[NEohioPAL] Halim El-Dabh 4,087 Birthday Party
Standing Rock Cultural Arts
info at standingrock.net
Tue Feb 12 09:22:14 PST 2008
Greetings,
WHO: Standing Rock Cultural Arts is honored to present
WHAT: Celebration of Halim El-Dabh’s 4,087th Birthday!
-Halim is a professor emiritus at Kent State University
-performance by Brian Klemmp and The Kent African Drum Community
-performance of "Ahpep and Ra" by Brian Thomas
WHEN: Tuesday, March 4, 2008 7:30pm
WHERE: North Water Street Gallery 257 N. Water St., Kent
MORE INFO: 330-673-4970 or info at standingrock.net
ADMISSION: Free
HALIM’S WEBSITE: www.halimeldabh.com
Halim continues to astound the world with his everlasting effervescence,
avant garde compositions, and amazing vitality.
We are honored and privileged to celebrate his birthday here in Kent,
Ohio, once again.
Come join us in celebrating the birthday and creative spirit of one of
the world's greatest living composers.
Standing Rock Cultural Arts
257 N. Water St.
Kent, OH 44240
330-673-4970
www.standingrock.net
HALIM EL-DABH
BIOGRAPHY:
(b. Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh, Cairo, 4 March 1921)
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 an international music conference organized by King
Fuad in Cairo. 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 in New Mexico, he began studies with Aaron Copland
and Irving Fine 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, John Cage, Alan Hovhaness, Leonard Bernstein,
Edgard Varèse, Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Ernst K_enek, and
Luigi Dallapiccola. 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 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. El-Dabh’s
orchestral/choral score for the light show at the pyramids of Giza has
been played there each evening since 1961, and is probably his most
frequently heard work. His Opera Flies (1971) is the only opera to have
been composed on the theme of the Kent State tragedy of May 1970.
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.
In his works, El-Dabh frequently draws on his Egyptian heritage, as in
Mekta' in the Art of Kita' (1955), The Eye of Horus (1967), Ptahmose and
the Magic Spell (1972), Ramesses the Great (Symphony no. 9) (1987), and
many others. He has created new systems of notation for the derabucca,
and has revived interest in ancient Egyptian 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, and other nations.
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 1959 he was invited by Otto Luening and Vladimir
Ussachevsky to join the first group of composers at the newly set up
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York, where 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 long-awaited CD compilation of many of these pioneering
electronic works, entitled Crossing Into the Electric Magnetic, was
released in 2001 by Without Fear Recordings. 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.
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; and
Ogún: Let Him, Let Her Have the Iron (2001), for soprano and chamber
ensemble. His most recent project, the opera/theater piece Blue Sky
Transmission: A Tibetan Book of the Dead, was presented in September
2002 in Cleveland, Ohio and in New York.
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 workshops for
children. Presently, El-Dabh is an adjunct professor at 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, and drama 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 Innova 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, the New England
Conservatory of Music, and Brandeis University. 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. 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 eighty-first
birthday with a series of four concerts of his music at the recently
reconstructed Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Library of Alexandria) in
Alexandria, Egypt.
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 September 2005, he was the
featured performer and presenter at the Unyazi Festival of Electronic
Music in Johannesburg and Soweto, South Africa, the first festival of
electronic music on the African continent. 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. 2006 New Works included the opera, “Thamos, King of
Egypt” and “The Symphony for 1000 Drums” performed in early July in
Public Square in Downtown Cleveland.
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.
David Badagnani
2007
Keeping track of this dynamic and prolific compser has been no easy task
and thank you David Badagnani for do his best to document Halim's
illustrious career.
Two recent Halim Performances include one sponsored by The Rocky River
Chamber Music Society at The West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church,
where Halim premiered his new work, "The Pomegranate Concerto" on
November 19, 2007.
And most recently, Halim has just returned from Boston where The New
England Conservatory celebrated him and performed a reworked version of
Halim's masterpiece, "Clytemnestra". This opera ballet was originally
performed in 1958 by The Martha Graham ballet company. (see above)
Of further interest: on Sunday, May 20, 2007, El-Dabh
received an honorary doctor of music degree
from the New England Conservatory, his alma matter
(M.M., 1953).
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