The Frequency of Color: Halim El-Dabh

On Feb. 11, 2011, after an 18-day protest fueled by Egypt’s fed-up youth, President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, ending his decades-long dictatorship. In many ways, this marks a new era in Egypt’s history.

Born in Egypt in 1921, seven years before President Hosni Mubarak and just one year before Egypt gained its independence, Halim El-Dabh proved to be musically adept as a child and was called a prodigy by some. El-Dabh is an emeritus professor of African Ethnomusicology at Kent State University, where he has taught for 42 years.

In Kent, his birthday has become an annual celebration with Standing Rock Cultural Arts. They will celebrate it again this March 4th, when El-Dabh will turn 90. The following story details one aspect of his multifaceted life.

Music in bloom

The air Halim El-Dabh sucked into his infant lungs was laced with sound. The scent of roses lingered at his nostrils as he exhaled, and their frequencies dripped from his ears as he watched his mother sever petals from their thorny stems, turning them into jam.

As a child, El-Dabh was sensitive to all the plants around him, but the flowers’ voices mesmerized him the most. He could sense the symphonies they produced just above his hearing range. Each color had a frequency all its own.

Feeling the vibrations of his surroundings, his tiny hands drummed on an empty water jug as he gazed at Cairo’s landscape. The music fermented in his consciousness as he ran, jumped and danced on the baked ground.

Conceptualizing sound, El-Dabh's then-11-year-old mind applied it to composition for the first time. His first musical piece, Misri-yaat, utilized clusters – similar-sounding keys simultaneously – in order to increase the song’s vibration rather than drown it in pools of its own resonance.

While one of his brothers, Michael, figure skated, Halim played his piece. Quick, jutting notes escaped his piano as his fingers slammed down on its keys. The notes progressed from bliss to intensity as Michael stretched his arms and balanced on one thin metal blade. Notes, which formed their own shapes in Halim’s mind, gave reverberation to, and took it from, the people around him.

That same year, in 1932, Egyptian King Fuad invited everybody who knew anything about music to Cairo. Halim’s brother Bushra said to him, “Hey, let’s go.”

Squinting in the Egyptian sun at the festival, Halim could make out the shape of Bella Bartok’s weighted gaze and Paul Hindemith’s slight sneer. He could not comprehend being in the presence of some of the 20th century’s greatest musicians – so he just listened for enjoyment’s sake.

After the festival, at his brother’s insistence, Halim started to learn formally. He studied at a conservatory a few times a week, yet he decided to become an agriculturist.

Still, music continued to bloom in his mind. 

Unwitting international composer

Sixteen years later, in 1948, still studying occasionally at a conservatory in Cairo, El-Dabh created a piece called It Is Dark and Damp on the Front.

He continued to work as an agriculturalist. Traveling around Upper Egypt, he farmed in places like Zagazig and Beni Suef. While traveling the country, unbeknownst to him, a committee comprised of members from all over the world was meeting to decide the next musician to play at the prestigious All Saints Cathedral.

“What about contemporary Egyptian composers?” Kamal Iskander, one of the committee members, asked.

“We don’t know any,” the committee members replied.

“I know one,” Iskander said. “His name is Halim El-Dabh.”

Shortly after the committee met, there was a knock on Halim’s door. One of the committee members had tracked him down. Halim shared tea with the Englishman, who asked if he could play some of Halim’s music.

The man chose a piece from a mass of compositions scattered all around the piano. But when he tried, he found he couldn’t string together the phrasing – he was overwhelmed.

He went back to the committee, insisting Halim was “the real deal,” and they agreed he would play at the cathedral.

Entering its archway the night of the performance, El-Dabh's nervousness dissipated.

Sitting behind the piano, he pressed the keys and allowed the sound of the first notes of It Is Dark and Damp on the Front to fade before introducing more, slowly building toward a seamless intertwining of manipulated sound.

After his last note, the audience erupted into applause.

And that night, as he slept, ink soaked into the fibers of newspapers as they ran through presses. The headlines waited in stacks for eyes of any language to read: “Halim El-Dabh, international composer.” 

Leaving Egypt

Halim had become famous overnight.

“Why don’t you come to France?” one of the committee members asked him. “Why don’t you come to Italy?” another asked. “Come to the conservatory in Paris.” “Come to England.” The inundation of invitations made his head spin.

Halim never thought about becoming a professional composer. He enjoyed farming and he had a good job. He loved traveling all over Egypt listening to its rich folk music, and he relished the fact that musical traditions changed every 20 miles.

A few months after his performance, he received a letter from the American University in Cairo: “We read the newspaper; would you like to repeat some of your music at our hall?”

Accepting the invitation, he prepared for the show. This time he would be the only person performing.

The show received little press attention other than a brief announcement in the newspaper the day before. Still, the night of the concert people arrived in droves. Sitting and standing, they occupied any space they could to see the farming composer from Upper Egypt.

Halim had never seen so many people. He feared he could not fulfill the crowd’s expectations. It seemed suddenly the world looked at him as a composer and Zagazig’s soil was still caked beneath his nails.

Once he began to play, nothing existed except for him, the music, and his belief of the energy within himself. The vibrations of the audience seemed different than that of the last, and he realized the music also was different this time even though he was playing the same songs.

After the concert, a tall, well-dressed man walked up to him.

“Hey, I’m Mr. Black, I’m the cultural attaché of the U.S. Embassy,” Halim recalled the man saying. “How do you do; I like your music very much. Have you ever thought about going to the United States of America?”

“No,” Halim replied in broken English. “Everybody’s trying to get me to France right now.”

Shortly after their introduction, Mr. Black informed him of an exchange program made possible through funding acquired from scrapped war materials.

“Fill out these forms and come back to me,” he said, handing him the applications. Halim went home, called his brother Salim and asked him to help fill out the forms. But Salim couldn’t understand the bureaucratic language either, so Halim went back to Mr. Black.

“I don’t understand these forms,” he said, growing frustrated. “They’re going to choose seven people from 500 applicants. I’m not gonna be one of seven, no way, don’t count on me …”

“Sit down,” Mr. Black said. “Let me help you.”

So Halim sat and watched as Mr. Black filled out every form. But after failing an English test he knew for sure that he wasn’t meant to go to America.

A few days later, Mr. Black informed El-Dabh that he had indeed been selected to go to America — to Julliard.

“What’s Julliard?” El-Dabh wondered. He'd received an additional grant to study English in Colorado.

The next day, he rushed to the library looking for recordings of American music. The girl working at the counter handed him a stack of Native American LPs, which she assumed represented the sound of mainstream America. Halim took the recordings home and listened to them. What he heard inspired him so much that he decided to attend the University of New Mexico instead of Julliard.

New country, new friends

It was 1950 and the July sun was high in the Denver sky. El-Dabh was in the streets doing a Native American snake dance when he encountered and befriended members of the Denver Symphony Orchestra.

“Oh, you’re a composer,” they said. “Just come to the orchestra from the back door, you don’t have to pay. Just come and see us.”

He watched the concert, absorbing the music intently. After the show, the musicians told him they were going to Aspen to perform there. “Come with us,” they said, inviting Halim on their bus.

The next morning he gazed out over the snow-covered mountains – a landscape unlike anything he’d seen in Egypt.

With his thumb pointed in the direction of the tent, which served as the cultural center, El-Dabh stood on the road, taking the advice of his new friends who went ahead of him to practice.

Soon, a black limousine pulled up and its back window went down. Peering at him was the famous composer Igor Stravinsky, who picked El-Dabh up and took him to the festival. After a short, uphill ride the two parted with El-Dabh thanking Stravinsky.

The realization of color

Two years later, while visiting New York, Halim sat on a subway watching people as they came in and out, going to and from their destinations.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a torn magazine sitting next to him. He picked it up to examine a picture of colors on its glossy page. As he read the words “ancient Egyptian music notations,” his grip tightened and an inner spark ignited the fuel within him. He knew he had found something of value, right there on the subway floor.

After a short trip back to Cairo, Halim settled into an artist community in Rockport, MA. Thinking about colors again, he began using them to teach the neighborhood children how to play the piano and dance. Their parents paid him a small amount of money to do so. But in order to afford his rent, El-Dabh began scribbling messages and sending them to universities: “I’m Halim El-Dabh. I’m in Rockport, Massachusetts. Would you like me to visit your university?”

Traveling all around the country, lecturing and performing earned him enough money to live comfortably. Still, El-Dabh continued to work with the children and the colors they produced. To him, the evolution of his recognition of color represented his stages of awareness. Though he had heard colors rather than see them his whole life, he was becoming increasingly conscious of their frequencies.

He began to paint compositions. The torn color notation article from the subway still wandered in his mind along with memories of the rose petal jam of his infancy and the frequencies he perceived in nature.

Sitting down on the floor, with pigment all around him, he looked at the canvas and delved inward. He started creating with a force that came through him, painting with a flow. When he was finished he read the painting – it sang to him, calling him. The colors were somehow innate; they inspired emotion. These paintings, which had their own lives, poured through him in order to obtain existence. Reading the paintings, he composed. The sounds came to him in a language and not just separate notes, but a collective thing, like clusters of objects – the color of realization.

A career's culmination

In 2006, in Montreal, an audience gathered to hear Halim play his paintings.

Before the concert, Halim guided the sextet he created (The Barking Dog Sextet) to play from color with one of his paintings projected on a huge screen. The crowd engaged in conversation. Someone laughed, a man cleared his throat. The sextet practiced while Halim directed them. A flute cut through the babbling.

“This is a world premier of The Dog Done Gone Deaf,” El-Dabh told the crowd. He dedicated it to the city of Montreal. “According to legend,” he said, “the dog is man’s best friend.”

The audience listened as he continued telling the Native American story of how man fell into the abyss and the dog jumped in after him, risking his own life. But man became bossy and forgot he was in an abyss. This caused the dog to go deaf out of an unwillingness to obey. Still, the dog pushed man out of the abyss because of the mutual realization that they are both creatures of the earth.

“We stand with you, the barking dog sextet. We stand with you, the barking dog sextet," he chanted and barked. “The wisdom is color – color. And we’ll all together … we’re going to breathe. I’m going to ask you to close your eyes.”

The audience breathed with him three times – in and out. Their bodies absorbed a large splotch of red pigment as the music began moving like a sunken ship might – forever, in vibration.

Accompanied by the sextet’s bells, sax and string instruments, in fury and then, again, relaxed, El-Dabh continued guiding breathing between songs so everyone could experience the color frequencies.

“Keep your eyes closed until you hear the first sound that’s realized from the frequencies of color,” he said.

The next song, Canine Wisdom, became manic halfway through. The audience ingested the sound through their ears, the backs and tops of their heads, their jaws – their entire bodies.

Unorganized conceptualization of instrumental color leaked into every orifice in the room. After the music concluded, a green splotch on the screen worked its way through people’s bodies while continuing to stare them in the face.

The audience clapped and shouted as loud as they could. They clapped until the sound of it became its own symphony, propelled by the colors they had absorbed. 

El-Dabh continues to teach African cultural expressions at Kent State University. In the class, he and his students make instruments out of materials such as simple planks of wood and bobby pins. When encountered at the local coffee shops he frequents, he emanates a radiance not typical of an 89-year-old man. Many musicians around the world play his music in honor of him.