HALIM EL-DABH

Composer, performer, ethnomusicologist

Performance: Symphony for 1,000 Drums

Composer, performer, ethnomusicologist, and educator Halim El-Dabh is internationally regarded as Egypt’s foremost living composer of classical music, and one of the major composers of the twentieth century. His numerous musical and dramatic works have been performed throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Among his compositions are eleven operas, four symphonies, numerous ballets, concertos, and orchestral pieces, works for band and chorus, film scores, incidental music for plays, chamber and electronic works, music for jazz and rock band, works for young performers, and pieces for various combinations of African, Asian, and Western instruments.

His extensive ethnomusicological researches, conducted on several continents, have led to unique creative syntheses in his works, which, while utilizing contemporary compositional techniques and new systems of notation, are frequently imbued with Near Eastern, African, or Ancient Egyptian aesthetics.

Born into a musical family in Cairo, El-Dabh studied piano and derabucca (goblet-shaped ceramic drum), and began composing at an early age. Although trained for a career as an agricultural engineer, his musical talent and immersion in Egypt’s cosmopolitan musical life (including village drumming and local festivals, Arabic and European classical music, and the jazz clubs of Alexandria) increasingly led him toward a life in music. An early introduction to contemporary music came in 1932, when the young El-Dabh was able to meet the composers Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith at the Congrès du Caire, an international music conference organized by King Fuad in Cairo. In the 1940s he studied classical piano at the Conservatoire of Joseph Szulc and won composition and piano competitions held at the Cairo Opera House. In 1946 he was asked by Hussein Helmy al-Muhandes to compose music for the Mohammed Abdel Gawad film Azhar wa Ashwak (starring Yehya Shaheen and Hind Rostom), and his piano trio Homage to Mohamed Ali El-Kebir was presented on the Cairo Broadcasting radio station in 1949.

By 1949, El-Dabh had gained such notoriety for his avant-garde compositions and piano playing—among both the general public and the royal family—that the cultural attachés of various nations began to invite him to pursue further musical studies in their countries. El-Dabh chose to apply to study music in the United States, and was one of only seven Egyptians (out of 500 applicants) to receive a Fulbright grant in that year.

Arriving in the United States in the summer of 1950 (and later acquiring U.S. citizenship), El-Dabh traveled to the Aspen Music Center in Colorado, where he met and assisted Igor Stravinsky. After researching Native American music and studying composition with John Donald Robb and Ernst Krenek in New Mexico, he began studies with Aaron Copland, Irving Fine, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Leonard Bernstein at the Berkshire Music Center in Massachusetts. Later, in New York’s vibrant musical scene, he developed close associations with many prominent and like-minded figures in twentieth-century music, including Henry Cowell, Alan Hovhaness, John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Otto Luening, and Vladimir Ussachevsky.

During the 1950s and ’60s, El-Dabh was grouped with fellow composers Hovhaness, Lou Harrison, Colin McPhee, Paul Bowles, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks, under the rubric “Les Six d’Orient” (the term coined by Glanville-Hicks), representing the vanguard of contemporary composers writing music inspired by musics of the East.

Having also achieved renown for his virtuoso derabucca playing, in December 1958 El-Dabh played the solo part in the premiere of his Fantasia-Tahmeel (for derabucca and strings), with the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. Also in 1958, he began working closely with the great American choreographer Martha Graham, composing the epic opera-ballet Clytemnestra (1958), which is considered Graham’s masterpiece; he eventually composed three more ballet scores for her (A Look at Lightning, One More Gaudy Night, and Lucifer). His Opera Flies (1971) is the only opera to have been composed on the theme of the Kent State tragedy of May 1970.

In his works, El-Dabh frequently draws on his Egyptian heritage, as in Mekta’ in the Art of Kita’ (1955-56), The Eye of Horus (1967), Ptahmose and the Magic Spell: The Osiris Ritual (1972), Ramesses the Great (Symphony no. 9) (1987), and many others. El-Dabh’s 1960 orchestral/choral score for the Son et lumière light and narration show at the pyramids of Giza (recorded the same year by the ORTF of Paris) was composed at the request of then-Egyptian Minister of Culture Sarwat Okasha, by order of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It has been played there each evening since 1961, and is probably his most frequently heard work.

El-Dabh has also created new systems of notation for the derabucca, and has revived interest in Ancient Egyptian (Pharaonic) language and musical notation. Many of his works from the 1960s on are also heavily influenced by West African traditional musics, such as Black Epic (1968) and Kyrie for the Bishop of Ghana (1968), and still other works bear the influences of the musics of Ethiopia, Brazil, India, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and other nations.

In addition to his compositional activity, El-Dabh has also conducted musical field research and recording throughout Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as in Eritrea, Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire, Central African Republic, Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Morocco, Greece, Macedonia, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Mexico, and Jamaica. He has also studied the Native American cultures of the American Southwest and the African American cultures of the southeastern U.S. El-Dabh is also considered an expert on the subject of traditional Egyptian and African puppetry, and has helped to present a number of such puppetry troupes in the United States. While in Ethiopia (1962-64), he formed Orchestra Ethiopia, the first pan-Ethiopian performing group.

Also a pioneer in the field of electronic music, El-Dabh began early sonic experiments with wire recorders at the Middle East Radio Station of Cairo in 1944. In 1958 he was invited by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky to join the first group of composers at the newly organized Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City, where, through 1961, he created a number of significant works. His Leiyla and the Poet (1959-61), recorded for Columbia Masterworks in 1964, is considered a classic of the genre. A CD compilation of many of these pioneering electronic works, entitled Crossing Into the Electric Magnetic, was released in 2001. In 2005, El-Dabh was commissioned by the American Music Center’s Siday Music on Hold Program to compose a new electroacoustic work to be used for the American Music Center’s telephone system, and later that year he was honored in Johannesburg, South Africa at the Unyazi Festival, Africa’s first-ever festival of electronic music, as “the father of electronic music in Africa.” He continues to create electronic works and to perform on electronic instruments such as the theremin and sine wave generators.

El-Dabh’s recent works include the ballet score In the Valley of the Nile (1999), composed for the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company; the piano concerto Surrr-Rah (2000), written for pianist Tuyen Tonnu; Ogún: Let Him, Let Her Have the Iron (2001), for soprano and chamber ensemble; the opera/theater piece Blue Sky Transmission: A Tibetan Book of the Dead; a symphonic work, The Quest; the opera Thamos, King of Egypt (2006); The Miraculous Tale, for alto saxophone and derabucca (2006), and a cello concerto, The Invisible Bridge (2007).

El-Dabh has served on the faculty of Kent State University’s School of Music since 1969, and has also taught at Haile Selassie I University in Ethiopia (1962-64) and Howard University in Washington, D.C. (1966-69) He is one of only eight Kent State University faculty members to hold the title of University Professor, Kent State’s highest faculty distinction, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award (1988). Retiring in 1991, Emeritus Professor El-Dabh continues to teach and compose prolifically, in addition to conducting lectures and workshops for both adults and children. Presently, El-Dabh is a professor in Kent State University’s Department of Pan-African Studies, where he teaches a course entitled African Cultural Expression. In this course, students are immersed in and participate in a holistic experience of music, art, song, dance, drama, musical instrument making, and mask making, as it is found in the environment of a pristine African village (which El-Dabh experienced during his years of living in villages while traveling throughout Africa).

El-Dabh’s music is published by C. F. Peters, and his works have been recorded by the Columbia Masterworks, Folkways, Egyptian Ministry of Culture and National Guidance, Auricular, Pointless Music, Luna Bisonte, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, NCG, Without Fear, Tedium House (Bananafish), Association for Consciousness Exploration, and Reference labels. There are entries on El-Dabh in nearly all major musical reference works, and his work is discussed in books by Akin Euba, Ashenafi Kebede, Adel Kamel, Gardner Read, and others. The first-ever biography of the composer, The Musical World of Halim El-Dabh, by Kent State University professor Denise A. Seachrist, was published by the Kent State University Press in April 2003.

El-Dabh holds degrees from Cairo University (1945), the New England Conservatory of Music (1953), and Brandeis University (1954). He has served as a cultural and ethnomusicological consultant to the Smithsonian Institution’s Folklife Program (1974-1981), and his numerous grants and awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships (1959-60 and 1961-62), two Fulbright Fellowships (1950 and 1967), two Rockefeller Fellowships (1961 and 2001), the Cleveland Arts Prize (1990), a Meet-the-Composer grant (1999), and an Ohio Arts Council grant (2000). In May 2001 he received an honorary doctorate from Kent State University, and in May 2007 he will receive a second honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory. In 2001, the composer celebrated his eightieth birthday with a festival of his music, which included more than 15 concerts and lectures, both in the U.S. and around the world. In March 2002 he was invited to celebrate his 81st birthday with a series of four concerts of his music at the recently reconstructed Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Library of Alexandria) in Alexandria, Egypt, as well as a composer’s symposium organized by Dr. Samha El-Kholy at the Ministry of Culture in Cairo.

In 2004, El-Dabh was honored by the Society for American Music with a panel session and interview-recital at the organization’s conference in Cleveland, Ohio. In August 2005, El-Dabh was the keynote speaker at a symposium dedicated to the late Nigerian composer Chief Fela Sowande at Churchill College in Cambridge, England. In October 2005 he was the featured composer at a symposium on African and Asian music at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China. 2006, his 85th year, featured numerous performances of his music in the United States, Egypt, and Europe, with a festival taking place at Kent State University.

In March 2007, he was the focus of a week-long series of concerts and lectures in Boston, at the New England Conservatory, Tufts University, and Harvard University, and in August 2007 his works for chorus and African percussion were performed by the men’s choir of Oxford University at the International Symposium and Festival on Composition in Africa and the Diaspora organized by Akin Euba, at Cambridge University in England.

Discography/Audio:

1957 – Sounds of New Music. New York: Folkways.

1964 – Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. New York: Columbia Masterworks.

1989 – The Self in Transformation: A Panel Discussion. Cassette tape: Features Donald Michael Kraig, Jeff Rosenbaum, Joseph Rothenberg, and Robert Anton Wilson. ACE.

2000 – Gilbertson, Nancy. Mediterranean Magic. Moravia, New York: Nancy Cody Gilbertson. Includes Mekta’ in the Art of Kita’, Book 3.

2000 – Olatunji Live at Starwood – Babatunde Olatunji & Drums of Passion (guest Halim El-Dabh). CD: Recorded at the 17th Starwood Festival in July 1997. ACE

2001 – El-Dabh, Halim. Crossing Into the Electric Magnetic. Lakewood, Ohio: Without Fear.

2002 – Halim El-Dabh Live at Starwood – Halim El-Dabh (With: Seeds of Time) CD: Recorded at the 22nd Starwood Festival in July 2002. ACE

2002 – El-Dabh, Halim Blue Sky Transmission: A Tibetan Book of the Dead (original cast recording) Cleveland Public Theatre, Halim El-Dabh, and Raymond Bobgan

2006 – Fan, Joel. World Keys. San Francisco, California: Reference Recordings. Includes “Sayera” from Mekta’ in the Art of Kita’, Book 3.
Films

1960 – Yuriko: Creation of a Dance. Features a rehearsal of The Ghost, with score by El-Dabh

1967 – Herostratus. Directed by Don Levy. One scene features audio of El-Dabh’s Spectrum no. 1: Symphonies in Sonic Vibration

2000 – Olatunji Live at Starwood – Babatunde Olatunji & Drums of Passion (guest Halim El-Dabh). DVD: Filmed at the 17th Starwood Festival in July 1997. ACE.

2002 – Halim El-Dabh Live at Starwood – Halim El-Dabh (With: Seeds of Time) DVD: Filmed at the 22nd Starwood Festival in July 2002. ACE.

Email heldabh@yahoo.com for more information about the composer.

Halim El-Dabh’s website