Aga Khan Music Programme

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kmaherali
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Aga Khan Music Programme

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Geneva, Switzerland, 27 October 2020 - The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the cultural agency of the Aga Khan Development Network, has announced the creation of the Aga Khan Music Programme (AKMP). Effective immediately, all existing activities of the Aga Khan Music Initiative and Aga Khan Music Awards are consolidated under the new programme, whose headquarters will remain in Geneva.

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The mission of the Aga Khan Music Programme is to foster the development of living musical heritage in societies across the world where Muslims have a significant presence, and disseminate this work internationally through collaborations with exceptionally creative musicians, artists, educators, and arts presenters.

AKMP will assume the former Music Initiative’s leadership role as an innovator in music and arts education; music commissioning, production and publication; and musical heritage documentation and revitalisation. Aligning the activities of the Music Initiative and Music Awards under a single umbrella programme will create synergies among projects and people. Laureates of the Music Awards will be incorporated into the music programme’s existing education network. A newly created music publishing arm will manage intellectual property rights for recordings, publications, educational materials, music compositions, and films developed by or featuring educators and artists across AKMP’s areas of activity.

Speaking at the inaugural ceremony of the Aga Khan Music Awards, in 2019, His Highness the Aga Khan noted that “Music can be a strong cultural anchor, deepening a sense of community, identity and heritage, while simultaneously reaching out in powerful ways to people of different backgrounds.” Echoing these sentiments, Prince Amyn Aga Khan added, “At a time when strengthening tolerance and pluralism has become an acute worldwide priority, music is one of the arts that offers a medium for reaching, involving and uniting global audiences by engendering emotions which we all share as human beings.” Fairouz Nishanova, director of the Aga Khan Music Programme, praised the talent of the programme’s global network of performing artists and educators: “It is an extraordinary privilege to work with the gifted musicians and teachers who, through a range of innovative musical languages, are striving to connect contemporary listeners to the power of tradition and cultural heritage.”

The Aga Khan Music Programme will comprise five interrelated programmatic domains:

Aga Khan Music Awards
Education and Mentoring
Creation and Performance
Production, Documentation, and Dissemination
Online Projects and Digital Archive

The triennial Music Awards, established by His Highness the Aga Khan in 2018, recognise exceptional creativity, promise, and enterprise in music performance, creation, education, preservation and revitalisation in societies across the world in which Muslims have a significant presence. The inaugural Music Awards ceremony took place in Lisbon, Portugal from 29-31 March 2019, co-hosted by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Lisbon Municipality. Watch the short film about the creation of Music Awards and the inaugural Music Awards ceremony:

Education and Mentoring

Music education was a core element of the Aga Khan Music Initiative and remains central to AKMP’s efforts to support the revitalisation, further development, and transmission of Muslim musical heritage in contemporary artistic languages inspired but not constrained by tradition.

Creation and Performance

From young school children to aspiring young professionals, venerated master musicians, and laureates of the Aga Khan Music Awards, individual artists, ensembles, and arts communities in the network of the Aga Khan Music Programme are offered opportunities to create and perform music that embodies contemporary perspectives on musical heritage. The music of AKMP’s own performing ensemble, the Aga Khan Master Musicians, is inspired by their deep roots in the cultures of the Middle East and Mediterranean Basin, South Asia, Central Asia, and China. These artists also serve as preeminent teachers, mentors, and curators.

Production, Documentation, and Dissemination

AKMP inherited the Aga Khan Music Initiative’s distinguished portfolio of audio and video recordings, publications, films, and educational materials representing two decades of work by a broad network of specialists. Supported by a new music publishing entity that manages the intellectual property rights of participating artists and educators, AKMP will continue to document, produce, and disseminate the work of outstanding musicians in its regions of activity.

Online Projects and Digital Archive

From the time of its establishment in 2000, the Music Initiative comprehensively documented its work through audio recording, film and video, photography, and print publications. Only a small percentage of this material has been published or made available online, while much of it remains unseen and unheard. A significant online education project and digital archive currently under development will include a fully searchable subscription-based database consisting of AKMP-owned audio and video assets and a collection of instructional tutorials. Online tutorials will feature a wide array of instructors, instruments, and themes suited to students of different ages and backgrounds, all using innovative lesson-delivery technology that syncs audio, video and music notation into a single interface. Several educational institutions in North America, Europe and Central Asia will test this new educational collection. AKMP’s new music publishing entity will own the rights to the tutorials, allowing for an “open access” policy.

An initial archive of films and videos produced by the Aga Khan Music Initiative is available on the AKMP Vimeo and YouTube sites:
https://vimeo.com/akmp
https://www.youtube.com/user/agakhanmusic

For more information:
Nathalie de Groot nathalie.degroot@akdn.org
Kirill Kuzmin kirill.kuzmin@akdn.org

https://www.akdn.org/press-release/aga- ... -programme
kmaherali
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Aga Khan Master Musicians embark on virtual concert tour

Geneva, Switzerland, 13 November 2020 - The Aga Khan Master Musicians (AKMM), a six-person ensemble brought together by the Aga Khan Music Programme to explore how musical innovation can contribute to the revitalisation of cultural heritage, is making its North American debut this week in three specially-produced concert films commissioned and broadcast by prestigious arts presenters: Hopkins Center for the Arts at Dartmouth College (10 Nov.); the Aga Khan Museum (13 Nov.), and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art (14 Nov.).

Originally scheduled as live events, the concerts were moved online after the pandemic shut down concert halls around the world. With AKMM’s members grounded in California, Europe, and Tajikistan, the Aga Khan Music Programme organised a technically challenging production process involving recording sessions on three continents during which the artists played their parts while listening through earphones to parts recorded hours earlier by their fellow ensemble members on other continents. Audio and video tracks were subsequently edited together into the three finished films according to specifications of format and duration provided by the commissioning presenters.

“The resiliency and adaptability of musicians across the world during a global pandemic is exemplified through the Aga Khan Music Programme and Aga Khan Museum’s first joint virtual concert of AKMM,” said Amirali Alibhai, Head of Performing Arts at the Aga Khan Museum. “This online presentation celebrates our renewed commitment to build upon and deepen a relationship that began in our first season of performing arts at the Museum in 2014, which we are proud to see continue well into the future, whatever challenges that brings.”

Fairouz Nishanova, Director of the Aga Khan Music Programme, echoed a similar theme in praising the work of the AKMM artists as well as the production team: “These films were a complex undertaking - artistically, technically, and logistically,” she said. “The inspired creativity that infuses both the musical performances and the filmmaking speaks to the exceptional talent that the Music Programme has assembled.”

The Hopkins Center’s broadcast of the film was preceded by a live conversation featuring AKMM member Wu Man and Dartmouth music professor and Aga Khan Music Programme Senior Advisor Ted Levin. In introducing the conversation, Mary Lou Aleskie, Director of the Hopkins Center, noted that “The Hopkins Center’s ongoing relationship with the Aga Khan Music Programme is a cornerstone of our efforts to maintain our commitment to artists around the globe and enrich our own community’s awareness and appreciation of global traditions and perspectives.”

AKMM consists of Wu Man (pipa), Basel Rajoub (saxophone, duclar), Sirojiddin Juraev (dutar, sato), Feras Charestan (qanun), Abbos Kosimov (frame drums), and Jasser Haj Youssef (viola d’amore). All six artists contributed their own original compositions and arrangements to the programmes performed in the films, which included world premieres of two new pieces by viola d’amore player Jasser Haj Youssef. Other works featured in the films have previously been performed by AKMM in the Diamond Jubilee Concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall in June 2018, at the opening concert of the Aga Khan Music Awards ceremony in March 2019, and at a preview of new works by the Master Musicians at the Ismaili Centre in Lisbon in December 2019.

For more information on the Aga Khan Master Musicians, see: https://www.akdn.org/our-agencies/aga-k ... erformance

To register for the free YouTube Premiere at the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art (Freer-Sackler Galleries), which goes live at 7:30 pm on Saturday, 14 November, visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/aga-khan-m ... 2116905953

To view the concert film presented by the Aga Khan Museum, visit the following link at 7 pm EST on 13 November: https://www.agakhanmuseum.org/programs/ ... -musicians

https://www.akdn.org/press-release/aga- ... ncert-tour
kmaherali
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Leaves Flying in Autumn (2000)

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTfHVJ7NNpg
kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

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Mehan (2013)
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Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n-oufU_8-I

Sirojiddin Juraev, dutar and Abbos Kosimov, doira
Composed by Sirojiddin Juraev (b. 1975)
kmaherali
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Teahouse (2016)

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Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCECHxtbgYA

Wu Man, pipa, Feras Charestan, qanun, Abbos Kosimov, doira

Arranged from folk sources by Wu Man (b. 1963)
kmaherali
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kmaherali
Posts: 25087
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

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Taqsim (2020)

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Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgXnz-YZ5OA

Composed and performed by Basel Rajoub

A taqsim is an improvised prelude to a longer composition or suite in traditional
Arabic and Turkish music, and is typically performed by a solo instrumentalist.
In this taqsim, Basel Rajoub improvises on the duclar, a hybrid instrument that
joins the single-reed mouthpiece of a clarinet to the body of the duduk—the
Armenian double-reed woodwind instrument. The idea for the duclar came from
an instrument-maker in Siberia.

Basel Rajoub is a saxophonist and composer-improviser whose inspirations include traditional Middle Eastern rhythms and melodies as well as jazz. Born in Aleppo, Syria, he graduated from the Damascus High Institute of Music and creates new music that brings together musicians from the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, and Europe. A winner of Radio Monte Carlo’s Moyen-Orient Music Award, Basel Rajoub divides his time between performing, teaching, composing, and recording. Currently based in Geneva, Basel performs as a member of several ensembles, and is the founding member of the Soriana Project.
kmaherali
Posts: 25087
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

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kmaherali
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