The world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in music.
What We Do
Our Mission Today
For the Artists
- Restoring their rightful place in society
- Increasing opportunities for training and skill development of the artist
- Providing platforms of exposure for traditional practitioners
For the Audience
- Inclusive exposure of traditional performing arts for public to ensure sustainability of cultural diversity
- Cultivating awareness of traditional art forms
- Production of accessible material on the traditional performing arts
All music is the sound of His laughter.
Shri Aurobindo
Providing a platform for practitioners of Traditional Arts
Takkiya Recitals:
APMC Karachi keeps our traditional music & dance alive by organizing events throughout the year to showcase the talent and skill of practitioners from all over Pakistan, as well as, overseas.
The Takkiya calendar is filled with baethaks, film-screenings, the NauTarang student platform, our Annual Festival, which takes place in March, and more. All of these free & public events provide the wider community an opportunity to connect with the rich cultural performing arts of this land.
Nurturing Audiences for Traditional Arts
Silsila-e-Sukhan Shanasi:
Delving into open conversations exploring South Asian classical music and dance. Silsila-e-Sukhan Shanasi is a new Music Conference initiative in partnership with The Second Floor (T2F) to raise appreciation and awareness of our rich music and dance forms through presentations, lec-dems on concepts and discussions on contemporary questions, concerns and issues.
Murki Youth Engagement Initiative:
The Murki Initiative engages with youth to nurture a future community that values its cultural heritage and actively works to preserve it, in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of traditional music and dance.
At present, the Initiative has three ongoing modules:
- Ta’arruf – Introduction to Eastern Music:
The basic concepts of our musical traditions are revealed to students through a 5-session module, featuring interactive activities, a workbook, performances, lecture-demonstrations and presentations aided by audio-visual references. - Saaz-baaz – Instruments Immersive:
Offers a hands-on experience of string, wind & percussion instruments, conducted by instrument practitioners. Participants develop an understanding of form, structure and the sound production of various instruments. - Sur-taal – Explorations in Music:
An opportunity for students to learn directly from established practitioners, who perform before them and interactively explain the creative process.
In the beginning, your Ustad teaches you; thereafter, your instrument teaches you. You have to work equally hard with both of them.
Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar
Darsgah Project- Navigating continuity for Traditional arts in the contemporary world
The Darsgah project explores a creative synthesis of the traditional master-disciple system with a contemporary institutional model of teaching. The project serves as a pilot to creating a larger, live-in, institution for teaching, learning, and developing South Asian classical music in Pakistan. Transposing the training from traditional gharanas onto a more accessible platform, we hope to pilot an institution that will be open to anyone with talent and passion for classical music, irrespective of background.
The physical space, based in Karachi, will engage artists, students, and audiences to create enabling environments for the teaching and learning of traditional music with the aid of modern technologies of learning, even non-traditional approaches, so musical heritage can navigate continuity in the contemporary, technologically empowered, and globalized world.
This project is being proposed at a critical juncture, where lack of state support, non-interest from corporations and brands, and general societal neglect of these musical styles, instruments, and lineages, has pushed these artistic communities to the peripheries, with many of their younger generations choosing to engage in other professions or to dissociate from their hereditary practices. Additionally, South Asian classical music, often miscast as ‘Indian Classical Music’ globally, has suffered discrimination from mainstream nationalist or religious narratives in Pakistan. Our project hopes to bridge these gaps and act in a reparative manner by reaffirming Pakistan’s position as a co-inheritor of this musical genre with India.
Developing an Archive for the Future
APMC Karachi regularly records performances and conversations with various artists. These recordings are preserved for posterity and are made accessible on all our social media handles.
Our living Masters are repositories of an invaluable oral history, who provide the last remaining link to a once thriving classical and folk music tradition. Unfortunately, very little material on our inherited traditions of music and dance, outside of performances (which in themselves are too few) remains today.
Documenting our music and dance legacy, the artistic stature of the Masters, as well as the history of our artistic traditions serves as a bridge to the musical landscape of current times. The documentation, through intimate interviews and masterclass baithaks etc., where the Masters speak about their art; their journey in it, relationship to their art form, insights and learning along the way, interesting anecdotes, etc., aims to save the nuances of these fast disappearing traditions for future generations.
Only that art can live which is an active manifestation of the life of the people. It must be a necessary and essential portion of that life, and not a luxury.
Ernest Bloch