Scene 1:
A few years ago, I had a dotar performance in Sydney. It was going well, and I was very much enjoying it. The moment I opened my mouth to sing the song Le Yarei, which is about the story of a man coming back home only to see his town being looted by foreign invaders and his beloved being taken away along with many others, I started crying. I cried so hard that at some point I had to stop playing and go backstage for a moment. I went back, said sorry and continued. I felt bad, and for a long time I couldn’t stop thinking that I had ruined the night for the audience.
Scene 2:
In a contemporary opera, I was the dotar player in the last scene, at a climactic moment. I was going to play parts of a Kurmanji song. This was a rare moment in the opera when purely melodic music was played. The whole opera was a spectral music experience. On the performance night, audiences were allowed to sit very close to the performers. Since the opera was composed by an Iranian composer, and many of the performers were from the Iranian community, there were many Iranians in the audience. The opera went for more than an hour. Here comes my scene. I start strumming on my dotar. With my first strums, I saw tears dropping from the eyes of an Iranian man sitting right next to me…
Scene 3:
During my first semester of teacher education at university, a lecturer asked us to reflect on our own education at school. When it was my turn, I said that music education was non-existent in my school because music was banned in my country. I immediately thought to myself that, again, I killed the vibe. So, I did not explain anything more. But actually, nobody seemed to care much. The lecturer did not even say a single word in response to what I said. We moved on, and nobody said anything to me about it at all.
When our experiences are so far removed from the living experience of the society we live in, people do not even know how to react to them. The result is that we stop sharing, and even when the moment comes, we keep it at the surface level. Nobody wants to be sad all day!