The seminar also includes a brief survey of continuities between Indian and Middle Eastern music, adaptations by western musicians, and ragamala miniature painting. Silver's activities at U.Va. Performing with Khan Saheb Silver will be his wife, Shubha Sankaran, a virtuoso on the surbahar and also a Gold Medal winner in 1990, and Ustad Tari Khan, Pakistan's leading young tabla maestro. Shubha Sankaran is the only female performer presently specializing in performance on the surbahar, a rare instrument which is related to the smaller sitar as the cello is to the violin. The group is also scheduled to perform in Lincoln Center, New York, in August 1995.
Silver is equally at home in North Indian music and in Urdu language and literature.
In 1964, he began his intensive study of Indian musical theory and performance on the sitar in Ahmedabad, India, under the guidance of Ustad Ghulamhusain Khan, Court Musician for Maharaja Tukojirao Holkar of Indore until Indian independence. In the last two concerts, he was joined by his wife, Shubha Sankaran, on surbahar. Silver also lectured on Indian music at Rabindra Bharati University in Calcutta and at Bombay University. He comes to the University of Virginia from the Voice of America, where he has been Chief of the Urdu Service since 1986. In that position, he supervises an hour and a half of daily Urdu broadcasts to Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and the Middle East.