When broadcaster, composer and musician Ed le Brocq wrote his first children’s book, Sonam & the Silence, the story of a young Afghan girl who falls under the spell of music banned by Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, he felt he was capturing an essence of something precious: the resilience of a musical culture that had survived decades of conflict.

A decade later, the story carries a different kind of weight.

The place that inspired the book, Afghanistan’s National Institute of Music school in Kabul, founded in 2010 by Afghan-Australian ethnomusicologist Dr Ahmad Naser Sarmast, and where le Brocq spent time teaching in 2015, was destroyed in 2021. Irreplaceable instruments were lost, and a generation of young musicians was forced into exile, taking their sounds and traditions with them.

Ed le Brocq. Portrait © Trish Dean

“Right now, just thinking about it … I’m almost ready to cry,” le Brocq says. “It’s the saddest thing; everything that Dr Sarmast and the young musicians worked for was literally burned to the ground.”

“There were instruments hanging from the ceilings, shelves and shelves of traditional instruments and Western instruments,” he recalls. “People from around the world were...