Who is Khan Sahib Brian Q. Silver?
Khan Sahib Brian Q. Silver is a South Asian classical music artist known for Khayal, Sitar. Stream 2 recordings on Saarey Music.
Dr. Brian Q. Silver owes a special debt of gratitude to the APMC for the generous musical and personal welcome he and his wife, Shubha Sankaran, received in 1988 on their first visit together to Lahore. After founder Hayat Ahmed Khan surprised Silver by scheduling, without prior notice, a program where he was to perform in concert with the esteemed tabla master Ustad Shaukat Hussain Khan, the APMC generously awarded Silver the honorary title of Khan Sahib. This was the second occasion that Silver had played sitar in Pakistan, the first having been in a one-minute solo on the second episode of the Moin Akhter’s television show, Yes Sir, No Sir, in 1987. When Silver again performed for the APMC in 1989, he was awarded the organization’s Gold Medal. He and Shubha continued to participate regularly in APMC events for the next 20 years.
After graduating from Harvard College in 1964, Silver traveled on a Fulbright grant to India, where he began learning sitar with the late Ustad Ghulamhusain Khan of the Bande Ali Khan gharana; his grant was renewed to continue his work with his Ustad for a second year, during which time he also undertook the study of Urdu with the late Professor Varis Alvi. Silver later earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and has taught Urdu language and literature, Indian music, and South Asian culture at several universities, including the University of Chicago and Harvard, where he was Associate Professor of Indo-Muslim Studies. He was Chief of the Voice of America's Urdu Service in Washington, D. C. from 1986 to 2007, when he was named VOA’s Ethnomusicologist and World Music Curator, a position he held through 2012. Earlier, in 1982, he had founded International Music Associates, of which he continues to be Executive Director.
Brian and Shubha have performed throughout the United States, including at Lincoln Center in New York, and in concert and in radio and television broadcasts in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Great Britain, Rumania, Morocco, Egypt, Peru, Guatemala, and most recently, the Peoples Republic of China in 2007. In 1991, 1996, and again in 2004, Silver was recognized for his sitar performance by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. His book, The Noble Science of the Ghazal: The Urdu Poetry of Mirza Ghalib, was published in 2014.
Silver’s Pakistan experience included a close involvement from 1976 through 1978 with the Classical Music Research Cell in Lahore, founded by Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Khwaja Khurshid Anwar, as well as with EMI Pakistan, through a friendship with then-director Mansur Bukhari. Soon after their first meeting in Lahore in the mid 1990s, Silver came to regard Raza Kazim, the inventor of the Sagar Vina, as his musical godfather.
