Hamza El Din (1929-2006)
Bob Shingleton of On An Overgrown Path writes:
Sunday, June 28, 2015
Music as a bridge between form and the formless
It was only when I stood on the Aswan High Dam and looked south across Lake Nasser that I really understood the tragedy of the Nubian people.
Beneath more than 2000 square miles of water lie the Nubian homelands
that were flooded when the dam was built in the 1960s, and between the
dam and Aswan are the soulless villages
that the Nubians were resettled in. Hamza El Din (1929-2006) - seen
above - made it his mission to preserve the Nubian culture that was
being extinguished by the waters of Lake Nasser. He was born in the
Nubian village of Toshka which was flooded when the High Dam was built.
After training as an electrical engineer he went on to study Arabic
music in Cairo and Western music at the Academy of Santa Celia in Rome
before moving to the West Coast of the States. He played at the 1964
Newport Folk Festival, recorded two albums for Vanguard, jammed with the
Grateful Dead and taught at the the legendary Mills College
in Oakland, California. A collaboration with the Kronos Quartet
followed an introduction by Terry Riley, and Hamza El Din's sparse and
repetitive oud lines are though to have influenced the development of
the minimalist style. His two classic albums are Escalay (The Water Wheel) - seen above - recorded for Nonesuch in 1971, and Eclipse, produced by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart in 1988.
The Nubians practise a syncretic mix of Islam and ancient animism, and Hamza El Din was influenced by Sufi mysticism. Dr H.J. Witteveen
has written that: "Of all the arts music has a particular spiritual
value and meaning, because it helps [us] to concentrate or meditate
independently of thought: and therefore music seems to be the bridge
between form and the formless. This is why music has always played an
important role in Sufism." The Nubian Dhul-Nun al-Misri
(830 CE) was an Egyptian hermetic and Sufi who, according to the
authoritative British Orientalist R A Nicholson, "above all others gave
to the Sufi doctrine its permanent shape". Animistic and shamanistic
elements mix with Islam in the Nubian religion, and the anthropologists
Marlene Dobkin de Rios and Fred Katz have described
how in shamanistic rituals, music provides "pathways and bannisters"
between the familiar form of everyday waking consciousness and the
formless mystery of higher levels of consciousness. That line of
transmission from Hamza El Din to the Minimalists continues through to John Luther Adams. The shamanist rituals of indigenous Alaskans influence John Luther Adams' post-minimalist music - notably in Strange and Sacred Noise - and his best known work Become Ocean has a coincidental but poignant link to the tragedy of the Nubians.
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