Lily Afshar

from MEMPHIS WOMAN magazine

December, 2005

Dr. Lily Afshar

I first met Dr Lily Afshar in September, 2004 when she was performing at Dixon

Gallery. First impressions showed a soft spoken but personable woman with an

intensity that was visible to all on the stage. A kind demeanor but still she

looked like the professor for whom you do not want to be late for class. But

today I see a different person as I am following her rapidly through the lobby

of the Clark Tower. She has the vivaciousness of one of her nineteen-year-old

students. “Want to see something spooky?” she says out of nowhere. She takes me

to a window of a classroom of Concorde College where CPR mannequins are laid

out on beds for healthcare students. “It’s like the movie ‘Coma,” she says. It

is 5:30 PM and she has been teaching at the University of Memphis since seven

that morning AFTER walking three miles from home to school for the exercise but

her energy seems at full force.

Black hair, darker eyes and her persona make her appear much younger than a

professor with fifteen years tenure. She has a big smile and warm, inviting

personality and follows a lot of what she says with laughter. But when it comes

to her music there is time for seriousness. Just take a look at her resume’.

The Teheran, Iran, native was ten she realized what she wanted to do. She has

pursued it diligently and without a break, without changing majors in college

and without changing career paths. “I always kept on going, never gave up and

always had a stated goal,” she says.

In her late teens she moved to the US and graduated from the Boston

Conservatory of Music, then to received her masters at the New England

Conservatory of Music and finally earning her Ph.D. from Florida State. In 1989

she moved here to take a teaching position at Memphis State University (now

University of Memphis). In 2000 she started the Guitar Society there. That year

she also received the Orville H. Gibson Award for Best Female

Classical Guitarist and an award from Gibson Guitar for Best Classical

Guitarist. She calls Memphis home.

Home for Afshar is a little different. In about a week she will be in Sweden,

then Turkey. She has played in Africa, The Middle East, Europe, South America

and Australia. Here in the US she played The Kennedy Center for the Performing

Arts, UCLA before Maestro Andres Segovia, Austin, Texas’ South by Southwest

Music Festival (“I was the only classical guitarist” she says.) plus many

venues in Memphis. Her studies have made her proficient in Persian, English,

Spanish and Italian.

She is teaching and performing and can’t really say one she loves more than the

other. “Both give me something different,” she says. Her feeling when she is on

stage is “Freedom. Complete freedom,” she says. “My purpose in life is what I’m

doing on stage.”

But teaching is also important. “I try to get the students to understand what

the composer really wants to feel and what I feel is the passion in the piece,”

she says. “When I come back from touring I can rest, do my teaching, get

rearranged and then I can perform again,” she says.

On the wall of the Tower Room American Grill where Afshar and I are talking, a

large photograph of a studio microphone in a recording studio sticks in front

of the camera and is bigger than everything else. She says the picture gives

the feeling of what it’s like to be recorded, which is at first intimidating. “

I make my students record themselves every week starting a month before a

concert to get over the fear,” she says. Afshar has long since gotten over the

fear herself.

And she will bring the sound of her guitar back to the recording studios when

Archer Records of Memphis releases a new CD of her works, scheduled for May of

2006. This music will be Turkish and Persian inspired. She started playing a

Thomas Humphrey Millennium guitar in 1986 for its strong projection and its

ability to raise high notes with ease,” she says and has stayed with that

guitar. “I am always trying to enlarge my repertoire,” she said. A recent

interest of hers has been the seh-tar, a Persian stringed instrument, and she

played last March to an audience in Wegmore Hall in London. She says that

concert was her most memorable.

Afshar is single and her travels even make having a pet impractical. She does

not have a cellphone because she prefers quiet time and lives on a quiet

residential street in East Memphis for the same reason. To unwind she likes to

walk. Frequently she will have a tape player to accompany her with everything

from music, to motivation or switch the radio to Dr. Laura Schlessinger she

says. She also loves movies. Some of her favorites are scary ones. She gives a

thumbs up to the last movie she watched, “Saw II.”

On a more serious side, being an immigrant has its challenges and those

challenges can be compounded when your country of origin is a place where

political differences have been tense for the last few decades. She does not

feel like she has trouble being accepted by either country whether she is in

the US or in Iran. “I try to stay away from politics. I’m a musician and I have

friends from all kinds of backgrounds and we get along fine,” she says. She

does not feel uneasy about others judging her by her birthplace or her adopted

country, “I never felt that but I know others who have,” Afshar said.

Before moving here her knowledge of Memphis could be summed up in one word- “

nothing.” Since her arrival in a city known a lot for blues, rock, country but

little for classical guitar, she has learned an appreciation of the blues. She

says some of her favorites are Andy Cohen and William Lee Ellis. The globe-

trotting musician has seen almost everywhere. Despite her travels around the

world and a resume’ that could get her a professorship to almost any school,

Memphis is home. New York and San Francisco were too noisy and crowded.

Tallahassee was too small. “Memphis has a lot of character and soul. I value

that soul and all of that when I see it,” she said.

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