The Golden Road

Not only treasures and precious goods were exchanged along the legendary Silk and Jade roads. We invite you to journey with us along The Golden Road and discover the musical legacy of these ancient routes.

At first a simple network of paths traced by explorers whose natural curiosity and desire to acquire wealth in faraway lands encouraged them to wander off the beaten track, over time, these corridors of connectivity eventually gave rise to major routes. Trade hubs sprung up, practices and ideas were shared, and unexpected encounters—some fruitful, some fraught—were made.

The Golden Road takes us on a journey along the sublime and sophisticated musical roads of the ancient civilizations of Afghanistan, India, and Iran, along the networks of trade and commerce established by the Persian Empire 2,500 years ago, forging links between the peoples, merchants, and dynasties of Europe and Asia.

Transmitted orally from one generation to the next, the music of these cultures is an inexhaustible source of inspiration and beauty, with its melodious modes (maqam, dastgāh or ragas), rhythmic cycles, and precisely calculated yet highly complex rhythms and beats. The symmetrical, geometric phrasing and sophisticated ornamentation remind us that music has rules in common with other arts, in particular architecture and painting.

Heirs to ancestral traditions, the musicians in this concert created a confluence of sound, bringing together the rich, singular sonorities of instruments whose roots go back thousands of years, each incarnating a leg of the musical voyage, all meeting up at the bend of notes and paths.

The incomparable virtuoso Homayoun Sakhi performs on the rubab, an iconic Afghan instrument often elaborately decorated with intricate mother-of-pearl inlays. He shares the stage with the prodigious Shashank Subramanyam on the bansuri, an Indian bamboo flute fabled to be the Hindu god Krishna’s divine instrument, which possesses a particularly delicate and bewitching sound.

They are joined by two ardent exponents of Persian music. Virtuoso and musical explorer Kiya Tabassian performs on the setar, a member of the lute family with a rich, refined sonority whose ancestry can be traced back to the birth of the Persian empire. The dialogues between their instruments are enriched and accompanied by the dazzling playing of percussionist Hamin Honari on the tombak, an instrument that entrances with its alternately mellow and percussive rhythms.

Gathered together on the same stage, these instruments—and the musicians who play them—offer us another story of the routes that forged links between the East and the West.

« Last Saturday, Constantinople enchanted the audience at the Bourgie Hall, who felt like they were traveling on a flying carpet to the far reaches of Central Asia. » – LE DEVOIR