Kayhan Kalhor and Kiya Tabassian bring setars into beautiful conversation at Early Music Vancouver
Through the ancient instrument’s “sweet, light” sounds, duo shares rich Iranian culture
Early Music Vancouver presents Kayhan Kalhor and Kiya Tabassian in Dialogue at the Kay Meek Centre for the Performing Arts on Friday June 3 and the Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre on June 4
HOWEVER COUNTERINTUITIVE it might seem, the duel is a perfectly valid musical undertaking. Many South Asian classical-music concerts end with a jugalbandi, in which two soloists—usually a percussionist and one other—face off, taking turns to produce phrases of ever-increasing length and complexity. Jazz has its cutting contests, designed to test a rising musician’s stamina and imagination. The most acclaimed composer of western classical music, Ludwig van Beethoven, famously whomped his pianistic rival Daniel Steibelt by playing Steibelt’s discarded sheet music upside down, imitating and mocking the Prussian musician’s typically thunderous attack, and improvising an undeniably superior variation on his score. Years later, just to rub salt in Steibelt’s wounded vanity, Beethoven even used that stolen melody as a key motif in his acclaimed Symphony in E flat Major.
Ludwig van was not someone you would want to cross.
Despite its honourable history, though, a musical duel is not what you’re going to hear when Persian virtuosos Kayhan Kalhor and Kiya Tabassian visit Vancouver this weekend—even if that’s how their meeting has often been described.
“It is definitely more of a conversation than anything,” Kalhor explains, in a Zoom interview from Texas, where he’s preparing for a concert with the innovative Brooklyn Rider string quartet. “I think this ‘duel’ idea is very attractive for western musicians. They did a lot of that in the 18th and 19th centuries—you know, [playing] themes and variations, or duels between two pianists or two violinists. But that idea does not exist in our culture.
“It’s a different philosophy,” he continues. “It’s more like singing together, singing something in the same language.”
Quick-draw antics and sonic insults will be noticeably absent from Kalhor and Tabassian’s performance. But the meeting of the two musicians will be rich in a variety of other subtexts; the two have known each other since well before the latter’s debut as a professional, with Kalhor serving as one of Tabassian’s most significant mentors.
Kalhor points out that although he’s now based in his native Tehran, he spent several years in Canada during the 1980s, earning a degree in music from Ottawa’s Carleton University. It was then that he met the Montreal-based Tabassian, who’s since gone on to be a significant player in Canada’s intercultural-music scene, as well as leader of the Middle Eastern-focused early music group Contantinople.
“Kiya and his family immigrated to Canada, I think, when he was 12,” Kalhor says of his fellow Iranian. “And as a young boy he came to me and learned setar from me. That relationship went on for a few years, until I moved to the U.S., but by that time I could see that he had a future in music. Kiya was very talented, and he was hard-working, and I actually paid special attention to him because of that. He became a serious musician—and for someone who started in music outside of his country, that’s amazing. You don’t see many of those examples.”
Kalhor contends that it’s difficult for young immigrants to truly master their native arts, simply because they’re not living in their birth culture full time. Their education is in a different language; the majority culture inevitably exerts an attraction; their friends are likely into sports and pop music. But Tabassian, he says, is “a special case”.
“He’s gaining respect in Iran,” Kalhor explains. “This means that he is serious; he’s done whatever was necessary to do. I mean, he’s done a few fusion things and outside projects, but as an Iranian musician I feel comfortable to sit beside him and play, because he understands the philosophy.”
Confirming the two players’ personal and sonic compatibility is that in their duo concerts, Kalhor sets aside the instrument that he is best known for playing, the violin-like kamancheh, and turns to his other favourite, the small lute known as the setar.
“I seldom play setar at my concerts, because I cannot really keep up with two instruments,” Kalhor says. “I travel with kamancheh and I usually play kamancheh, but when I go back home and I have a month off, I play setar all the time.
“The setar sound is very sweet and very light, and it works nicely together with another setar,” he adds. “Usually with two instruments of the same kind, you don’t have that experience, and in my duo projects I have usually used plucked strings versus kamancheh. But two setars can create a really, really beautiful atmosphere.”
Beyond that, Kalhor helps that his deep and respectful conversations with musicians like Tabassian, cellist Yo Yo Ma, and sitarist Shujaat Hussain Khan can inform global listeners about the poetic beauty inherent not only in Iranian music, but Iranian culture.
“All the stupidity, all the wars, the intolerance, the racism, the hatred, all these mass murders… Every shameful thing that the human race is experiencing and has experienced in the past is, in my opinion, because of lack of culture, lack of knowledge about each other,” Kalhor says. “So I think the only possible way to overcome that is through culture and education. We have to educate ourselves, and we have to spread the culture.
“If I sit down with an African musician, I’m telling people that I have respect for Africa and Africans,” he continues, noting that his next album release will be a collaboration with Malian kora master and fellow world citizen Toumani Diabaté. “If I’m sitting down with an Indian musician or a Western classical musician, same thing. We are all the same. We have to understand that, and we have to learn from each other.
“We’re one race; we were just born in different countries or continents and brought up within different beliefs. So what I’m doing and why I’m doing it is to bring this out.”
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