I’m six years old. It’s a bright summer day in Tehran. Watching my uncle work, I ask him, “Uncle, what are you doing?“ “I’m making an instrument.“ “Why?“ “Because I need a ghamkhaar.“ “A ghamkhaar, what is that?“  “It’s something that eats your sadness .“ “A sadness eater?“ “Yes, a sadness eater, something that comforts you.“ “What does it do with the sadness it eats?“ “It turns it into beautiful sounds.“ “Like a song.“ “Yes, like a song.” This is the beginning of a story I heard told by Mehrnam Rastegari, an Iranian singer and kamancheh (Iranian bowed spike fiddle) player during a recent performance at which five of us from different musical traditions performed — Mehrnam, my daughter and I, mariachi fiddler Mireya Ramos from Mexico City and Afro-Louisiana accordionist Sunpie Barnes from New Orleans. We sat side by side on the stage, with each music tradition’s representative asked to play a piece that the other musicians would then play along with. There was no rehearsal and no prepared material to share. It was an invitation to see how music might be reshaped when people of vastly different backgrounds played together in a spontaneous, improvised manner, a chance to see what might happen not only to the music but to us, players and audience members. We went around once and when it was Mehrnam’s turn for the second time, she told the story of the ghamkhaar. Opinion “Could you play a song for me that would eat sadness?” the child asked her uncle. “Yes,” he said, grabbing his tar — an Iranian stringed lute — and playing a melody which mesmerized the child.  Which of uncle’s sorrows has this music swallowed and sent back to me as beautiful sound, Mehrnam wondered. Twenty-eight years later, after moving to New York City, Mehrnam Rastegari was playing in a gallery and noticed a woman in the audience crying. After the performance, the woman spoke to Mehrnam in perfect Persian, thanking her. Mehrnam understood that the music had swallowed this woman’s sadness and that the tears were sorrow turned to sound,  offering relief. Thousands of miles from her homeland and family, the adult Mehrnam felt the force of the pain and sadness that exists in every corner of the world, including Iran. She also felt at home in her music, believing that in New York she and the music had been freed from suppression, censorship and gender discrimination. And while she sees music as the most powerful sadness eater, she recognizes that it does not remove sadness. Rather, it transforms it, it holds what we cannot hold alone and makes it both shareable and bearable. Mehrnam finished her story by saying, “If I go back to that child, I still hear the question — what happens to sadness when it is eaten? And maybe the answer has always been the same — it becomes sound.” Partway through telling her story, Mehrnam was stopped by her own tears, and the audience fell silent. I thought about her experience as an Iranian living for the past four years in the United States, far from her home and family in Tehran. In New York, she has found a freedom to be herself as a person, a woman and a musician, and for this she is deeply grateful. But she also loves her homeland and her family and friends who have been living under bombs and rocket fire directed at them by the United States. She loves her new home but does not love the violent attack on her homeland, the killing of those who have little or no say in the outcome of such an attack and who can only suffer under its power. She also loves her homeland but does not love the constraints she experienced there — the limitation of civil rights for women, the inability to choose the kind of life she would lead. She can love the U.S. while not loving certain actions of its government. She can love Iran while not loving certain actions of its government. How many of us have felt this, I thought, this complexity in the face of contradiction, the sadness we experience from conflict in the world and the conflicted feelings we carry with us, our loyalties to and love of many places? As Mehrnam Rastegari has, I have known music as one of the great eaters of sadness, a kind of power that helps me bear what would otherwise be unbearable. On that stage with people from around the world, playing music I’d never played before, and offering it to listeners, I saw this power ever more clearly. Ghamkhaar — a comfort. The post Music: The sadness eater appeared first on WyoFile . ...read more read less