| Contents |
From childhood to young manhood -- Denver, New Mexico, and Boston -- Massachusetts and New York -- Egypt, New York, and Ethiopia -- Greece, Germany, and Washington, D.C. -- The Hawthorne school and Kent State University -- Kent, Ohio -- Retirement. |
| Abstract |
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 Sound and Light of the Pyramids of Giza, a spectacle that captures the mystery of the ancient structures in narration, lights, and music and 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 the ballets Clytemnestra and Lucifer. Not interested in a life of fame and recognition, El-Dabh chose to leave New York to conduct musicological research in Egypt and Ethiopia. Although this book 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. |
