by Serâ Tokay,music director of the Şişli Symphony Orchestra (SSO) in Istanbul.

In 2004, Tokay sent a proposal to the Afghan Ministry of Culture to found the School of Classical Music at the University of Kabul, and was invited to the country the following year by the government for talks.

A worsening of the security conditions in Kabul halted the plan but Tokay is now waiting for advice from the Turkish Embassy and hopes to resume negotiations with the Afghan cabinet soon.

Tokay said: ‘I thought that learning about Western classical music would help to divert Afghans from narrowly local preoccupations and awaken in them a sense of the universal.’

Mohammad Rafiq Khushnud, the director of the music department at the Afghan Ministry of Culture and Youth Affairs, said the school could open within four years: ‘The people of Afghanistan like classical music very much.We have more than a hundred students already studying classical music privately.’

The Strad
December 2007

(Reproduced with the permission of The Strad)