With Sirojiddin Juraev in Tajkistan (Photo: Emily O'Dell)
Don’t worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn’t matter.
We have fallen into the place
where everything is music…
— Rumi
Tonight in Cambridge, Sirojiddin Juraev (my friend and dutar teacher from Tajikistan) will be performing at Harvard at 7 pm in John Knowles Paine Hall. Sirojiddin is a master of shashmaqam–a Central Asian musical genre whose lyrics are derived from the Persian poetry of Sufis like Rumi and Hafiz.
I first started studying dutar with Sirojiddin at the National Conservatory of Music in Dushanbe, when I was living in Tajikistan and polishing my Persian. He’s a phenomenal teacher, and the most virtuosic dutar player in Central Asia. This spring, Sirojiddin has been the Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Music at Harvard. If you’re in the area, don’t miss tonight’s free concert and help spread the word–he’s really as good as it gets.
