Music of Egypt - Modern Popular and Folk Traditions

Modern Popular and Folk Traditions

Contemporary Egyptian music traces its beginnings to the creative work of luminaries such as Abdu-l Hamuli, Almaz and Mahmud Osman, who were all patronized by Khedive Ismail, and who influenced the later work of Sayed Darwish, Umm Kulthum, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, Abdel Halim Hafez, Zakariyya Ahmad and other Egyptian musicians.

Egyptian music began its recorded history in the 1910s, around the time composers such as Sayed Darwish were incorporating western musical forms into their work. Some of the Middle East's biggest musical stars have been Egyptian. Abdel Halim Hafez and Umm Kulthum were especially popular. Most of these stars, including Umm Kulthum, were part of the classical Egyptian and Arabic music tradition. Some, like Abd el-Halim Hafez, were associated with the Egyptian nationalist movement in 1952.

Read more about this topic:  Music Of Egypt

Famous quotes containing the words modern, popular, folk and/or traditions:

    Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
    And danced all the modern dances;
    And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
    But they knew that it was modern.
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead-drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason and finds himself a true prince.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    the yonge sonne
    Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
    And smale foweles maken melodye,
    That slepen al the nyght with open eye—
    So priketh hem nature in hir corages—
    Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
    Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)

    I think a Person who is thus terrifyed [sic] with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contrary to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.
    Joseph Addison (1672–1719)