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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 President Gamal 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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