Ziyodullo ShahidiЗиёдулло ШаҳидӣЗиёдулло Шаҳидӣشهیدی1914—1985
The Shahidi Foundation carries on the work of Ziyodullo Shahidi, the father of Tajik symphonic music. He set the six classical maqams inside the European symphony.
From the beginning of the 1950s he looked for a way to write the maqam into symphonic music. He kept at it for the rest of his life.
The work ahead
The Foundation was constituted in 1992 to keep a body of music, and the argument inside it, from being lost in a war. The music survived. Most of it is still not playable, still not taught, and still not heard outside Tajikistan. That is the work.
The scores, parts and tapes are scattered — the museum, private hands, the old radio archives. Finding them is only the first half. The second is publishing performing editions, so that a conductor who wants a Shahidi symphony can order the score instead of reconstructing it.
Ninety years after he began, most of this music has never been performed outside the country. We want it in concert programmes, in competition repertoire and in the hands of orchestras who will pair the maqams with the symphonies they were written into.
What he did is a technique, not a biography: six classical maqams set inside a European symphonic frame, without either one being flattened. It can be taught. Materials and masterclasses for conservatoire students, in Dushanbe and beyond it, are the surest way the work outlives the people who remember him.
The museum has been in his own house since 1987, and the archive with it. Keeping it open, catalogued and visitable — and getting what is on paper onto the record — is the standing obligation underneath everything above.
His life, in four movements
