Fred Onovwerosuoke: New York Times: Halim El-Dabh, Composer of Martha Graham Ballets, Dies at 96

Halim El-Dabh in an undated photograph. Credit Bob Christy/Kent State University (New York Times)

 

Composer Fred Onovwerosuoke brings this obituary to our attention:

 

The New York Times

 

By MARGALIT FOX  SEPT. 8, 2017

Halim El-Dabh, an Egyptian-American composer best known for the haunting, Eastern-infused ballets he wrote for Martha Graham, died on Sept. 2 at his home in Kent, Ohio. He was 96.

His death was announced by Kent State University, where he was university professor emeritus of music, specializing in composition and African ethnomusicology.

Mr. El-Dabh, who began his professional life as an agricultural engineer before succumbing to his passion for shaping sound, settled in the United States in 1950. In the years that followed, he was a vigorous presence on the East Coast new-music scene, which included composers like Otto Luening and Alan Hovhaness.

But Mr. El-Dabh’s music, critics agreed, was unlike anyone else’s. Hallmarks of his style included melodic fragmentation, rich sonic layering and lyricism combined with judicious dissonance; rhythmic complexity; unusual instrumentation; and strains of the music of Egypt, where he was born and reared, and that of sub-Saharan Africa, where he did extensive fieldwork.

Mr. El-Dabh, who composed hundreds of pieces, including symphonies, concertos, chamber music and vocal works, was also known for compositions that combined Western instruments with Eastern ones, notably the darbuka, a goblet-shaped drum on which he was a skilled performer.

He was also in the vanguard of electronic composition, creating pieces in that medium as early as the 1940s.

Writing about Mr. El-Dabh in 1975, The Washington Post called him “a modern composer of stature and accomplishment.”

Mr. El-Dabh’s most famous composition is almost certainly the score for “Clytemnestra,” one of four ballets for which Ms. Graham commissioned him. The only full-evening-length dance she choreographed, it is widely considered her masterwork, spanning more than two hours and reworking the mythic Greek tragedy of murder and retribution.