COLOGNE, 24 January 2006 — The long-awaited call from Afghanistan’s Ministry of Culture was music to Babrak Wassa’s ears. The Afghan-born composer, who has lived in Germany for 25 years, had just been commissioned to write the score for his homeland’s new national anthem. “I’m very happy. It’s a great honor,” Wassa said yesterday. “I’ll be finished with the orchestral score very quickly,” he added. Wassa, 58, left Afghanistan for political reasons in 1980 and is now a German citizen. He lives in the town of Roesrath, near Cologne.
The melody of his anthem, soon to be heard in Afghanistan and around the world as well, is “simple and catchy, somewhat sprightly and optimistic,” Wassa revealed. He said he would like to record it with the West German Radio and Television (WDR) Symphony Orchestra. “My piece is a mixture of major and minor keys. The melody will be familiar to Afghans,” Wassa said.
Wassa directs eight choirs in Cologne and the nearby Bergisches Land region. He said composing the music for the anthem was a “point of honor” and that payment had not been discussed. “The composition will be a gift to the Afghan people,” he declared. The anthem’s lyrics, which Afghanistan’s government and Parliament agreed on last autumn, celebrate the country as the homeland of many tribes. Wassa, formerly the general music director for radio and television in the Afghan capital Kabul, was taken unawares when the Afghan government asked him in December 2005 to submit a proposal for an anthem. “For a week I had no idea at all. There wasn’t any melody that I liked,” he recalled. But then the notes began to flood into his mind. Wassa played a bit on a keyboard, sang along, and recorded the piece on computer.
Several weeks after his submission, he said the Afghan Culture Ministry, on behalf of President Hamid Karzai and his Cabinet, thanked him for the successful composition. Finally, on Sunday evening, came the official go-ahead. Wassa studied in Moscow on a scholarship, and after he returned to Afghanistan in 1978 he became general music director in Kabul. But he said he had come under political pressure, had not been able to work freely, and had felt that he was in danger.
