BRAGA, Portugal — The Taliban tried to silence them, at times violently. The musicians from the Afghan Youth Orchestra have defiantly played on, and this week they will take to one of the world’s most prestigious stages: Carnegie Hall . Their journey to perform at the famed New York City concert venue has been long, painful and fraught with danger.
After the Taliban swept back into power in Afghanistan in August 2021 , many of the musicians believed they’d never play their instruments again. According to the group’s hard-line and austere interpretation of Islam, women should remain covered outside the home. Most forms music are strictly forbidden.
That’s what makes Wednesday’s Carnegie Hall concert such a triumph, Ahmad Sarmast, founder and director of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) , told NBC News in a series of interviews, the last in late July. It’s a “message of resilience, resistance, to the people of Afghanistan and the youth of Afghanistan,” he said. “In spite of all the challenges and the difficulties that they are going through and what they experienced in the last three years, they are still strong.
” ANIM, which the youth orchestra is part of, has long stood as a resounding symbol of resilience and resistance since it was established in 2010. Born under the fragile security of a United States-backed Afghan government in Kabul , it was the country’s first and only school of its kind. Boys and girls shared classrooms, Afghan culture and Western music were embraced, and children from all walks of life were welcomed.
For a decade, orchestras and ensembles from the institute toured the world, playing to packed venues. With the success came unwanted attention from the Taliban, which treated ANIM as a threat and an affront to their religious beliefs. The militant group regularly targeted the school, including a deadly suicide bombing at a performance in 2014.
The attack killed one person and severely injured Sarmast, who was forced to spend three months recuperating. So when the Taliban stormed back into power following the withdrawal of U.S.
-led forces and the collapse of the Afghan army, many of those associated with the school feared for their lives. “It was a shocking moment that you realize that Afghanistan is finished,” trumpeter Zohra Ahmadi, 15, said. “It was like we were dead.
” Sarmast said he knew he had to quickly get help to evacuate the school’s staff and students who he believed would be targeted. So he sent off appeals to government officials in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Portugal. “Portugal was the only government around the world that positively and promptly responded,” he said.
“And offered a group asylum for 284 people ...
the entire school community.” Today, the school has re-established in Braga, a small city in northern Portugal. And, once again, they’re touring the world — now, as an orchestra in exile.
This week’s ANIM concert at Carnegie Hall will mark the institute’s first performance in the United States in more than a decade. “It’s something big that we are going to play in Carnegie Hall. .
.. It’s coming true, one of my biggest dreams,” Ahmadi said.
“We are happy and sad at the same time.” This sense of bittersweetness is shared among many of the young musicians, whose families remain trapped in Afghanistan — where the Taliban have banned music and arts, and where repression, especially against women, is rife. For Sarmast and his students, taking to the stage at Carnegie Hall is much more than playing one of music’s most hallowed venues — it’s spreading a message of what Afghanistan could have been and what it could still be.
“We are not only sharing the beauty of Afghan music on those stages around the world,” Ahmadi said. “Each note that we play today, it’s a note of protest. And it’s the voices of millions of the Afghans who have been forced into silence.
”.
