Gamal Abdel-Rahim
Encyclopedia : G : GA : GAM : Gamal Abdel-Rahim
Gamal Abdel-Rahim (b. 1924, Egypt; d. November 23, 1988, Frankfurt, Germany) was an Egyptian composer, educator, and pianist.
In 1950 he began university studies in musicology at the Musikhochschule of Heidelberg in Germany, deciding on a career as a composer. From 1952 to 1957 he studied composition with Harald Genzmer (a pupil of Paul Hindemith) at the Musikhochschule of Freiburg in Breisgau.
In 1959, Abdel-Rahim was appointed to teach theory and harmony at the newly opened Cairo Conservatory of Music. He was later appointed head of the composition department there (the first of its kind in the Arab world), which he founded in 1971. Abdel-Rahim was quite influential among Egyptian composers of the next generation, as the majority of them studied with him during his time at the Cairo Conservatory.
Abdel-Rahim's style fuses traditional Egyptian musical elements with contemporary European ones, focusing on Egyptian materials in his later works more than in his earlier ones.
Abdel-Rahim was married to Samha El-Kholy (1925-2006), a noted Egyptian musicologist and former president of the Academy of Arts in Cairo.
References
- El-Kholy, Samha, and John Robison (1993). Festschrift for Gamal Abdel-Rahim. Occasional Paper Series (Fulbright Commission in Egypt), v. 2, no. 2. Cairo: The Binational Fulbright Commission in Egypt. ISBN 7775491002.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.