KABUL, Afghanistan — Every night, Mohsen, a slight, awkward 13-year-old boy, goes home from school to an orphanage here and does something that would probably have been impossible a dozen years ago: he practices his violin before going to bed.

The instrument, he said, has become his closest friend. “It has a sad voice,” he said.

All such voices, happy or sad, were banned by the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, when they imposed their extremist vision of Islam on Afghanistan, a country with a long and rich musical tradition. Musicians were beaten, instruments destroyed, cassette tapes smashed.

But since 2010, an Afghan music scholar trained in Australia, aided by a Juilliard-educated violinist and with government backing, has kept a small music school going in Kabul, putting musical instruments into the hands of street kids and striving to make space for girls in a country where education is often denied them.

The very existence of the school, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, is a significant achievement. Now it is sending a group of youngsters, ages 9 to 21, to the United States for a 13-day tour. They arrive on Sunday, with performances scheduled for the Kennedy Center in Washington (on Thursday) and Carnegie Hall (on Feb. 12), not to mention an ice-skating trip to Yonkers and a visit to “The Lion King” on Broadway.