Musicians - Halim El-Dabh

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	Musicians - Halim El-Dabh

Halim El-Dabh (b. Cairo, Egypt, March 4, 1921) is an Egyptian-born U.S. composer, performer, ethnomusicologist, and educator.

Trained in agricultural engineering at Fuad I University (now Cairo University), he achieved notoriety in Egypt for his innovative compositions and piano technique. Following a well received 1949 performance at the All Saints Cathedral in Cairo, he was invited by an official of the U.S. embassy to study in the United States.

Coming to the United States in 1950 on a Smith-Mundt Fulbright fellowship, El-Dabh studied composition with John Donald Robb and Ernst Krenek at the University of New Mexico, with Francis Judd Cooke at the New England Conservatory of Music, with Aaron Copland, Irving Fine, and Luigi Dallapiccola at the Berkshire Music Center, and with Irving Fine at Brandeis University.

El-Dabh soon became a part of the New York new music scene of the 1950s, alongside such like-minded composers as Henry Cowell, John Cage, Edgard Varèse, and Alan Hovhaness. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1961.

Among El-Dabh's works are four ballet scores for Martha Graham, including her masterpiece Clytemnestra (1958), as well as One More Gaudy Night (1961), A Look at Lightning (1962), and Lucifer (1975). Many of his compositions draw on Ancient Egyptian themes or texts, and one such work is his orchestral/choral score for the Sound and Light show at the site of the Pyramids at Giza, which has been performed there each evening since 1961.

El-Dabh's primary instruments are the piano and darabukha (an Egyptian goblet- or vase-shaped hand drum with a body made of fire-hardened clay), and consequently many of his works are composed for these instruments. In 1958 he performed the demanding solo part in the New York City premiere of his Fantasia-Tahmeel for darabukha and string orchestra (probably the first orchestral work to feature this instrument), with an orchestra under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. In 1959 he composed several works for an ensemble of percussion instruments from India, for the New York Percussion Trio.

Also a pioneer in the field of electronic music, El-Dabh first conducted experiments in sound manipulation with wire recorders in Cairo in 1944. In 1959, he was invited by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. His electronic drama Leiyla and the Poet (released in 1964 on the LP Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center) is considered a classic of the genre.

Like Béla Bartók before him, El-Dabh has also conducted numerous research trips in various nations, recording and otherwise documenting traditional musics and using the results to enrich his compositions and teaching. From 1959 to 1964 the most significant of these trips included investigations of the musics across the length and breadth of Egypt and Ethiopia, with later fieldwork being conducted in Mali, Senegal, Niger, Guinea, Zaire, Brazil, and several other nations. During the 1970s, El-Dabh served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution and conducted research on the traditional puppetry of Egypt and Guinea.

El-Dabh served as associate professor of music at Haile Selassie I University (now Addis Ababa University) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, professor of African studies at Howard University (1966-69), and professor of music and pan-African studies at Kent State University from (1969-91); he continues to teach courses in African studies there on a part time basis. Among the awards and honors he has received are two Fulbright awards (1950 and 1967), three MacDowell Colony residencies (1954, 1956, and 1957), two Guggenheim Fellowships (1959-60 and 1961-62), two Rockefeller Foundation fellowships (1961 and 2001), a Meet-the-Composer grant (1999), an Ohio Arts Council grant (2000), and an honorary doctorate (Kent State University, 2001).

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