ShahidiFoundation
Peace,
made audible.
The Ziyodullo Shahidi International Music Foundation carries forward the work of the father of Persian symphonic music — a living dialogue between the maqam and the symphony, the East and the West, the many and the one.
From a confectioner's house
in Samarkand.
Ziyodullo Shahidi was born in 1914 in Samarkand — a Tajik city of poets and turquoise tilework — to a family of confectioners. He was a virtuoso of the nay, the tanbur and the dutar long before he could read a Western score.
He survived the century that took his father to the Gulag in the terror of 1937. At thirty-two he entered the Moscow Conservatory — the only one of a circle of young Tajik melodists to graduate — and returned to give Tajikistan its first symphonies, its first operas, and a modern voice rooted in its oldest songs.
"He used the tradition by setting it within European harmony."
He heard no contradiction
between two worlds.
Where others heard East and West as opposites, Shahidi heard one music. He took the Shashmaqom — the six great classical modes of Bukhara and Samarkand — and set them inside European symphonic form, following a thread that runs back to Avicenna's dream of reconciled cultures.
In the maqam and the symphony, Shahidi saw not the contradiction of traditions, but the harmony of being — and the eternity of Love.
Founded by his daughter, the scholar Munira Shahidi, the Foundation grew from the house-museum into a meeting place for the world. Through the years of civil war it kept a single door open — to seminars, festivals, and evenings where traditions answer one another.
The house where the
music still lives.
On Loiq Sherali Street stands the house where Shahidi lived and worked for half a century. Since 1989 it has kept his manuscripts, gramophone records, and the instruments of the maqam.
Dushanbe 734002
Tajikistan
10:00 – 17:00
By arrangement
Dialogues of Culture
Festivals & Seminars