Peace, made audible.

He was born in Samarkand on 4 May 1914. The city was in the Russian empire then and is in Uzbekistan now, and it had been a Persian-speaking city of poets for centuries before either. It is where his family’s music came from.

His father, Muqaddaskhon Shahidi, was a musician known in the town. He kept a salon where the shashmaqom was played, and he belonged to the reforming, Jadid-influenced intelligentsia of the city. Firdausi, Rudaki, Hafiz and Jami were read aloud in that house. Ziyodullo learned the nay, the tanbur and the dutar by playing them, long before he could read a Western score.

In 1937 his father was killed. We have always put it in one sentence:

He overcame two crucial events in the culture of the region: the replacement of Arabic-based Farsi and Turkish by Cyrillic, and the persecution of intellectuals — his father, Muqaddaskhon Shahidi, was murdered during the Bolshevistic terror of 1937.

A Russian source says he was arrested by the NKVD and died in prison six months later. A Tajik interviewer, putting a question to Munira Shahidi in 2013, spoke of a grandfather who had been repressed and shot. We do not know which it was.

He was born into a language written in the Perso-Arabic script and did his adult work in a language written in Cyrillic. In one generation a thousand years of poetry stopped being readable by the people who had inherited it.

By 1939 he was in Dushanbe, running the song-and-dance ensemble of the Tajik State Philharmonic, and he ran it for thirteen years. He was known as a gidjak player and a writer of melodies. He had no formal training in composition until he was nearly thirty.

After The Second World War, in 1946, a group of Tajik melodists entered Moscow Conservatory, but only one of them managed to graduate from that School of Music.

He was thirty-two when he enrolled and forty-three when he finished, in Vladimir Fere’s composition class. Moscow in those years meant Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Khrennikov, Kara-Karaev. Our own text calls it “the complicated interconnections between the Russian, Caucasian and Central Asian traditions”.

The songs he wrote in that decade reached more people than the concert pieces did:

This feature of his art was an integral part of the radio music of that period, linking Tajiks, Uzbeks, Iranians, and Afghans of the 50s and 60s, and bringing them out from their political isolation.

He did not begin as the maqam’s champion. Early on he would not grant Tajik traditional music, shashmaqom included, the standing of a professional art, and he argued it in print. On 6 May 1957 the newspaper Tojikistoni Soveti printed a summing-up of the discussion under the heading “a reply to Z. Shahidi”.

Then he changed his mind. Buzruk and the Symphony of Maqams came out of the tradition he had spent the 1950s arguing against.

Buzruk, from 1972, is a symphonic poem on one of the six maqams. Our own text says it caught the attention of the leading musicians of the Soviet Union “by virtue of the ‘cordial warmth’ of his interpretation”.

The Symphony of Maqams followed in 1977. This site is laid out in its four parts, and this is how we described them:

the first is comprised of monadic meditations (the theme of Nasri Ushshok — Narrative of the Beloved) and the interaction of Polaris spheres. The second (based on Bebokcha) consists of the feeling of expectation with respect to the coming Fiesta of Meeting, and the third is in itself a Hymn of Love (a new interpretation of the Narrative of the Beloved), which overcomes darkness and suffering of expectation. Finally, the lyric-contemplating monadic theme (new version of Bebokcha) and the various aspects of the whole returns to the starting point, but with the new quality of the wisdom of life.

The Music Encyclopedia sets out how it is made. The orchestral colour rests on sonoristic effects, written-out aleatory and ostinato complexes, the newest compositional styles of the day, and underneath them the ancient Tajik monody keeps its strict purity. A single unharmonised line, with a 1970s avant-garde apparatus around it. In 1983 the symphony was played at the Sixth Congress of the USSR Union of Composers and at the international symposium of maqam scholars in Samarkand.

The opera came earlier. Komde and Madan was staged in 1960 and its full score published in 1982. It is the first Tajik national opera, made from a poem by the seventeenth-century poet Bedil, and Gennady Rozhdestvensky recorded it for Moscow radio. Its recurring theme is Ushshoqi Samarkand, the Beloved of Samarkand. It does not behave like a European opera, and our own note says why: “the characters are not so distinct. The theme of Madan sometimes appears in Komde’s features as she accompanies Madan’s arias.”

In the wisdom of maqam tradition and symphonic thought, Ziyodullo Shahidi saw not the contradictions of musical traditions, but the harmony of being and the eternity of Love.

He died in Dushanbe on 25 February 1985 and is buried at Sari Osiyo. He had left no instruction about the house. His widow Marhabo and his eldest daughter Munira decided it should be a museum, and in 1987 they opened it. In 1989 it became the Republican Museum of Musical Culture, the first museum of music in Tajikistan. It holds his manuscripts and scores, his gramophone records, his own instruments and those of other masters of the maqam.

The Foundation came five years after that, in February 1992, in the first months of the civil war. We wrote at the time:

At that time, Tajik society had split into two contradictory ideological fronts which threatened to annihilate the values created by the previous generation, and there was a distinct need for a foundation of this kind.

It was set up by the museum together with the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Education, the Academy of Sciences, the National University and the Kayra-Kum carpet factory. From 2001 it published Fonus, a journal in Tajik, Russian and English “devoted to culture as a peace-making instrument”, on money from UNTOP, UNDP, UNESCO, the OSCE and the Swiss cooperation office. In 2004 it ran the first Ziyodullo Shahidi International Festival of Contemporary Music. Munira led all of it until her death on 15 July 2026.

The manuscripts, the recordings and the papers are all still in Dushanbe. Come and listen.