Little more than a decade before Joel Schut arrived for a two-month teaching project at the听听in Kabul, music was banned in the war-torn central Asian nation.
From 1992 to 2001, the ruling Taliban prohibited the playing of music and actively destroyed thousands of instruments. An entire generation of Afghans was not allowed to take part in the act of creating music.
Officially, that is.
鈥淚t doesn鈥檛 mean that music wasn鈥檛 being played,鈥� says Schut, 27, who graduated from the CU-Boulder College of Music in 2012 with a master鈥檚 degree in orchestral conducting. 鈥淚t was just being done behind closed doors.鈥�
In a nation that has been wracked by war, coups and invasion for the last 40 years 鈥� indeed, for millennia 鈥� the fact that there is a mixed-gender music academy for children in Kabul indicates how swiftly things can change. 鈥淚t was a privilege to be a part of some good news in a country that too often needs it鈥� says Schut who recently returned to the US. 鈥淲hile I went as an educator, I received a deep education through the stories, music, and lives of wonderful students and welcoming people.鈥�
Schut traveled to Afghanistan this summer to fill in for William Harvey, who teaches viola and violin and conducts the Afghan Youth Orchestra, while he took a short sabbatical. The orchestra performs original arrangements that fuse Western and traditional Afghan music, playing everything from violins and piano to the sitar and rubab. 鈥淎s a conductor, educator, and violinist, it was incredible to be a part of pedagogy and music in a different environment.鈥�
