Music that blends the styles of different cultures will form an important part of Hong Kong’s second Asia+ Festival, which showcases more than 100 performances and activities featuring the essence of cultural traditions and innovations by artists from nearly 30 countries.
Presented by the city’s Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau and organised by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, the three-month festival, which runs until November, aims to highlight outstanding artists from countries in Asia and beyond, especially those linked by the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s plan to develop a global trading network.
Musicians often leave their home countries and find success after settling down in another part of the world, but wherever they go, their art often reflects their cultural origins. Two of the mesmerising and melodic experiences during this year’s festival in October and November respectively are cases in point.
“The Woven Sounds” concert, featuring traditional Persian tunes performed by Mehdi Aminian, an ethnomusicologist, and members of his eponymous ensemble, is centred on the millennia-old craft of Persian carpet making – inscribed on Unesco’s Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage – and a music tradition that is tied to it.
The performance features an almost-lost practice known as naqshe khani, or “pattern singing”, which has been passed down from generation to generation, but neglected in recent years. Weavers would turn the carpet patterns – governed by the long, vertical yarn, or warp, and the shorter, horizontal yarn or weft – into lyrics and sing them aloud, along with casual conversations, to let other workers know the specific pattern being used.
“One weaver with the [pattern map] starts on the left side and the other weaver sits on the right side,” Aminian, who was born in Iran and is now based in Austria, says. “The weaver who has the map would sing the patterns to the other weaver and they would reach to each other in the middle because carpet patterns are symmetrical.”
