America's Future Needs the World's Music
On Greenland, Peshawar, and why curiosity is a national interest.
[Updated 7:21pm]
As I write, President Trump is in Davos talking about Greenland as if nations were real estate, as if sovereignty were a negotiating position, as if the people who live in these places were incidental to American interests.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, Afghan musicians are hiding.
Reports this week describe Peshawar, the Pakistani city that has sheltered Afghan artists for decades, slipping toward silence as deportations accelerate. The rhythms that once filled wedding halls and courtyards are disappearing. For musicians who fled the Taliban’s ban on music, who saw instruments smashed and schools shuttered, being sent back would end their ability to perform, to teach, to pass on traditions that stretch back generations.
One singer told reporters that if forced to return he would have to abandon a nineteenth-century classical lineage founded by his ancestors. The Taliban raided his home, destroyed his instruments, and jailed and beat him and his sons. They told him to quit music and sell vegetables instead.
These two stories seem unconnected. They are not.
The rhetoric aired in rooms like Davos becomes policy, and policy changes who gets to make and share music.
Much of my work has been making the case that Americans need art from other worlds. Not as exotic curiosities. Not as educational supplements. As essential encounters with human creativity that expand our capacity to understand ourselves.
About ten years ago, thanks to Center Stage, a group of us traveled to Pakistan. One evening, we gathered at a restaurant atop a hill outside Islamabad, overlooking Abbottabad, to meet members of Khumariyaan, the ensemble that fuses Pashtun folk traditions with rock energy. They gave us pakols, wool hats of the region, gifts of welcome and friendship. Alongside the warmth, they described the dangers on the roads between Peshawar and Kabul: checkpoints, uncertainty, the knowledge that their music made them targets. They told us they hid their instruments in the floorboards under their trunks and feared their hands would be cut off.
I think about that meeting now. About the generosity of artists who shared their culture even as they navigated threats we could barely imagine. About the roads that have only grown more dangerous since.
In 2021, I spoke at globalFEST, the annual showcase of international music presented with NPR. I shared my own formation: studying violin as a child, discovering Youssou N’Dour at a Peter Gabriel concert in 1987, seeing Angélique Kidjo in Central Park in 1994. I never imagined I would work with these artists, travel with them, and build friendships that reshaped my sense of what music can do.
I brought the ticket stubs. I held up the CD I bought at Tower Records after that Central Park concert. These were not souvenirs. They were evidence of transformation, moments when meeting an unfamiliar tradition opened something in me that formal training never could.
What I said at globalFEST was this: artists, through their practice, teach curiosity, empathy, and moral clarity. Funders and presenters must create space for the full potential of an artist’s contribution. It is not only artistic output that propels us forward. It is a way of being and seeing the world.
This is what we lose when musicians are silenced. Not just songs, but ways of knowing.
Over fifteen years at Carolina Performing Arts, we welcomed more than five thousand performers from sixty-five nations to our stages in Chapel Hill. I remember sitting in my office, on the phone with Abida Parveen in Lahore, asking her to visit North Carolina because I knew what it would mean for our students to hear her, and for the rapidly growing South Asian community in the Research Triangle to feel seen on our stage. In 2016, we launched Sacred/Secular: A Sufi Journey, a year-long exploration of Sufism through artists from Muslim-majority nations outside the Arab world. In a time of rising Islamophobia, it offered a window into the plurality of Muslim identity that monolithic thinking refuses to see.
That work taught me something I now believe to be essential: encounter changes everything. When you sit in a room and hear music from a tradition you do not know, something happens. The unfamiliar becomes less foreign. The impossible becomes more possible. Your sense of what humans can create expands.
But this is not just about individual transformation. It is about democratic capacity.
A society that cannot receive difference cannot govern pluralism. A country that hears other nations only as markets or threats loses the ability to imagine shared futures. When algorithms narrow what we hear, when visas become weapons, when communities fear to gather, we do not just lose music. We lose the practice of receiving what we did not expect, the very skill democracy requires.
Consider what cultural illiteracy costs. A diplomat who has never heard Afghan classical music cannot understand what is being destroyed when the Taliban bans it. A voter who knows nothing of Senegalese Sufism cannot evaluate whether a travel ban is justified. Young people who graduate without experiencing traditions beyond their inheritance carry a narrower sense of human possibility into every room they enter: boardrooms, classrooms, voting booths.
But this does not require a concert hall. In taxis and Ubers across American cities, I have had hundreds of conversations with drivers from around the world, sharing songs from home, swapping artists and stories. One night in Queens, a driver played a track by Pakistani singer Sanam Marvi; I texted her to say a New York taxi was riding along to her voice. He could not believe that not only did I know the music, I could reach the artist. He smiled and said, “This is what I love about America.” Those rides were small classrooms. Cultural exchange is not rarefied; it lives in everyday moments when we ask and listen.
The Afghan musicians hiding in Peshawar represent more than individual artistry. They carry traditions that survived Soviet invasion, civil war, and two Taliban regimes. They recorded songs of resistance on cassettes smuggled across borders. They preserved a collective soul even as the nation was torn apart.
When the Taliban demand that musicians pursue other occupations to contribute to the country, they are not only eliminating a profession. They are attempting to extinguish a way of understanding the world that resists control. Music creates connection across difference. It lets grief be witnessed, joy be shared, and stories be remembered. It does not submit easily to ideology.
And so instruments are destroyed.
At the same time, American political rhetoric increasingly frames the world as useful or hostile. Other nations become markets to capture, resources to acquire, or threats to contain. America First becomes an arithmetic that subtracts every connection that does not produce measurable advantage.
What gets lost is what artists have always known: human flourishing depends on meeting what we did not expect, on being changed by it, on finding ourselves expanded by traditions we did not inherit.
When we tell Americans that the only music that matters is “American,” a narrow, policed idea of American that excludes the very traditions that built it, that other nations exist primarily as economic variables, that our interests can be pursued without regard for theirs, we are not just making foreign policy. We are shrinking our souls.
I think about the classical singer in Peshawar who carries a lineage founded by his ancestors. I think about the two thousand cassettes in a shop kept by a man who fled Afghanistan in the 1980s, half of them now hidden because he does not know what will happen if he is sent back. I think about the young musician who said, “If you take away music from me, it will be like taking my soul away.”
And I think about the young Americans who will never hear these artists if the deportations continue, who will grow up with leaders who speak of other nations as obstacles rather than teachers, who will inherit a cultural landscape defined by what sells rather than what transforms.
We have built an arts ecosystem that still treats international work as a special category. We program diverse seasons as though the default were Eurocentric. We celebrate world music as a genre, which is to say, as everything that is not mainstream, which is to say, as everything that is other.
The truth is that there is no single mainstream. There is only the narrowing of what we allow ourselves to hear.
Authoritarian regimes criminalize music with batons and decrees. Democracies can make presence a crime through paperwork, raids, and policies. The methods differ. The effect on families, classrooms, and rehearsal rooms is fear.
In Peshawar, a singer hides his harmonium under floorboards. In Queens, a teenager skips rehearsal because a parent may not come home from work after an ICE raid. Different systems, similar chilling effects on culture and community.
The Taliban silences songs outright. U.S. policy can silence them indirectly, by making the artists and the audiences who would gather to hear them feel unsafe.
Someone has to hold the door open.
This is where presenters come in. Bringing international work to American stages is not a peripheral activity. It is where ideals become itineraries, fees, visas, and community moments. Done well, it is not extraction but reciprocity. The work requires logistical tenacity and moral seriousness in equal measure.
This is not a luxury. It is a necessity.
These musicians are not only fighting for their livelihoods. They are fighting for a world in which sound can still cross borders, in which traditions can survive displacement, in which a nation’s soul cannot be extinguished by those who fear what music does.
And we, the Americans who have the privilege of safety, who can choose what we listen to, who decide which artists get platforms and which get silence, have responsibilities too.
We must resist the flattening.
We must keep bringing unfamiliar music to American stages. We must support the organizations and presenters who do this work, not as charity but as survival. We must teach young people that the world is larger than algorithmic recommendations, that creativity cannot be contained by borders, that curiosity about other traditions is a strength.
We must also say clearly, when our government speaks of allies as debtors and territory as acquisition, that there is another way to be in the world: a way that listens before it speaks, learns before it teaches, and receives before it demands.
Greenland is not a piece of ice to be negotiated. It is Kalaallit Nunaat, home to people with histories and songs of their own. The musicians in Peshawar are not abstractions. They carry lineages that belong to them and, if we are willing to listen, to all of us.
The musicians know this. They always have.
I think of the pakols we were given on that hilltop outside Islamabad, gifts of welcome from artists who feared for their hands.
The question is whether we will receive what they offer.