On this day in 1921, Halim Abdel Messieh el-Dabh was born, and he would grow to become a musical genius, composing music years before it became common in Europe and America.
The youngest of nine children, el-Dabh was born into a large Coptic family in Sakakini, Cairo, although the family was originally from Abutig in Asyut. El-Dabh was always drawn to music, studying piano at the Szulc Conservatory in Cairo and using sounds in his agricultural work. He went on to study agricultural engineering from Fuad I University (now Cairo University) and graduated in 1945. Throughout his degree he was composing and studying music.
Long before electronic music became mainstream in Europe or America, a Coptic composer in Cairo had already begun experimenting with recorded sound as raw compositional material. In 1944, el-Debh composed the earliest known work of tape music (musique concrete) titled ‘The Expression of Zaar’. El-Debh burrowed a recorder from the Middle East Radio office and went to the streets of Cairo to record a zaar ritual (satanic exorcism) and edited the taped music. He presented the piece publicly at an art gallery event in Cairo, and it was so popular it was then performed in 1949 at All Saints Cathedral.
It was transformative for compositional music, and el-Debh was then invited by the US embassy to study in the United States as he was awarded a Fullbright fellowship. El-Debh studied composition at the University of New Mexico, the New England Conservatory of Music, the Berkshire Music Center, and Brandeis University.
In 1959, el-Debh worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, America’s oldest center for electronic and computer music research. He was one of its first outside composers and produced influential work there throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
The Washington Post later described him as “a modern composer of stature and accomplishment.”
El-Debh would go on to compose four major ballet scores for the legendary American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, including her ballet masterpiece Clytemnestra (1958). Grantham was an incredibly famous American ballet dancer and choreographer, creating the ‘Grantham technique’ and being the first dancer to perform at the White House, travel as a cultural ambassador, and achieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom with Distinction, the highest American civil award.
El-Debh was heavily influenced by his Coptic identity, a characteristic that is often erased when remembering him. He was reportedly “captivated by the liturgical music of his family’s Coptic Christian tradition”. Some of his works include ‘Michael and the Dragon’ clearly a piece focused on the Archangel Michael.
Coptic liturgy and the Coptic identity are respectively strong continuums of Phraonic music and a Pharaonic identity. It is likely that his Coptic identity gave him strong roots in his indigenous identity connected to Ancient Egypt. Another Pharoanic piece he composed was ‘The Reappearance of the Lotus Flower’. Whilst a young man, El-Debh was inspired by Nasser’s secular pan-Arabism but became disillusioned when he saw its failure to act against the persecution of the Coptic people.
In an interview with The Christian Science Monitor in 1957, he said:
“I stand in the 20th century, and I experience 20th-century phenomena, but the roots of ancient times are in me. I use their insights to understand the West and contribute to its music.”
To this day, since 1961, if you were to attend the Sound and Light show at the Giza pyramids in the evening, the orchestral and choral score for the performance was composed by El-Debh.
El-Dabh’s primary instruments were the piano and the darabukha. But more than any instrument, his medium was synthesis, mixing the ancient and modern, Egypt and America, ritual and technology, liturgy and experimentation.
El-Debh would go on to extensively travel across Egypt, Ethiopia, Mali, Senegal, Niger, Guinea, Zaire, and Brazil, dedicated to ethnomusicological study. He served as Associate Professor of Music at Addis Ababa University and later as Professor at Howard University and Kent State University. Over his lifetime he garnered vast achievements including two Fullbright awards, three MacDowell Colony residencies, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and two honorary doctorates.
In the United States, during the 1950s and 1960s, he was also a strong supporter of the African-American community and an advocate for civil rights and anti-racist thought. His worldview was rooted in civilisational depth but oriented toward justice in the present.
El-Dabh passed away in the US at the age of 96, on the 2 September 2017.
