Photo by Bob Christy, ’95

Ever since Emeritus Professor of Music Halim El-Dabh, 86, was a child in Egypt, he has been intrigued by the world of music.

 

VIDEO: CLASSROOM BECOMES A VILLAGE
Watch scenes from El-Dabh's African music and dance class as the emeritus professor discusses his global music research and theories about music and our connection to the universe.

PODCAST: EL-DABH UNABRIDGED
Listen to the full Halim El-Dabh interview, in which the legendary musician and educator further discusses his theories about the power of music and his world travels. .

LIFE OF A LEGEND
Keep reading about Halim El-Dabh, the legendary musician, research and educator at Kent State University, on his faculty Web page with the Department of Pan-African Studies.

The Science of Sound

Composer’s research spans the globe, bridges cultures

In a small southern province of Ethiopia called Sidamo, the word has already spread. The governor announced the arrival of the eminent professor and the preparations have begun.

Each community member, young and old, prepares a special song for the honored guest.

Village men blow into 12-foot vertical instruments built from bamboo stalks topped by ram’s horns. The instruments’ buzz cuts through the air, resounding like trumpets.

Halim El-Dabh, University Professor from Kent State University, joins the village festivities, relishing the sights and sounds of the welcome.

“Everyone — the whole town — was coming in from all directions. The flutes were playing, and they fit the notes together like a bell choir, each member playing its own special note, staggered and interlocking,” says El-Dabh, reminiscing. “It said something about how they worked together to create the music.”

On a warm day in August 2007, El-Dabh is transported back in time to that day more than 50 years ago in Ethiopia, via digital music recordings and photos.

Another rare recording from the trip revitalizes the song of a Dorze village girl, performed especially for him. The richness of her voice penetrates the air as if she were standing and singing for him today.

Sitting in suit and tie, legs crossed, hands folded, El-Dabh grins, accompanying the recording with a soft hum. Boxes brimming with large yellow envelopes — manuscripts and correspondence detailing the past 60 years — surround him in an office in the Lincoln Building at Kent State, the new (temporary) home of the Department of Pan-African Studies. While the smell of fresh paint permeates portions of the building, two rooms are secured and organized for El-Dabh’s treasures: instruments including a piano and a derabucca (a ceramic drum), photos of El-Dabh’s children and filing cabinets full of music and memories, accumulated over years of research and travel.

Music for a lifetime and beyond

The new space serves as a working archive for El-Dabh, emeritus professor, composer, performer, ethnomusicologist, forefather of electronic music, Egypt’s foremost living composer of classical music and one of the major composers of the 20th century. Thanks to four of El-Dabh’s students and admirers over the past almost 20 years — including, currently, David Badagnani, a doctoral student who is writing his dissertation about El-Dabh’s music and who has worked an estimated 5,000 hours since 2003 to organize and assemble his works — the archive to honor his accomplishments is slowly coming to fruition.

The opportunity to work and learn more about El-Dabh was too good an offer to refuse, says Badagnani.

“I was always very interested in contemporary composers like John Cage and Igor Stravinsky, but when I came to Kent State everyone told me that there was someone here who is right up there with these guys, and who knew all of them, and whose music was just as good as theirs,” Badagnani says. “Since I didn’t get the opportunity to work with any of them, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to work with El-Dabh.”

Like every composer of his stature, El-Dabh needs an archive of his work so any scholar or musician wanting to study or play his music can do so.

Badagnani’s systematic organization of the manuscripts, research and related information will allow El-Dabh to “experience through others my experiences,” says El-Dabh.

While the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Library of Congress are among the interested parties vying for El-Dabh’s archive, he wants to ensure that wherever his collection ends up, it isn’t simply “housed.”

“I don’t want things to be buried like in a library. I want to revitalize it, to make it alive,” he says.

El-Dabh, 86, yearns to disseminate his knowledge, and the archive, which he considers the “nucleus” for a projected institute of his work, will allow him the pleasure of vicariously reliving musical experiences via the recordings and other artifacts from his research trips, while savoring the culture and people behind the instruments and sounds.

The Egyptian-born composer has spent his life capturing the sound of culture, conducting musical field research and recording in 20 of the 53 countries in Africa, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Ereitrea, Senegal, Mali and Niger, as well as in Brazil, Mexico and Jamaica. As an ethnomusicologist, he is interested in music that is part of the social tradition of different cultural groups in their pristine rural settings.

“Ethnomusicology is the anthropology of music,” he says. “As an ethnomusicologist you can’t really work in a lab; you have to live with the people.”

El-Dabh says that researchers can gather information by studying tapes, inviting people from the areas being studied into a lab situation or going into the field and really “living it.”

“I chose to plunge myself into the middle of things and said, ‘Here I am. I am not going to presume anything.’ I never recorded anything unless the local people asked me to record. Having the tape recorder automatically changes the culture’s perception. You are perceived more as a person from an outside society looking in on them as they are looking at you,” he says.

Conducting research independently is key, El-Dabh says, because it made him depend on his environment.

“When I traveled to the middle of a village, I had no one to back me. I always preferred to travel alone rather than with a group. As an individual you are vulnerable, but this vulnerability can be a great asset in that the local people don’t view you as a threat; in my experience they nearly always embraced me as an individual showing interest in their culture,” El-Dabh says.

He said he found that the way he related to the people in these countries was very important because often the dichotomy between one’s perceived social concept and the realities of life in the field “will hit you in the face” during the research experience, he says with a laugh.

“I had that experience once with someone who was traveling with me in Niger, who became increasingly uncomfortable with the realities of village life. In the midst of this situation, all of your training and your entire concept of social relationships collapses; you are in a sea of unknowing, in a completely different culture. You start asking yourself ‘Will I sit down to eat?’ ‘Will I sleep on the ground?’ ‘Will I stay in a house?’ ‘Is the water clean and safe?’ ‘Can I do this now?’ All of that. You discover yourself, in a way, when you realize that you aren’t only studying someone else; you begin to learn about yourself.”

“Through this, I learned that I am. That I am you. That the world is interconnected. That is reality. I am everybody. I am the experience of everybody because we are connected. It’s really amazing when you think about it.”

African treasures, greater than gold

As a consultant for the Smithsonian Institution from 1973 to 1981, El-Dabh collected music from Africa to bring back to Washington, D.C.

The traditions of African music are so advanced, but are unfortunately clouded by the notion that the continent is backward, El-Dabh says.

“In reality, they are much more advanced in understanding the depth of music than we are,” he says.

In his view, the treasures of African traditional music are unlimited. They combine sounds, instruments and voices as part of their daily life.

As part of his consulting, El-Dabh brought 15 Ekonda women from a forested region of western Zaire to Washington, D.C. to sing in their unique chorus style at the 1976 Festival of American Folklife, which was held to celebrate the nation’s bicentennial and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.

“It puzzled everybody. The harmonies they used are very different; they create harmonies and sound relationships that we don’t even think about.

“Usually, we know a little bit about Africa here, so we calcify it, freeze it and generalize it. It’s a huge continent, three times the size of the United States, and we generalize and say ‘well, this is African dance’ or ‘this is African music,’ but each region has great depth.”

When El-Dabh traveled to Egypt to record, he took in a new expression of music every 20 miles.

“Our relationship with Africa is in diamonds and gold, in resources and oil, and we have a blindfold to our development. We are still infants. We have high technology but we are distracted by it; it is not really taking us to our own depths.

“We need to look at music in a multifaceted way. Break away from convention,” he says. “We are stuck with the idea that ‘this is it.’ My research involves the creative transformation of the dynamics that come out of this continent and the sound it creates.”

The magic of sound

El-Dabh credits two life experiences with sound as having a significant impact on his life and musical work.

Born Halim Abdul Messieh El Dabh in 1921 in Egypt, El-Dabh recalls hearing sounds at just seven days old.

Many years later, in 1955, while living in a summer home in Newton, Mass., waiting for his pregnant wife to give birth to their child, El-Dabh was struck by a bolt of lightning while gathering metal chairs on the patio. According to his former wife, the sound that emanated from El-Dabh when he was hit “was so huge,” he says.

“Half of my body was constantly numb for a month. The buzzing sensation I felt within my body during that period was like another form of sound,” he adds.

Like many of El-Dabh’s other experiences, facing death became inspiration for a composition, “The Miraculous Tale,” which included saxophone and drum (derabucca) and was performed in Boston by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on his 86th birthday. The first movement, for saxophone, told of his face-off with lightening.

El-Dabh’s fascination with sound formed the basis of a presentation called “Waveforms and the Magic of Ethnodynamics,” which he delivered at Columbia University in January 2006. The address was based on his belief that the musical cultures of Africa are magical, and that the people there have an advanced sense of sound aesthetics.

“In the United States, we’re already conditioned because of the technology of hearing. We have telephones, cell phones and televisions, but all of these transmissions constrict our listening ability and our output of sound,” he says.

“The word is very powerful. I am sure the sound I made when I was struck by lightening was not a voice of fear, but maybe a voice of action or anguish. Fear has an entirely different vibration that drains the vitality of a person or a nation.”

There is an enormity of things to consider when discussing sound, he says.

“Everything is sound. That is why music is so important. To me music is everything: It’s joy, it’s entertainment, it’s sociological relationships, it’s economics and social dynamics,” he explains.

If he could simply record what a majority of people hear every day, El-Dabh said that he would be able to forecast what kind of economic condition the person will be living with in the next year.