LAHORE: Despite pleasant weather, not many Lahorites turned up on the first day of the Lahore Music Meet 2015. Whether it was due to insufficient marketing or the event’s inherent central paradox – conversations around a subject that is best felt, lived and experienced – it is hard to say. Nonetheless, it was a pleasant spring day at Alhamra that offered engaging conversations to music geeks who got up early on a Saturday morning to listen to discussions on Pakistani music, once the sole unifying force for the country’s youth, now a fragmented and only sporadically relevant cultural option.

The LMM is an effort at providing such a platform, hoping to revitalise the reputation and perception of music within the country and abroad.

The keynote address by Arshad Mehmood started an hour late, probably due to poor attendance but Arshad, a veteran of the heyday of Pakistani geet and ghazal, kept the small audience captivated with his central thesis. Music requires dedication of a sort that can only pay off in the long run, he said. It is possible to become a one-hit-wonder, even produce popular albums for a short period of time, but those who truly endure, even beyond their lifetimes, are those who give up their lives for this art form. Even popular music is best done by those who are classically trained. In this regard he gave the example of Sajjad Ali whose classical training has stood him in good stead throughout his long and successful pop career.

The session ‘Music of Subversion: Narratives of Resistance in Music’ also started more than half an hour late than scheduled, a noteworthy fact mainly because of the seamless discipline of the annual Lahore Literary Festival that has spoilt Lahorites with its world-class organisation. The panelists at this session included Beghayrat Brigade’s Ali Aftab Saeed, Awami Worker Party’s Ammar Rashid, Sangat Theatre’s Sarah Kazmi and moderator Hasan Javid. Inevitably, the PTI was brought up during the conversation about politics and music, with some panelists calling the music and dance at its dharnas an act of defiance in its own right, even if the music played there lacked any real subversive value.

Ali Aftab Saeed livened up this session with his characteristic Urdu laced with Punjabi, a welcome relief from the academic English that can sometimes plague panels populated by academics. Sarah Kazmi told some fascinating anecdotes about her experiences as a woman performing street theatre in villages and slum areas, itself a political act in a country where public spaces are often the domain of men alone.

An important evening session was with veteran singer Surayya Multanikar who took the audience along on her journey from humble beginnings in Multan to the glitzy world of PTV. Mentioning former prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s family as one of her patrons, Multanikar narrated anecdotes from a life that sounds like a dastaan to today’s youth. Sitting with her daughter, Rahat, an English literature professor at a local college, Multanikar interspersed her stories with hit songs from her PTV days.

Peelu Pakiyaan and Kukra Dhammi Deya mesmerised the crowd, though even here the sparsely populated hall somewhat marred the experience for those in attendance.

The Sachal Orchestra performance in Hall II was filled to the brim, though, probably because Sachal are now recognised internationally, a surefire way of getting recognised by people in the homeland. Either way, it was a stimulating performance that received rousing applause from the capacity crowd.

First day verdict: LMM is a good idea insufficiently imagined. It would do better to develop a model of conversation that can be weaved within performances, the only way to pull in bigger crowds.

Published in Dawn, April 5th, 2015

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