Ziyodullo Shahidi

Who was Ziyodullo Shahidi?

Ziyodullo Shahidiev was a Tajik musician and father of Persian Symphonic Music in Tajikistan.

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 Ziyodullo Shahidi. Merging maqam with symphony, he formalised modern Tajik music and became known as an outstanding figure of this form of synthesis. The reconciliation of different cultures as an idea goes back to the philosophy of Abu Ali Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna.

Ziyodullo Shahidi was born in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, at the beginning of the century. He overcame two crucial events in the culture of the region: the replacement of Arabic-based Persian and Turkish by Cyrillic, and the persecution of intellectuals - his father, Mucaddaskhan Shahidi, was murded during the Bolshevistic terror of 1937. As an amateur musician, virtuoso in several traditional instruments, such as nay, tanbur and dutar, he developed his musical gift in tours beyond Central Asia, and participated in the organisation of the modern theatres in Tashkent and Samarkand. Due to political events he moved to Dushanbe, where he found his own sphere of activity. In 1946, in his mature age, Ziyodullo Shahidi entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he plunged into the atmosphere of the complicated interconnections between the Russian, Caucasian and Central Asian traditions. The masters of musical thinking of that period were varied in their forms of expressions: Schostakovich, Khachaturyan, Khrennikow, Kara-Karaev, etc. His first chamber instrumental pieces, such as Rondo, Concert for piano & violin, were inspired by the search for new forms, styles, and expressions of modern music.