At the beginning of this series of articles, we explained how the UNESCO divided cultural heritage into the tangible and intangible, with one of the components of the latter being music.
In order to gain an overview over Egypt’s musical heritage, we must look at the origins of Arab music, which can be traced back to the era of Arab and Islamic civilization, mainly between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries AD.
At the beginning of this period, the Arabs translated the different sources of knowledge from civilizations around them, for example the Greek civilization, Roman and Persian civilizations.
Music was a revered science at a time when many Arab musicologists like Kindi, Alfarabi, Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Al Armawi.
There was also Zeryab, who exported his vast knowledge of Arab music to Andalusia in Spain. Al-Farabi wrote his famous “Ketab Al Musica Al Kabir” (The Great Book of Music), in which he defined the various Arabic music scales, known as maqamat. Al-Farabi was a good theoretician, composer and musician.
A set of ancient, handwritten manuscripts from this period survives, some of which are in the National Library of Egypt. Unfortunately, scoring (the writing of) musical notes did not exist at that time, except in the works of Al-Armawi.
Although the scoring of musical notes started in the West in the Renaissance period, in the East there was no such thing until Napoleon Bonaparte came to Egypt in 1798 and his scientists (savants) wrote their famous encyclopedia about Egypt known as Description de l’Egypte.
In one of its sections, there is an account of the Egyptian songs that existed at the time with their musical scores; these are the oldest musical records for Egyptian songs. Up until that time, as in many nations, music was transmitted from one generation to the other as orally.
After the French expedition and during the nineteenth century, the family of Mohamed Ali ruled Egypt. They tried to create a renaissance in Egypt and for this purpose adopted a Western mindset and attitude.
The monarchy encouraged art, and artists became a common part of the royal life. Under Ismail Pasha, Abdou el-Hamouli was a famous singer in court, as were Mohamed Osman, Salama Higazi, Dawoud Hosni and finally Sayed Darwish.
This trend continued until the 1920s, culminating in 1932 in a famous international conference for Arabic music that will be subject of our next article.
