Interview with VOA Urdu chief
Interview with Brian Q. Silver
Voice of America, Urdu Chief
by Komal Mahkdoom
April 30, 2006
His response to a request for an interview was the question “How long would it take?” Rushing through broadcast schedules and running in and out of recording studios, Brian Q. Silver almost never has the time to actually be at his office seat.
In his position of chief of Urdu Staff of Voice of America since 1986, Silver supervises an hour and a half of daily Urdu broadcasts to listeners in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. He has also designed a keyboard typeface and training program for word processing in Urdu.
Before associating with the world of broadcasting, silver remained a specialist in Indian musical theory and a performer on the sitar. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, where he focused on Urdu and Persian literature, history, culture, and music. Silver furthered his South Asian experience by teaching in the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard
University from 1974 to 1983.
In the time Silver was able to stay at his desk, he shared his experiences with South Asian culture and music, as well as his professional broadcasting at Voice of America.
Q: Your family was not particularly involved in any kind of ethnic diversity. What was it, then, that brought you into the field of foreign, particularly South Asian music and studies?
Silver: The predecessor to Indian music is actually flamenco music, which is Spanish gypsy music. I lived in Denver, Colo., and I worked in a record store and I heard some recordings of things that sounded quite interesting and one of them was flamenco guitar. So I decided, “Well, I’d like to learn that.” I couldn’t find a teacher for Flamenco. There were guitar teachers around so I took two or three lessons, but he basically said “Well, you’re gonna have to teach yourself,” so I listened to recordings and tried to duplicate what I heard in recordings. In the process I met the elder brothers of one of my high school classmates who had been doing this for several years, so I started working with him… We became the “Flamenquistas” for the whole Denver, Colo., area. After listening to flamenco music I heard my first recording of Indian music. I remember very clearly, the first time I heard it I thought “Now this should be very interesting music to play.” So I went through college trying to play Raga type structures on the guitar and banjo. Borrowed a sitar my last year from a man who became my mentor: Hyman Bloom, a very famous painter who had been interested in oriental music for years. Noodled on that a bit but I was able to get a grant to India to study sitar, and I went over there specifically to study sitar. And this was a year before George Harrison, so it wasn’t as though, you know, the sitar was a craze as it became after the Beatles took it up. It was definitely an unusual subject. But I found a very good teacher and was able, because of my professional capabilities in guitar and banjo, to pick up very quickly. And so I studied with him intensively for two years everyday. I’d get up at 5 o’clock in the morning…the ustad-shagird (teacher-student)type of silsila (routine).
Q: Did your university give you the grant to study sitar abroad?
Silver: No, it was a Fulbright grant. It was an unusual grant that was in place for three or four years. Usually Fulbrights are for pure academic programs, but this was more like a Peace Corps kind of thing where they sent us over to teach English half-time at a college and then do a research project. So the sitar and then subsequently Urdu were my research projects.
Q: Is that how you achieved your fluency in the Urdu language?
Silver: Well, because it was my ustad’s mother tongue, I started, you know, tooti phooti (broken, amateur) Urdu to get along, and then I went to a mushaira (poetry recital); aur phir maamla khatam (and it was a done deal then). I decided I had to learn this language and this literature, because…you’ve been to a mushaira? Ok, the parallels of the performance between a musician and the audience and the poet and the audience were very striking. And it sounded beautiful and I had been an English major in college and planned to go back and become a college professor in English. I thought, “Well, why not explore another culture?” So that’s how I got into the Urdu. I was fortunate to get an extension for a second year… and so my second year I’d go to my sitar ustad at 5 in the morning, and then in the afternoon I found a very fine teacher, a direct descendant of Wali Dakni, the first Urdu poet, Waris Hussain Alvi, who taught me in the afternoon. So I had a busy but happy life teaching at college and then going over to Alvi Saheb’s house.
Q: Your capability with the sitar and with South Asian languages is well known. Keeping in mind your current position at Voice of America, however, did you perform any active work in journalism before heading to broadcasting?
Silver: None whatsoever. I came in purely as an Urdu, well presumably Urdu expert, but also with management experience because in between I taught Urdu for three years at Minnesota, nine years at Harvard. But as often happens at Harvard the younger faculty doesn’t get tenure. The department actually voted me tenure but for funding reasons the deans reversed the decision, so for one month I had tenure teaching Urdu at Harvard but then that was over. Was looking for another job and a job opened up at Duke University where I became director of all of their international programs, the visa section, the study abroad, and so I had a lot of management experience. But I wanted, for a variety of reasons, to leave that job. This job opened up so I came up here, with no journalistic experience but a knowledge of Urdu and management skills, so I’ve been here since 1986.
Q: Do you think that this job limited you in any way, considering that this field is more vocal, and does not actively involve live instruments or language instruction?
Silver: Well, I had made a conscious decision at one point not to become a full time musician. I figured that would be difficult given what the market was. Quite frankly, being a Gringo, you know, a gora (casual Urdu term for “white man”) I had found difficulty in general circles, not among musicians, but in general circles about getting credibility, like “He’s an American, he can’t play our music.” So I sort of trained myself as an ethnomusicologist and actually applied for a couple of positions teaching as an ethnomusicologist even though I had no academic background whatsoever in it. So when this job opened up it was interesting and, as challenging as the Duke job was, I missed South Asia. I mean I’ve lived a long time in South Asia, and I wanted to get back to South Asia. This was a perfect way to get back into the mahol, the environment of South Asia, so here I came and here I am. I miss teaching, I love teaching, but on the other hand… my teaching gig had been basically first and second year Urdu and I don’t know that I would have wanted to do that for 30 years. So, this has been a challenge, it’s brought me to Washington, a city I love, and I have a variety of activities outside the job that are challenging so I can’t complain.
Q: So do you think that says anything about the nature of the professional field of international journalism? Would it be true to say that command over language overrides qualification as a journalist?
Silver: Well, this was a case of an organization needing, I mean a unit needing management, and ideally management by someone who knew the language. When I came there were a couple- three cases of service chiefs who didn’t know the language.
Q: But did you know anything about the broadcasting equipment and formats?
Silver: I had done professional recording and so forth so the technical side was no problem. I mean I could edit quickly and do those sorts of things, and then I went ahead and I learned the electronic editing.
Q: What is the nature, then, of the duties you perform as a supervisor?
Silver: Well, in the simple, good old days when we had only an hour and a half a day and a staff of 16, we would have shift editors but I would work. There was a period when there was someone who had been a managing editor here, he retired where I took over that role... and I would come in and I would edit the morning show. And at a certain point the staff communicated to me they really would like to edit themselves and that made sense… Responsibilities have expanded. We went from an hour and a half a day to three after Sept. 11, and then up to 12 hours, and put in the music component, then we started internet and now we’ve started television, so I’m managing all three. To be perfectly honest the management and administrative demands are so great that my journalistic activities are minimal at this time. I mean in the quiet days I would do interviews myself, I’d do a weekly program, a music program with one of my colleagues, and I…I’d have to say really dabbled at journalism. But I’m not trained as a journalist, and not really experienced as anything other than a managing journalist. I mean I’ve gone out, done reports, edit them and put together but it’s mostly administration.
Q: Although you are the chief of the Urdu Staff at VOA, is there anything you have personally learned from the nature of your programming?
Silver: One of the interesting developments of this expansion to twelve hours is we decided to include a music component, discovering all about the Pakistani rock scene. I hadn’t realised that exists; I’m a very sticking to metal, stuffy classicist. But it was very interesting to see that this whole industry was developing, and quite successfully.
Q: Finally, if this interview gets published, would you teach me to play the sitar?
Silver: If you’re willing to put in the effort, sure, I’d be happy to.
http://www.planetblacksburg.com/interview/komal-043006.html
Voice of America, Urdu Chief
by Komal Mahkdoom
April 30, 2006
His response to a request for an interview was the question “How long would it take?” Rushing through broadcast schedules and running in and out of recording studios, Brian Q. Silver almost never has the time to actually be at his office seat.
In his position of chief of Urdu Staff of Voice of America since 1986, Silver supervises an hour and a half of daily Urdu broadcasts to listeners in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. He has also designed a keyboard typeface and training program for word processing in Urdu.
Before associating with the world of broadcasting, silver remained a specialist in Indian musical theory and a performer on the sitar. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, where he focused on Urdu and Persian literature, history, culture, and music. Silver furthered his South Asian experience by teaching in the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard
University from 1974 to 1983.
In the time Silver was able to stay at his desk, he shared his experiences with South Asian culture and music, as well as his professional broadcasting at Voice of America.
Q: Your family was not particularly involved in any kind of ethnic diversity. What was it, then, that brought you into the field of foreign, particularly South Asian music and studies?
Silver: The predecessor to Indian music is actually flamenco music, which is Spanish gypsy music. I lived in Denver, Colo., and I worked in a record store and I heard some recordings of things that sounded quite interesting and one of them was flamenco guitar. So I decided, “Well, I’d like to learn that.” I couldn’t find a teacher for Flamenco. There were guitar teachers around so I took two or three lessons, but he basically said “Well, you’re gonna have to teach yourself,” so I listened to recordings and tried to duplicate what I heard in recordings. In the process I met the elder brothers of one of my high school classmates who had been doing this for several years, so I started working with him… We became the “Flamenquistas” for the whole Denver, Colo., area. After listening to flamenco music I heard my first recording of Indian music. I remember very clearly, the first time I heard it I thought “Now this should be very interesting music to play.” So I went through college trying to play Raga type structures on the guitar and banjo. Borrowed a sitar my last year from a man who became my mentor: Hyman Bloom, a very famous painter who had been interested in oriental music for years. Noodled on that a bit but I was able to get a grant to India to study sitar, and I went over there specifically to study sitar. And this was a year before George Harrison, so it wasn’t as though, you know, the sitar was a craze as it became after the Beatles took it up. It was definitely an unusual subject. But I found a very good teacher and was able, because of my professional capabilities in guitar and banjo, to pick up very quickly. And so I studied with him intensively for two years everyday. I’d get up at 5 o’clock in the morning…the ustad-shagird (teacher-student)type of silsila (routine).
Q: Did your university give you the grant to study sitar abroad?
Silver: No, it was a Fulbright grant. It was an unusual grant that was in place for three or four years. Usually Fulbrights are for pure academic programs, but this was more like a Peace Corps kind of thing where they sent us over to teach English half-time at a college and then do a research project. So the sitar and then subsequently Urdu were my research projects.
Q: Is that how you achieved your fluency in the Urdu language?
Silver: Well, because it was my ustad’s mother tongue, I started, you know, tooti phooti (broken, amateur) Urdu to get along, and then I went to a mushaira (poetry recital); aur phir maamla khatam (and it was a done deal then). I decided I had to learn this language and this literature, because…you’ve been to a mushaira? Ok, the parallels of the performance between a musician and the audience and the poet and the audience were very striking. And it sounded beautiful and I had been an English major in college and planned to go back and become a college professor in English. I thought, “Well, why not explore another culture?” So that’s how I got into the Urdu. I was fortunate to get an extension for a second year… and so my second year I’d go to my sitar ustad at 5 in the morning, and then in the afternoon I found a very fine teacher, a direct descendant of Wali Dakni, the first Urdu poet, Waris Hussain Alvi, who taught me in the afternoon. So I had a busy but happy life teaching at college and then going over to Alvi Saheb’s house.
Q: Your capability with the sitar and with South Asian languages is well known. Keeping in mind your current position at Voice of America, however, did you perform any active work in journalism before heading to broadcasting?
Silver: None whatsoever. I came in purely as an Urdu, well presumably Urdu expert, but also with management experience because in between I taught Urdu for three years at Minnesota, nine years at Harvard. But as often happens at Harvard the younger faculty doesn’t get tenure. The department actually voted me tenure but for funding reasons the deans reversed the decision, so for one month I had tenure teaching Urdu at Harvard but then that was over. Was looking for another job and a job opened up at Duke University where I became director of all of their international programs, the visa section, the study abroad, and so I had a lot of management experience. But I wanted, for a variety of reasons, to leave that job. This job opened up so I came up here, with no journalistic experience but a knowledge of Urdu and management skills, so I’ve been here since 1986.
Q: Do you think that this job limited you in any way, considering that this field is more vocal, and does not actively involve live instruments or language instruction?
Silver: Well, I had made a conscious decision at one point not to become a full time musician. I figured that would be difficult given what the market was. Quite frankly, being a Gringo, you know, a gora (casual Urdu term for “white man”) I had found difficulty in general circles, not among musicians, but in general circles about getting credibility, like “He’s an American, he can’t play our music.” So I sort of trained myself as an ethnomusicologist and actually applied for a couple of positions teaching as an ethnomusicologist even though I had no academic background whatsoever in it. So when this job opened up it was interesting and, as challenging as the Duke job was, I missed South Asia. I mean I’ve lived a long time in South Asia, and I wanted to get back to South Asia. This was a perfect way to get back into the mahol, the environment of South Asia, so here I came and here I am. I miss teaching, I love teaching, but on the other hand… my teaching gig had been basically first and second year Urdu and I don’t know that I would have wanted to do that for 30 years. So, this has been a challenge, it’s brought me to Washington, a city I love, and I have a variety of activities outside the job that are challenging so I can’t complain.
Q: So do you think that says anything about the nature of the professional field of international journalism? Would it be true to say that command over language overrides qualification as a journalist?
Silver: Well, this was a case of an organization needing, I mean a unit needing management, and ideally management by someone who knew the language. When I came there were a couple- three cases of service chiefs who didn’t know the language.
Q: But did you know anything about the broadcasting equipment and formats?
Silver: I had done professional recording and so forth so the technical side was no problem. I mean I could edit quickly and do those sorts of things, and then I went ahead and I learned the electronic editing.
Q: What is the nature, then, of the duties you perform as a supervisor?
Silver: Well, in the simple, good old days when we had only an hour and a half a day and a staff of 16, we would have shift editors but I would work. There was a period when there was someone who had been a managing editor here, he retired where I took over that role... and I would come in and I would edit the morning show. And at a certain point the staff communicated to me they really would like to edit themselves and that made sense… Responsibilities have expanded. We went from an hour and a half a day to three after Sept. 11, and then up to 12 hours, and put in the music component, then we started internet and now we’ve started television, so I’m managing all three. To be perfectly honest the management and administrative demands are so great that my journalistic activities are minimal at this time. I mean in the quiet days I would do interviews myself, I’d do a weekly program, a music program with one of my colleagues, and I…I’d have to say really dabbled at journalism. But I’m not trained as a journalist, and not really experienced as anything other than a managing journalist. I mean I’ve gone out, done reports, edit them and put together but it’s mostly administration.
Q: Although you are the chief of the Urdu Staff at VOA, is there anything you have personally learned from the nature of your programming?
Silver: One of the interesting developments of this expansion to twelve hours is we decided to include a music component, discovering all about the Pakistani rock scene. I hadn’t realised that exists; I’m a very sticking to metal, stuffy classicist. But it was very interesting to see that this whole industry was developing, and quite successfully.
Q: Finally, if this interview gets published, would you teach me to play the sitar?
Silver: If you’re willing to put in the effort, sure, I’d be happy to.
http://www.planetblacksburg.com/interview/komal-043006.html
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