Round Table Discussion: Music & Migration
What happens to musicians and their music when they migrate to other places? How is their creative musical practice involved in their integration and how is their distinctive identity preserved? Amin Hashemi, Nicolas Le Bigre, Parmis Mozafari, Amir Tahqiq and Matthew Machin-Autenrieth discuss the ways Iranian, Polish and other communities have brought with them music and much more.
This Round Table explores the varied experiences of Iranian musicians migrating to the UK, their relationship to the UK, their understandings of what integration means and the ways in which they are putting it into practice. The panel also looks at other migration experiences of people in Aberdeen with Nicolas le Bigre, and the intercultural dynamics in Gibraltar with Matthew Machin-Autenrieth, as well as the internal dynamics inside Iran before and after 1979 that led to a first large wave of migration to the West.
Dr Amin Hashemi is a scholar in cultural history of Iranian music. He studied and worked in academic positions in Iran, England and Scotland. In his PhD at SOAS, University of London, Amin explored the complexities of cultural antagonism in Iranian popular music with a focus on the context and practice of censorship and in his current fellowship in Aberdeen he is looking into the relationships between creative music practice of Iranian musicians and their cultural integration into the UK. Amin is also an accomplished player of Iranian stringed instrument, the Tar.
Nicolas Le Bigre is a Lecturer and Archivist, working at the Elphinstone Institute for Ethnology & Folklore since 2016. Born and raised in Washington, D.C, Nick le is French-American and moved to Scotland in 2010. He has researched the personal-experience narratives of immigrants in Scotland, examining broad concepts of immigrant experience, such as home, space and time, religion and spirituality, as well as the movement and interconnectedness of place and people. He has been the Co-ordinator of the Polish-Scottish Song Group for many years, and runs the Elphinstone’s regular Storytelling Festival.
Dr Parmis Mozafari is Associate Lecturer in Persian at the University of St Andrews, where she teaches Arabic and Persian in the School of Modern Languages. She has written widely on topics relating to women’s music-making and culture in Iran’s contemporary Islamic republic, including book chapters on 'Carving a Space for Women’s Solo Singing in Post-revolution Iran' and 'Dance and the Borders of Public and Private Life in Post-Revolution Iran'.
Dr Matthew Machin-Autenrieth is Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at the University of Aberdeen and the Principal Investigator for the European Research Council-funded project ‘Past and Present Musical Encounters across the Strait of Gibraltar’ (2018–23). His research spans three areas: the relationship between music and regional identity in nation states; heritage studies; and music, diaspora and postcolonial studies. He is currently working towards a book tentatively entitled: The Sons of Ziryab: Flamenco-andalusí, Colonial Memory and Moroccan Migration across the Strait of Gibraltar .
Born in 1985 in Shiraz, Iran, Amir Tahqiq began learning the daf in 2006 under the tutelage of Mostafa Sohani and Sina Shahryari, and later took advanced rhythm courses with Navid Afqah. Since 2009, he has taught at music schools in Shiraz, and became the director of the cultural and artistic centre in Khon in 2013. In 2020, he founded his own music school, Mahbang, with official approval from the Ministry of Culture. Amir has performed widely throughout Iran and has been living in Aberdeen since arriving as a refugee to the UK.
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