Halim El Dabh © James Vaughan
Halim El-Dabh
Composer and ethnomusicologist Halim El-Dabh was born in 1921 in Cairo. He is a pioneer of electronic music and conducted his first sound experiments in 1944. In 1950 he went to the USA, studied native American music as well as composition with Aaron Copland and Irving Fine at Berkshire Music Center in Massachusetts. At the end of the 1950s, El-Dabh worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York. He composed electronic music, operas, symphonies, chamber music works and ballet music for Martha Graham. His ethnomusicological research produced Arab, African and even Ancient Egyptian influences on his music. From 1969 to 1991 he was a professor at Kent State University Hugh A. Glauser School of Music in Ohio.