On learning that one of the first electronic works was by an African, Halim El-Dabh

Early last year, I found out — in casual conversation — that one of the first instances of an electronic piece, of ‘music concrète’ in particular, was created by an African, Halim El-Dabh. In Cairo, in 1944.

This was a big moment for me. Immediately, I saw my work in electronic music as simply an extension of African music — which I have always argued, but not always believed myself. El-Dabh’s piece, The Expressions of Zaar, premiered 4 years before Pierre Schaeffer’s first premiere. I recall back to my [chaotic] semester at IRCAM. Not once had I heard about El-Dabh, but many times, I had been taught about Schaeffer, who is widely recognised as the founding father of music concrète. What’s interesting is that the work at Schaeffer’s premiere used the techniques that El-Dabh was exploring, years prior — independently, with borrowed equipment (a wire recorder) from the offices of Cairo’s Middle East Radio.

Perhaps El-Dabh being one of the pioneers of electronic and electroacoustic music is common knowledge among many people in the scene. Perhaps. (Or at least, his music seems to be known well enough — Led Zeppelin cites his music as an influence). But to see how he was erased in the education that I received around the origins of electronic music was nearly frightening. Africans on the continent were part of the foundation and the building blocks, yet somehow, we didn’t get to hear about it. I’ve been meaning to put it into writing because it’s important for me to combat, through the concrete act of noting down, the academic gaslighting that many of us contemporary artists from the “non-Western” world have gone through, both from academic systems as well as the industry itself. Perhaps I have a need to affirm my own experience, but I hope it affirms the experiences of others as well.

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In reflecting on why hearing about El-Dabh was such an important discovery to me, I noted that it immediately gave me a sense of belonging in a space where imposter syndrome has stuck close to my skin. Western spaces don’t quite allow for the definition of ‘African music’, i.e. music by Africans, to expand and evolve. “I saw she’s a Kenyan composer that went to NYU, but I hear more of the NYU than the Kenya,” one blogger wrote about my album this year.

(What does that even mean?)

Many African artists have felt pigeon-holed into the kind of music we share. I’ve found myself invited onto projects because they identify me as an “exciting new voice in contemporary African music”, which is a definition I am happy to roll with — only to find that there are almost always caveats to these invitations: a month or two prior to the release of my EP, peace places: kenyan memories, a commissioning body was looking to commission a work by a ‘contemporary African composer’.

“I saw on your website that you perform with the African instruments of kalimbas, mbira, djembe, etc,” They asked me. “Can you send some examples of when you’ve used them?”

“Ok, sure.”

It felt like they were on my side — that they wanted me to have the opportunity to create and experiment however I wanted (which naturally, would be rooted in African ideas). I shared the unreleased music from peace places: kenyan memories, feeling sure that the commissioning body would be excited by the direction my music was going in.

“Where are the pieces with kalimbas?” They asked, during our next phone call.

I quickly double checked the link I’d sent over, which was working fine on my end.

“Did you receive the files I sent you?” I asked.

“Yes, but I was having trouble hearing the kalimbas.”

I was stunned. In that record, the use of kalimbas and mbira is quite transparent to any musician who knows what kalimbas sound like, which is an important point — because the only explanation I could then gather was that for this white commissioning body, I was just not using the kalimbas stereotypically enough. It didn’t sound African enough for them, and they did not trust me when I shared it was guided by, inspired by, where I grew up. It was not even enough to be African.

What was clear from that situation, among others, is that I had to somehow fit into the way they understood ‘African music’ to be. The music needed to have sonic markers that were recognisable to the white, non-African ears, for it to be worth commissioning.

Many institutions have hopped on the train of inviting “contemporary” works by African artists, but they are rarely prepared to be challenged by those works, or by the artists. The commissioners still need the music to have particular ‘African’ identifiers. Because if they can’t wrangle it into a definition that they understand, how then can they capitalise on the “otherness” of our music?

“The fact that el-Dabh is not a Westerner begs questions about his relationship with the avant-garde, which is largely made up of composers of European descent. Some of el-Dabh’s European contemporaries in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Pierre Boulez, were staking their claim in a provocative manner with a postserial approach. Others, like Pierre Schaeffer and his musique concrète circle, were defining their own school in which to work. el-Dabh had no such confrontational agenda. Instead, he hoped to bring together his compositional techniques, the influences of a life spent in agriculture, and his local ethnic experiences.
But because of his iconoclasm, el-Dabh’s output and presence could be perceived as unsettling to Western avant-garde circles. in addition, the composer’s inability to fit into a school or generalized approach may have affected the credit and distinction, or lack thereof, that el-Dabh received.”
— Michael Khoury, A Look at Lightning

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Cue in, “world music”.

(I’ve wanted to blog about “world mUsic” in itself for three years, sharing my observations from working for American institutions that “specialise” in programming “world music”; and of course, how frustrating the Grammys are with this category — but maybe that’s for another time.)

(Edit to add: this recent article by friend, Naila Aroni, is pretty spot on.)

My first encounter with this idea of “World Music'' happened at a young age, and it was strange: I would have to scroll all the way down the genre list of my parents’ iPod Classic, but the music that I found there was, for the most part, local music to me (Eric Wainaina, Suzanna Owiyo, Brenda Fassie, Oliver Mtukudzi, to name a few). And now, being a working artist attempting a career at music-making within the current music infrastructure we have, I find myself, among others, ushered into this industry of “world music” — I imagine a football referee, taking out their vanishing spray to draw a line on the football pitch that says, ‘you can’t move behind this line’. ‘World music’ is the space outlined for us non-western artists to sit within, and any attempt to break out of the allocated space is met with pressure to return to what makes us ‘more marketable’.

Of course, this category is created by the West, as a way to ‘make sense’ of non-Western music when it is brought into popular contexts of consumption. Legend has it that a bunch of white dudes in the UK went to a pub and “decided” to make this genre (I’m not kidding). As I see it, the genre seeks to profit off of repackaging all these deeply nuanced musical traditions into something controllable, something understandable to white ears, white pockets, white people. The founders of the genre argued that these records were getting lost, and I don’t mean to take away from the fact that there were many artists who gained genuine audiences and meaningful visibility abroad from this new positioning, particularly when local audiences and local infrastructure, for one reason or another, were not providing the right environment for the artist to live and create their art sustainably —

but, the creation of a ‘world music’ industry led to a displacement, an oversimplification and a continued stereotyping of many musics from all over the world, in order to allow the ‘exotic’ to keep being the selling point. This separation (“othering”) has felt particularly engineered to ensure that music-makers from the “rest” of the world cannot quite participate in the same way as our western counterparts in global artistic spaces: be it in mainstream discourse, programming and gigs, grants, awards — all of which, within the current economic system, are often the only ways in which artists can access meaningful connections, income, and visibility. We are shut out by genre, category, or citizenship, language; by our “otherness”.

So, we are left out of the conversation. We are denied the truth of our histories. We are rarely positioned as as the intellectual contributors, pioneers, that we actually were. I feel sure that on my parents’ iPod, El-Dabh would be tucked away at the bottom of the genre list, stripped away from the context of his art, and the importance of his achievements as it pertained to both the continent and the world, would be eclipsed.

“By the time Otto Luenig and Vladimir Ussachevsky became acquainted with El-Dabh’s music in 1955, the Egyptian composer had been dabbling in electronic music for more than ten years.
When the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was established in 1959, El-Dabh was among the first outside composers invited to work there. His approach to combining spoken word, singing, and percussion sounds with electronic signals and processing added significantly to the development of early electroacoustic techniques produced at the center.”
— Thom Holmes, Electronic and experimental music: Technology, Music and Culture

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The way the west engages with music by artists from the non-western world is often underpinned by a genuine lack of attempt at understanding other musics in the specific and textured contexts they truly belong in, and a lack of interest in inquiring how that context could be a part of how the music is shared.

It also means that artists are glued to specific definitions. ‘African music’ cannot move beyond anything else than what white ears know (or want) it to be. In class, I’d watch my teachers speaking to how western classical music shifted over time: from the Renaissance period, to Baroque. Baroque, to Classical. Classical, to Romantic. Romantic to…

but ‘African music’ isn’t acknowledged in the way that it has shifted over time; in the way that artists from the continents are exploding the way we understand music. Oftentimes, any original and interesting work emerging on the continent is weighed down by western comparisons or western contextualisations (which are conveniently uninterested in engaging with forced integration and influence that colonialism and its aftermath brought forth). We find ourselves framed against western forerunners, compared with people we had little knowledge of or people whose music we didn’t know:

A recent review from a notable publication of a music compilation I was a part of (alongside other incredible African musicians), said, “Brian Eno once plundered African music…now [African] artists are producing indigenous versions of Eno’s ambient style.”

Nevermind that Eno was not someone any of us on the compilation may have known until much, much, later, perhaps during formal academic study in a western institution.

Nevermind that I couldn’t recall even a measure of Eno’s work, where I could recall countless African folk songs that understood minimalism, repetition as a musical language for centuries — centuries before Eno.

Nevermind that Eno was not mentioned in the press release — which is sent out to writers in advance, in order to provide language on how to talk about the release. What the press release did say, was that all the featured artists were invited to create works inspired by african storytelling. Each artist wrote a paragraph on exactly how they wanted their track to be understood; and there was even a video of some of the artists sharing more of their perspective. The writer of that review chose to ignore all this, in favour of talking about Eno.

(I think of how another publication positioned a 2022 work of KMRU, a Kenyan ambient artist, as showing “more of” his heritage — but surely the idea of ambient music in itself — in its persistence, patience, repeating and cyclical nature — is but a continuation of how our music has been in Africa for centuries?).

I of course understand that influences happen both consciously and subconsciously — all artforms stand on the backs of thousands of previous efforts, communities, inspirators, coincidences, and whathaveyou. Mine is not to take away from Eno, in that instance, or deny his role in the development of ‘ambient music’ as we commonly understand it today. My frustration lies in the way that sentiments like that continue to strip artists from the African continent as having any independence over the development of their work. As someone making experimental music from the African continent, I find myself at odds with the way the industry wants to define me, and by how they want to define music by African sound-makers.

As a result, not only am I looking to African epistemologies to guide my work, whether or not this is explicitly identified by other people — but now more than ever, I’m looking to it to explain my work. Because so often, we’ve been gaslighted into not seeing ourselves as originators or as important contributors in things that we had a significant role in the creation, or development, of. To hear about El-Dabh’s work was this incredibly liberating moment for me, as a result, perhaps because it gave me an “a-ha” moment to bring to white ears, because now perhaps they can’t make me or my work feel like an imposter —

But it’s not even about that.

What it really was, was that immediately, the lens through which I understood my place as a music-maker shifted. The little chronological chain in my head, of African electronic musicians that came before me, now has an origination point.

Of course, I knew a bit about Halim El-Dabh from my Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music recordings, but I was gratified to find out that, pursuant to his early wire recorder piece made live in a Cairo radio studio, Halim held incontrovertible claim to being “the father of African electronic music.” Halim was that root for an incipient Afrodiasporic conception of electronic music.”
— George Lewis, writing about Unyazi, the ‘first African electronic music festival’ that took place in 2005

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When my debut EP was released, I found myself to be quite excited that it was understood, by some people and by some press publications, within the context of African art.

An exciting moment I recall was an interview I did with a Kenyan student, who had been studying music at a university in Nakuru, Kenya. The interview was for a course on ‘Contemporary Art Music in Africa’, and upon reading the student’s questions for me beforehand, I found myself genuinely emotional after seeing this particular question:

“How do you appropriate western classical music instruments in your composition of African art music?”

“I’m usually asked this the other way around,” I told them when they asked it over Zoom, and I was still somewhere between joy, laughter, and tears. Like, actual tears. To find someone attempting to understand my music first and foremost within the context I had outlined for my art, i.e. as being driven by African understanding, and thus seeing all else as something foreign — I think, was new to me. Also, the question followed the idea that I was in control of my choice to appropriate the western classical; which I liked — understanding it as a tool at my disposal, something I could choose to invite or reject in my music making. I appreciated that a lot — commonalities between cultures are so common, but why was it often not a consideration that principles in the music of non-western artists have been discovered through their understanding of art within their own cultural context? Why was the standard or default knowledge source often always attributed to the west?

I recently came across a special interview between Halim El-Dabh and another legendary composer I have been inspired by, Pauline Oliveros, from when they were in South Africa to give keynote speeches at ‘the first African electronic music festival’, called Unyazi, in 2005. At the start of the interview, El-Dabh outlines how often African philosophy and knowledge tends to be sidelined — that often, the continent is pillaged for its material goods, but there has often been little consideration for our ability to also discover, share, and produce knowledge.

“Africa can give to us more than diamonds, and more than gold, and more than oil….[they can give] their way of life and culture, and their knowledge — knowledge in music, in sound…”
— Halim El-Dabh :)

I would want anyone attempting to engage with my work to allow space for the ways in which African art can be expansive, and limitless; and that there can be more effort and research put into understanding multiple inspiration points — not only western ones. It is not to say that I have not been influenced by western artists: I carry Ravel’s melodies in my fingers, and Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey have both been my Spotify top artists for multiple years in a row (is this embarrassing?). Mine is simply to challenge the current way we have positioned intellectual contributions from African artmakers. There is a necessity in pointing out connections and originators that are contextual to the music and its maker. If there is no effort to operate from this perspective, we find that there is continued erasure of African art and knowledge.

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Of course, the timeline in my mind of African electronic artists must include Cameroonian composer Francis Bebey, who I ceaselessly quote, as in here, on another blog post.

He was another person that once I learned about, my mind and heart burst. Bebey cemented how I positioned myself as an African composer working with electronics. What was also important about Bebey to me is that he wrote a book, somewhat of a music manifesto, ‘African Music: A People’s Art’.

“It is imperative that the future of African music be based on the development and not merely upon preservation,” he said, and this quote stuck to me (so much so that I produced two podcast episodes around this idea, and continue to research around it).

To hear an African who existed over half a century ago declare that African artists have an inherent right to create work that is evolving was a pretty big and affirming moment for me. At the same time, it’s saddening to see myself emotionally moved by something that feels obvious. But this is my point, that western spaces have a way of making you feel like an imposter, like you only belong in the one box that they’ve outlined for you. They do not hesitate to make you feel like you do not belong.

So to have Bebey communicate that the sound of the continent has its own lineage, its own life, its own development, and its own future, was another special moment to experience. For Bebey, experimentation, just as preservation, is a necessary part of our art and our livelihood as Africans. These, to me, continue to be pillars of my artistic process.

(Of course, western spaces are not too interested in accommodating too much of this evolution of African music. There’s space for one to “represent”, perhaps two; but any more than that — ah, now they’re taking the spots of the ‘normal’ artists. ‘World Music’ is where they can place us if we become too many, and perhaps here is another conversation about artistic infrastructure on the continent, in our respective African countries, and the ways in which colonialism and capitalism have frustrated and choked environments where art and artmakers should bloom…)

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I have sat on this article for so long. A quick check at my version history on google docs shows that I started writing it on September 6th, 2022, and I can’t say how long it had been in my head before that.

I think of why: There are many nuances I want to acknowledge, and nuances within those nuances, and even nuances within those nuances. And, I’m scared to be wrong. What if I’m misguided, and El-Dabh wasn’t one of “the first”? Does that render my point, all these words, futile?

A quick scroll through the comment section of a youtube video of El-Dabh’s piece, which describes the piece as an excerpt of the “earliest recorded piece of electronic tape music, also known as "musique concrete" or "electroacoustic" tape music” — is ‘enough to confirm my fears. Commenters quickly hopped on to disprove the caption, though they cannot unanimously agree — they get pedantic about definitions of “wire”, '“tape”, “electronic”, “electroacoustic” — and you can’t help but feel that it starts to get mean-spirited, like there is a need to make sure that Halim El-Dabh’s name is not cemented with the likes of his well-known contemporaries (“He is a pioneer in electronic noise/feedback. Congrats, sounds like garbage!”).

The truth is, The Expressions of Zaar is one of the earliest known works of music concrète, and it was premiered four years before Schaeffer coined that same term. Electronic instruments and other electronic & electroacoustic musical experiments had indeed happened before the 1940s and as early as 1913, including Messiaen’s beautiful piece for an early electronic keyboard instrument, Oraison (1937), Clara Rockmore and Lucie Bigelow Rosen’s work with the theremin, Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No 1, and barely a handful more. But, “isolated from the mainstream of contemporary music at the time, El-Dabh independently discovered the potential of sound recordings as the raw material from which to compose music.” (Holmes).

El-Dabh went to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship in the 50s, and was a notable part of the New York electronic music scene, with like-minded composers of John Cage, Edgar Varèse, Henry Cowell. The works he developed at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center contributed significantly to the development of early electroacoustic techniques produced during this time, and El-Dabh worked over 30 years, offering a myriad of ethnomusicological and compositional perspectives. How is it that all through my time in academia, I knew all. of. those. composers., but not El-Dabh?

There’s much to be angry about. But for now, I focus on this discovery in the way that it elated me. I’ve just found it liberating to know that there continues to be African artmakers whose thought and knowledge I can trace over in their art, in their words. It is an honour to find myself as a continuation of a lineage of African artists that embraced experimentation as part of our expression.

I’m far from the only one. There are plenty of contemporary sound artists and sound-making communities on the continent whose art is pushing and evolving what African art-making looks like. And this includes soundmakers who create within definitions that exist outside of the ones we are used to; that exist outside of the music metadata tags, whose music is unreachable to “white ears” or to the internet, or any other definitions we have chosen to box ourselves into. And, there are also contemporary soundmakers from the continent who are fighting for space and visibility in western or global contexts, who are pushing boundaries and adding to an ever-growing definition of what African sound-making is, and of what sound-making is in general.

Only artists from the African continent should define what our art is, where it sits, and how it evolves. It deserves to be held and understood in its own place, one defined by the composer themself.

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Some Suggested Reads/Listens:

A Sonic letter to Halim El-Dabh, by Kamila Metwaly

Pauline Oliveros & Halim El-Dabh - An Interview, by Rudiger Meyer at Unyazi, 2005

Lending an Ear, by Jessica Ekomane

A Look at Lightning – The Life and Compositions of Halim el-Dabh, by Michael Khoury

The Grammy's’ New ‘African Music’ Category is a Step Backwards

Africa Synthesized: Editorial Note

Halim El-Dabh lecture at Unyazi, 2005

How Black Musicians Carved Out a Space in Ambient Music

More Unseen Histories:

A Not So Untold History of Latin American Women in Early Electronic Music