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Halim El-Dabh is an Egyptian-born educator and
composer of instrumental and electronic music and epic theatrical
works. He came to the United States in 1950 and, in the mid-1950s,
met Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky, who invited him to work at
the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where he was
affiliated until 1961. He then spent several years in Africa and
eventually returned to the United States where he taught for many
years at Howard University and Kent State University. Now in his 80s,
El-Dabh gives live electronic music concerts all around the world.
This text is based upon a series of conversations on May 23, 2002 and
October 9, 2005.
Early years in Egypt
I grew up in Cairo which was a musically
vibrant place during the 1930s and 1940s. I attended performances by
visiting ensembles such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the La Scala
Opera, ballet and jazz concerts on the Beach of Alexandria. In 1932,
when I was 11 years old, I attended an international celebration in
Cairo, the Congress of Arabic Music, with my thirty year old brother.
It was there that I met composers from Europe, Sudan, Libya, Morocco
and Tunisia, among them Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith.
The highlight for me was discovering the wire recorder, an early
recording device, which became important to me a decade later. I
listened to Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire which I first
heard on gramophone record and Stravinsky's Firebird and
The Rite of Spring. I discovered traditional Egyptian music
and learned that it had elements of drama and advanced instrumental
techniques, such as the imitation of the human voice or animal
sounds. I played drums and when we didn't have drums, pots and pans
and noisemakers. I used to play tone clusters on the strings inside
my brother's piano and I composed my first piano piece, called
Misriyaat, in which I used my hands in various unorthodox ways
to achieve certain unique sounds from the piano.
In 1942, I won the first prize for
composition at the Cairo Opera House and four years later, I began
composing music for movies, beginning with Azhar wa Ashwak
(Roses and Thorns). I was an agricultural student at the time. The
film producer Hussein Helmy El Mohandes used to send a lorry to pick
me up from work, saying "we need you." The director used the effect
of juxtaposing images of the lead actors over footage of my hands
playing piano. I completed It is Dark and Damp on the Front in
1949, which was acclaimed by a Belgian critic, A. J. Patry.
Overnight, I was much in demand and my life changed. There was much
stress and excitement. Up to that time, I never thought of myself as
a composer. I had been working as an agricultural consultant and
composing music just for myself.
I attended Egyptian circumcision rituals,
where people gather together and celebrate with drums and pots and
pans and cymbals. They change their voices with ululations, up and
down. I began to notice that traditional Egyptian musicians also
altered the sounds and timbre of their instruments. This led me to
begin altering and transforming sounds. One day in 1944, my friend
Kamal Iskander and I borrowed a wire recorder from the Middle East
Radio Station in Cairo and attended a traditional women's ritual
called the zar ceremony, in which women chant with various
vocal timbres and intensities in order to call spirits from other
worlds. We had to sneak in with our heads covered like the women,
since men were not allowed in. I recorded the music and brought the
recording back to the radio station and experimented with modulating
the recorded sounds. I emphasized the harmonics of the sound by
removing the fundamental tones and changing the reverberation and
echo by recording in a space with movable walls. I did some of this
using voltage controlled devices. It was not easy to do. I didn't
think of it as electronic music, but just as an experience. I called
the piece Ta'abir al-Zaar, (The Expression of Zaar). A short
version of it has become known as Wire Recorder Piece. At the
time in Egypt, nobody else was working with electronic sounds. I was
just ecstatic about sounds.
After graduating from Fouad I University (now called
Cairo University) in 1945 with a Bachelor of Science degree in
agricultural engineering, I became an agricultural consultant. My
company would send me out to the field to map out plans for large
farms, figuring out what they should plant. I would leave people
behind to do the work and then I would travel through the villages,
where I heard traditional music, dance and religious ceremonies.
Some years later, in 1962, I received a Rockefeller
grant to study Ethiopian music, especially of the Ethiopian church.
As part of this grant, I traveled to Greece and Sudan in 1962,
Ethiopia and Eritrea that year and the next and then back to Greece.
Soon after, I traveled to French-speaking West Africa in 1967, and in
the 1970s, Nigeria, Ghana, Morocco, Guinea, Sudan and the Congo, then
called Zaire. I had visited Sudan and Uganda as a child. In 1959, I
returned to Egypt to compose music for Son et lumière
(Sound and Light), the show that is shown every night at the Pyramids
in Giza, sponsored by the Egyptian government under PresidentGamal
Abdel Nasser. I have visited a total of fifteen African countries.
Discovering the continent as a whole, something that I only really
came to fully appreciate after spending time in New York, was like a
revelation. I explored the relationships between people and their
music and during the 1940s, I became interested in the work of
composer Yusuf Greiss, who brought together Egyptian and Western
influences. I also traveled to Central Asia and Brazil in the
1980s.
The 1950s and early 1960s in the United States
When I came to the United States in 1950, it was
overwhelming. I first went to study English in Denver and then to the
Aspen Music Festival, where I met Igor Stravinsky and became his
assistant for the summer. That same year, I went to Albuquerque and
spent a year in graduate studies at the University of New Mexico. I
briefly studied with Ernst Krenek in the Spring of 1951. During the
Summers of 1951 and 52, I studied at Tanglewood with Aaron Copland,
in 1951, and in 1952, Irving Fine. I had some additional studies with
Luigi Dallapiccola and Leonard Bernstein. Fine guided me to two
colleges in Boston. I completed a degree in composition at the New
England Conservatory in 1953, studying with Francis Judd Cooke and
then a Master of Fine Arts at Brandeis University, in 1954. By 1957,
it was time to go to New York City.
New York City felt like home right away. The City opened its
arms to me and it was just incredible. Within two weeks, I received a
commission to compose a work for Martha Graham. She didn't feel that
it could be ready on time, so instead I began a much larger work for
her that would be performed at a theater on Broadway in 1958. The
result was Clytemnestra, which kept growing until it became a
two-hour ballet dance drama with singers. The music publisher Edward
B. Marks gave me the keys to his family's penthouse. I met Marilyn
Monroe at a party and rode the subway as often as I could just to
hear the screeches of the wheels against the tracks. The sounds
inspired me and I considered them to be musical elements that could
be manipulated and transformed. It was on the subway in 1959 that I
met Edgard Varèse and it turned out that he also enjoyed these
sounds.
In 1957, I met Otto Luening and Vladimir
Ussachevsky at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. I was alone in
the Colony's library one day, plucking wire and twine that I had
attached to the strings of a piano. I was working on the composition
Symphonies in Sonic Vibration: Spectrum no. 1 for extended
piano. The wires were stretched across the room and tied to various
knobs and other fixtures. My ceramic Egyptian darabukha hand
drum was also resting on the piano strings. This gave me an even
wider gamut of sound possibilities. Luening and Ussachevsky happened
to walk into the library while I was performing and they became very
interested in what I was doing. As a result of this encounter, they
offered me a small grant to experiment at their newly formed
electronic music studio in the basement of the McMillin Theatre at
Columbia University. I arrived in 1958 and by 1959, the studio moved
to 125th Street and became known as the Columbia-Princeton Electronic
Music Center.
Columbia-Princeton was a terrific place.
Since each of the composers came from a different culture there was a
refreshing mixture of approaches, yet a unity found in the electronic
medium. Varèse, Ussachevsky, Luening, Milton Babbitt,
Bülent Arel and I all came from different cultural backgrounds.
In my own work, most of which I did in 1959, I brought international
instruments such as 'ud, tabla, Ceylonese drum, bamboo
flutes, and also my own speaking, chanting, and singing voice, both
in my own language and in English. To these I added sine waves,
square waves, and white noise and treated all of the sounds with
various filters, methods of layering the sounds, loops, and voltage
controls, as well as the Philips Black Box and, while working
on a collaboration with Otto Luening entitled Electronic
Fanfare, the RCA Sound Synthesizer. One nice thing about Columbia
was that every Friday the electronic composers and other music
faculty had a cocktail gathering and we talked about performances. We
sometimes drank at local bars around 125th Street, and also at two
clubs in Greenwich Village, the Village Gate and the Five Spot, where
we sometimes did tape music performances.
The electronic drama Leiyla and the
Poet is my best known electronic work from that time. It was
included in the first concert by Columbia-Princeton in 1961, where it
created quite a stir, and also on its first recording in 1964. It is
a modern retelling of the Majnun Leila legend of ancient
Arabic/Persian culture. I had been in Egypt and France and returned
to complete the piece and attend the concert. The audience at that
first concert included many contemporary composers, artists and
dancers, but even so, some responded with nervous laughter and
yelling. Dancer Yuriko Kikuchi, a member of the Martha Graham Dance
Company, told me after the concert: "Your music hit me in my stomach,
so I had to scream!" In general, I found that most people, even
Martha Graham, didn't look favorably upon electronic music. Few
thought of it as a way to create serious art. However, Leiyla and
the Poet has apparently inspired many electronic composers and
popular musicians including Frank Zappa and the West Coast Pop Art
Experimental Band. Young composers Alice Shields and Neil Rolnick
found inspiration in the recording. My work Symphonies in Sonic
Vibration: Spectrum No. 1 was used in a late 1960s experimental
film, Herostratus.
What I loved most about electronic music at
that time was the feeling that I could sculpt sounds. I felt like a
sculptor, taking chunks of sound and chiseling them into something
beautiful. I felt satisfaction and joy in the process of doing it. It
was a great ecstatic feeling and I was excited about sharing it with
others. I hear sound through my body. My body feels it. That's how
actually I can tell whether I like it or not. It's physical. I can
not only hear but see sound, the different shapes, sounds and colors.
This is what attracted me about electronic music.
Life today
After I left New York and went to Ethiopia in
1962, people forgot about me as a composer. I became known as a
musicologist. Now, I'm excited about being rediscovered in my 80s. I
feel habitual ecstasy. I feel grateful to my friends and my success
doesn't go to my ego. People and places inspire me. I live the
moment. I cherish my friends. Inspiration comes to me constantly from
contact with people and with the whole universe. When I go places and
hear different languages and sounds, they enliven me. Sculpting
sounds and composing continues to excite me. In the last five years,
I have traveled to hear my music performed in Alexandria, Egypt;
Johannesburg, South Africa; Cambridge, England; and Beijing, China. I
also continue to love teaching. I like to have fun when I teach. In
my classes, everybody dances, moves and sings.
Many thanks to David Badagnani for his assistance and encouragement.
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