The songs of Kabul

“Music is a potent mechanism for self-actualization,’’ said Tanya Kalmanovitch, a violist and professor at the New England Conservatory of Music. “To be able to convey something through music requires you to recognize that you have something to say, and that you have a right to say it. That alone in many contexts can be a radical political act.’’

Kalmanovitch took a small delegation of conservatory students to help teach at the institute last winter, and she is going back in August. She works with the founder and principal, Ahmad Sarmast, son of a famous Afghan composer and conductor. With the help of funding mostly from the World Bank and Germany, and with the full support - for now - of the Afghan government, he has stocked the school with traditional Afghan rubabs (a short-necked lute), stringed ghichaks and sarods, and sitars, as well as Western instruments.

“Many of our master musicians have passed away,’’ Sarmast says in a trailer for a documentary film being produced about the school. “We have instruments no one can play. Afghanistan does not even have an orchestra to play our national anthem.’’

Half the seats at the school are set aside for war orphans or street children, who normally subsist selling gum or plastic tote bags to cars stuck in Kabul’s relentless traffic. With the help of the non-governmental Aschiana Foundation, families are given a stipend of about $30 a month to keep their children off the streets and in school. Most are adolescents who have no memory of life without war or oppression.