The circulation of "New Music" between Afghanistan and its transnational community

The background I, along with my wife Veronica Doubleday, have been engaged with the music of Afghanistan for the last 35 years. The foundation of my knowledge of Afghan music comes from 2 years fieldwork in Herat, and to a much lesser extent Kabul, in the 1970s. My first foray into the Afghan diaspora was in 1985, making the film Amir: An Afghan refugee musician's life in Peshawar, Pakistan. Since then I have conducted further fieldwork on Afghan music in Peshawar, in Mashad, New York, Herat (in 1994, in the interval between the communists and the Taliban) and Fremont (California). Since the defeat of the Taliban I made four visits to Kabul, where I set up a music school for the Aga Khan Music Initiative in Central Asia. The Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK has a Diasporas, Migration & Identities Programme, which in 2006 gave me funding to carry out research Afghan music in London, and London's connections with Kabul, Hamburg (with a very large Afghan colony), and Dublin (with a very small one). My paper today considers some of the more general questions that arise about the circulation of music between Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora that my study raises. This is very much a preliminary report on work in progress.