16 Facts About Halim El-Dabh

Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh was an Egyptian-American composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, and educator, who had a career spanning six decades.

Halim El-Dabh is particularly known as an early pioneer of electronic music.

Halim El-Dabh first conducted experiments in sound manipulation with wire recorders there in the early 1940s.

Halim El-Dabh soon became a part of the New York new music scene of the 1950s, alongside such like-minded composers as Henry Cowell, John Cage, Edgard Varese, Alan Hovhaness, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks.

Halim El-Dabh worked there sporadically until 1961, creating various tape works, including at least two in collaboration with Luening.

Halim El-Dabh produced eight electronic pieces in 1959 alone, including his multi-part electronic musical drama Leiyla and the Poet, which is considered a classic of the genre and was later released in 1964 on the LP record Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.

Halim El-Dabh's musical style was a contrast to the more mathematical compositions of Milton Babbitt and other serial composers working at the center, with El-Dabh's interest in ethnomusicology and the fusion of folk music with electronic sounds making his work stand out for its originality.

Halim El-Dabh helped introduce an "Egyptian folk sensibility" to Western avant-garde music.

Halim El-Dabh served as associate professor of music at Haile Selassie I University in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, professor of African studies at Howard University, and professor of music and Pan-African studies at Kent State University ; he continued to teach courses in African studies there on a part-time basis until 2012.

Halim El-Dabh is one the best known composers of Coptic descent and his works are highly regarded in Egypt, where he was considered the foremost living composer among that nation's "second generation" of contemporary composers.

Halim El-Dabh was invited back to his homeland in April 2002 for a festival of his music at the newly constructed Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt; most of the compositions presented were heard by the Egyptian public for the first time.

Halim El-Dabh was a frequent performer and speaker at both the WinterStar Symposium and the Starwood Festival, where he performed with lifelong friend and master drummer Babatunde Olatunji in 1997, and where El-Dabh's concert of traditional sacred African music was recorded in 2002.

Halim El-Dabh was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.

Halim El-Dabh was noted for his support for the African American community, and his activism on behalf of civil rights, which he says were motivated by his own experiences of racism.

Halim El-Dabh had two children with Hyde, his daughters Shadia and Amira, and one child with Jaken, his son Habeeb.

Halim El-Dabh died at his home in Kent, Ohio on 2 September 2017, at the age of 96.