[CANCELLED] PRAx: Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali

Please note: This event has been cancelled for travel-related reasons. PRAx will attempt to rebook the remarkable Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali in a future season.

A form of Sufi devotional music, Qawwali is performed seated by a large ensemble, typically with singers and harmonium players in the front row and chorus and percussionists in the back. Brothers Rizwan and Muazzam Ali Khan, nephews of legendary Pakistani Qawwali master Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, channel a family lineage in the genre that stretches back over five centuries. An incredible opportunity to see an ensemble that performs all over the world, bringing an experience by turns mesmerizing, transcendent, absorbing and ecstatic.

PRAxPRELUDE at 6pm: Come join us for a pre-show happy hour! PRAxPRELUDES feature food and drink for purchase and an equally tantalizing bit of programming related to the main event.

About Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali Group

The Rizwan-Muazzam group is a Qawwali group, led by the internationally acclaimed Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s nephews, Rizwan and Muazzam. The sons of Mujahid Mubarak Ali Khan, they have been performing together as Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwals since the 1990s.

The two lead singers come from a direct family line of Qawwali music that spans over five centuries. Their grandfather was an uncle of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and taught Nusrat the art of qawwali vocal music. They themselves studied under their father, who died in 1996, and were then tutored by Nusrat. They have continued their uncle’s pioneering efforts to transcend cultural, language and religious barriers and to bring to the world the devotional but vibrant Qawwali vocal music of the Sufi mystics.

Drawing upon a rich vein of Islamic and Sufi poetry, Qawwali music is a centuries-old form of Sufi devotional music from the Indian subcontinent in which romantic love is a metaphor for spiritual adoration and mystical enlightenment. It is not surprising that Qawwali has become a staple of Bollywood film scores and an increasingly central focus of world music programmes in concert halls and festivals throughout the world.

About Music at Oregon State University

https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/svpda/music