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| | | Kayhan Kalhor playing the kamancheh during a Silk Road Ensemble concert at the Mondavi Center, UC Davis, in April 2011
| © MAX WHITTAKER
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In March 2011, the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma performed a concert in Harvard's Sanders Theatre as part of our five-year partnership with the University. During that concert, we had the opportunity to film a performance of Kayhan Kalhor's "Silent City," a largely improvised memorial to a community destroyed, which builds from whisper-quiet stirrings to achingly melodic passages. In the first video below, Kayhan shares his inspiration for the piece.
Improvisation is integral to the Persian tradition, its "core essence," as Kayhan says. "Silent City" is not a traditional Persian piece, but its use of a particular scale prominent in music from northwestern Iran and eastern Turkey identifies it with a Kurdish tradition—and also with a Kurdish history that is difficult to bear.
In 1988, when Saddam Hussein's regime launched chemical weapons in a genocidal attack on the Kurdish city of Halabja, just a few miles from the Iranian border, many thousands died. But Kayhan noticed that few in the West discussed this tragic event, or even knew of it. For his part, he couldn't shake the terrible images he had seen. "I had it in front of my eyes wherever I went for a couple of months," he says. "It wasn't easy to forget, and I always wanted to do something to remember that." "Silent City" is dedicated to the memory of Halabja. Kayhan says he offers it as an invitation to reflect. "I hope it helps people to remember it, or if they don't know what happened there, to think about it." The video below, the final movement of "Silent City," is an excerpt of the piece as performed by the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre in March 2011.
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