Overview

Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh has studied with the giants of 20th-century musical composition and conducting, including Leopold Stokowski, Irving Fine, Leonard Bernstein, and Aaron Copland. El-Dabh's compositions have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, the Cairo Opera House, and the Edinburgh Festival as well as in Amsterdam, Athens, Paris, London, and Rome. His music is well known in his birthplace where some of his compositions are heard in the Sound and Lights of the Pyramids of Giza, a spectacle that captures the mystery of the ancient structures in narration, lights, and music and which is performed daily at the pyramids. In the late 1950s El-Dabh worked with electronic music pioneers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. He was commissioned by choreographer and modern dance innovator Martha Graham to write the music for Clytemnestra and Lucifer. Not interested in a life of fame and recognition, El-Dabh chose to leave New York to conduct musicological reearch in Egypt and Ethopia. Although The Musical World of Halim El-Dabh focuses on his career from his arrival in the U.S. in 1950 to his retirement from the faculty of Kent State University in 1991, his early life in Egypt, its influence on him musically, and his creative life following retirement are also presented. In March of 2002 El-Dabh, who is considered Egypt's most important living composer, presented a concert of electronic and electro-acoustic works and three concerts of his orchestral chamber music in collaboration with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina String Orchestra at the newly reconstructed Bibliotheca Alexandrina (the famous Library of Alexandrina of antiquity, which was destroyed by fire more than 1,600 years ago). The CD accompanying this biography features excerpts of this program as well as other selected musical highlights from El-Dabh's rich career.

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9781306304351

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