Classical and scholarly music
It is impossible to evoke Egyptian scholarly music - and Egyptian music as a whole, in fact - without first mentioning the "Nahda". Throughout the nineteenth century, under the reigns of Muhammad Ali Pasha (1805-1848) and Khedive Ismail (1863-1879), Egypt experienced an economic and cultural boom marked by its relations with Europe. In this context, a great intellectual and artistic effervescence developed, which enabled the Nahda ("Arab cultural renaissance") to blossom in Cairo. A transversal movement, it affects all fields, from philosophy to religion and literature. Or again the music which, at that time, will synthesize Egyptian musical traditions and marry them with Turkish and Persian influences. It was also during the Nahda that the takht, a small traditional chamber group of learned music, was popularised, comprising oud, qanûn (table zither), violin, ney (reed flute) and riqq (drum on cymbalette frame). A great musical feature of the Nahda is the wasla. Meaning "link" or "linkage," the word refers to a musical sequence of semi-composed and improvised vocal and instrumental pieces. The music of the duo Tarek Abdallah, a great oud player, and Adel Shams El-Din, a traditional percussionist, provides very good examples of wasla. Another great specialist of the Nahdah period, Mustafa Saïd is one of the greatest composers of contemporary Arab classical music and a renowned oudist. But the most illustrious Egyptian name in classical music is undoubtedly Omar Khairat. His very rich output is marked by the composition of great frescoes for the Egyptian state, but above all film music, ballets, operettas and symphonies for which he has tried to draw a link between contemporary Arab and Western music. Another Egyptian classicist - this time in the European sense of the term -, Gabriel Saab (brother of the writer Andrée Chedid) is the author of an important work influenced by Tchaikovsky and Sibelius. Less well known, Sherif Mohie Eldin remains a remarkable contemporary classical conductor and composer.
Notably, there is a great tradition of opera in Egypt. The history of the genre is also marked by Aida. Commissioned from Verdi by the Khedive Ismail Pasha to celebrate the inauguration of the Suez Canal, the piece was not completed in time and it was finally Rigoletto that was performed on stage that evening at the Cairo Opera House (built for the occasion). The first opera house in Africa, it was destroyed by fire in 1971 before rising from its ashes in 1988. Since its creation, the country has cultivated a true lyrical tradition to the point of becoming a breeding ground for remarkable (female) voices: Ratiba El-Hefny (the pioneer), Amira Selim (coloratura soprano very present in France), Gala El Hadidi (mezzo of the Dresden Opera), Fatma Said (who at her young age already sang in the world's major opera houses), and finally Farrah El Dibany, the "Egyptian Carmen" trained and dubbed at the Paris Opera. Apart from their nationality and their talent, all of them have in common that they have been to the Paris Opera. Apart from their nationality and their talent, all of them have in common to have passed through the Cairo Opera. A venerable institution in Egypt and in the Arab world that offers a very rich programming. It is advisable to see the Cairo Symphony Orchestra perform the classics of the European repertoire or the Cairo Opera Orchestra play the most beautiful hours of the oriental register. Also in Alexandria, the Sayed Darwish Opera House - directed by its cousin in Cairo - is worthy of the capital's programming
Traditional and folk music
The country was such an actor of the golden age of Arabic song at the beginning of the 20th century that we sometimes forget the richness of its traditional and folk music. Like many countries, Egypt, wishing to define the contours of a "national style", began collecting folklore from different regions in the 1950s. Among them are Nubian or Said music in the north of the country. The former have something of a hypnotic blues with sub-Saharan roots while the latter are very powerful dance music. If you're interested in the genre at all, it's essential to listen to the prince of Nubian music, Hamza El Din. Adored by the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, celebrated by minimalists Steve Reich and Terry Riley, this great artist sadly misunderstood has produced some masterpieces including Escalay: The Water Wheel in 1968. A great moment of Nubia. Always trance-like, the "zâr" is - although a cousin of the Moroccan gnaoua - singular to Egypt. This ceremony of disenchantment accompanies the exorcism with an ensemble of wind instruments (including thearghoul) and percussion(darabukka, târ, riqqq and sâgât). Now confined to folklore, the music of the zâr can be heard at the Makan Centre for Culture and the Arts in Cairo.
A link between traditional and folk music is the mawal. This slow and (painfully) sentimental Arabic vocal practice is a lament song that usually precedes the song itself. Traditionally, the orchestras accompanying them are composed of typically Egyptian instruments such as the raba (a two-stringed violin), the kawala (a six-hole bamboo flute) and thearghoul (an ancient double clarinet with two pipes of unequal length). Even today, it is more than common to hear a variety singer singing a mawal on stage before a song.
Popular music
At the beginning of the twentieth century, as scholarly music declined, variety music made its appearance in Egypt under the impetus of the singer Abdu el-Hamouli (whom Khedive Ismaïl adored). By making music accessible to the public, the latter turned his habits upside down and opened the door to a new world in local music. In the 1930s, a generation of young musicians laid the foundations of Egyptian musical modernity with a variety of music steeped in learned music. This sophisticated popular music was often accompanied by the takht - the Egyptian scholarly music ensemble - supplemented by Western classical instruments. It was during this golden period that three great voices appeared, three great craftsmen of the "Egyptian Renaissance": the "Sinatra of the Nile" Abdel Halim Hafez, Mohammed Abdel Wahab, the first Egyptian singer of charm, and above all the immense Umm Kulthûm (or Umm Kalsoum). The latter is "the voice of Egypt". And more than 40 years after his death, the inimitable voice and the long and languorous songs of the singer nicknamed "the Star of the East" still resound in the Egyptian streets. As the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1988) summed it up, "Arabs don't get along with each other at all, except when they love Oum Kalsoum". During the 1950s, every first Thursday of the month, from Cairo to Baghdad, life in the Arab world came to a halt and all ears hung on the radio set. Why did this happen? A ritual: the Egyptian diva would sing a new creation, adorned with the long improvisations that made her famous (the same song could last from forty minutes to several hours). Mythical during her lifetime, she exported Egypt, her accent, her style to the Arab world and the rest of the globe. If Cairo was a veritable Hollywood of Arab song until the 1970s, it is largely thanks to her (and Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Abdel Halim Hafez).
From the 1980s onwards, a new generation of more pop musicians, with "westernised" styles, burst onto the Egyptian musical scene. Among the most important, Amr Diab, nicknamed "the father of Mediterranean music" is a superstar of the Arab world regularly breaking sales records. Another emblematic figure, Mohammed Mounir is the great modern voice of Nubia, known for his fusion of Egyptian traditions and blues, soul and reggae. And let's not forget Hakim, a huge pop star from the Arab world and a great representative of a style that could not be more Egyptian, the shaabi. Meaning "popular", the genre is the song of the streets of Cairo. Dating from the 1970s, it modernizes the popular song in the text and especially the instrumentation (adoption of the accordion, drums, synthesizer, saxophones, etc.). A precursor of the genre is Ahmed Adawiya, famous for his sometimes subversive or provocative lyrics, close to the Egyptian streets. Faster, danceable and western, a cousin of the shaabi is the jeel ("generation"), a pop and melodramatic genre with a rhythm often marked by hand-clapping. Two styles from which Raï was later derived.
Delicate not to mention the tribute of Egypt to the French-speaking popular song. Born in a modest neighbourhood north of Cairo, Yolanda Gigliotti, whose stage name was Dalida, became "Miss Egypt" in 1954 before leaving for Paris the same year and enjoying the success she had become known for. The interpreter ofAlexandria, Alexandra, Claude François, is also a child of the country (although unknown to the Egyptians). Born in 1939 in Ismailia to a father employed by the Suez Canal Company, he left Egypt in 1956 when it was nationalized.
Current music
The popular uprising of 2011 has had a strong echo in Egyptian artistic production and many of the iconic artists of the revolution are now headliners. This is the case of Cairokee, a particularly political rock band that has been enjoying a string of popular successes since its anthem dedicated to Tahrir Square, Ya Al Medan, in 2011. The same goes for the rock group Massar Egbari in Alexandria, committed to the core, or Dina Al-Wedidi and her languid jazz-folk, who became a female icon after the demonstrators sang her songs in 2011. By opening minds as much as it did music, the "Egyptian Spring" not only allowed the emergence of new artists, but also new aesthetics. Although its birth predates the revolution, electro chaâbi (or mahraganat), with its rebellious lyrics and wild nature, took off phenomenally during the Arab Spring. Coming from the shantytowns of the Egyptian capital, this nervous and repetitive mix of electro, rap and shaabi is danced in improvised party spaces, in the streets, on rooftops, while offering young people a microphone to express themselves. A real mouthpiece for society whose figures are Islam Chipsy (pioneer and pro synthesizer), Oka & Ortega (who have become stars), Mc Sadat or Amr Haha (with conscious lyrics). The genre has a thousand variants and sub-genres, each district of Cairo having its own style and sound. But electro chaâbi is only the tip of the iceberg. At the antipodes of electronic music, there is an important and very avant-garde underground electronic scene in the country. Their names are Kareem Lotfy, Zuli, Rami Abadir, Mostafa Onsy, Maryam Saleh, Maurice Louca or Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and they do better than surviving in the face of a strict government, censorship and the absence of subsidies or record companies (they are practically all signed to foreign labels). They are very beautiful artists whose listening allows us to take the pulse of young contemporary creation.
The electro chaâbi comes from the street and... it's still its best scene. To listen to it, you just have to listen carefully. Otherwise, one of the best places in town to listen to music is the very dynamic El Sawy Cultural Centre. Installed in the trendy district of Zamalek, the place has succeeded in being at the same time a place impossible to circumvent for the Cairo youth and the current musics, while regularly promoting the traditional music. Otherwise, the other beautiful scene in town is the Cairo Jazz Club. Don't be fooled by its name, you can hear everything there - absolutely everything - and some nights it's even rather trendy.
Dance and theatre
The dance scenes in ancient Egyptian painting prove it: it has been present in the country since the Pharaonic era. Today, however, conceptions of the genre have changed a little. When one thinks of dance in Egypt, images of oriental dance - otherwise known as "belly dancing" - quickly come to mind. While these performances have long been part of the country's image, the return of a certain puritanism threatens their representation. In addition, Egyptian dancers are being challenged in their own country by young girls from Eastern European countries. But to seduce the Egyptian public, it is not enough to perfectly master these pelvic movements and leg throws. In oriental dance, expressions and eye games are also essential to seduce and captivate the audience. Egyptian women have a head start in this game, thanks in particular to the films of Samia Gamal or Tahia Carioca, who cradled their childhood. One of the loudest voices defending oriental dance in the face of the return of moral austerity is that of Dina, a famous dancer and author of a militant book on the subject, Ma Liberté de Danser. Always active, she can be seen at the Haroun Al-Rashid Semiramis Intercontinental, a unique place in Cairo where all lovers of the sensualité́ Arabic dances will be delighted. On the other hand, lovers of classical dance are not abandoned in the capital, far from it. The corps de ballet of the Cairo Opera House is a reflection of the institution of which it is a member: unique in the region but unequal in its performances. In the past, however, it was bathed in a prestigious aura. Founded in 1953, the corps de ballet of the Cairo Opera House was originally modelled on the Bolshoi, with performers from the Bolshoi even training local dancers. Over time, however, quality has declined, although there has been a renaissance in recent times. Today, people go there mainly to see the great classics of the Western repertoire. Modern and contemporary dance is not to be outdone. Introduced slowly in the 1990s, it is flourishing around the central figure of Karima Mansour. Trained mainly at the London School of Contemporary Dance, on her return to Cairo in 1999, she created MA'AT, the first contemporary dance company established in Egypt. Then, in 2012, she also founded and directed the Cairo Contemporary Dance Center, the first local contemporary dance school, seeking to weave a network of dancers and choreographers in the country. While classical dance (frequently) and contemporary dance (more rarely) can be seen at the Cairo Opera House, two interesting events are taking place in Egypt : D-CAF, a festival of multidisciplinary contemporary art (dance, theatre, music, visual arts), for three weeks each spring, and the International Contemporary Dance Festival for about ten days in May each year.
In addition to a very rich national literature, Egyptian theatre has some fine feathers. One thinks of course of Andrée Chedid, famous in France, and her plays Bérénice d'Égypte or Les Nombres, and Adel Hakim who directed the Théâtre des Quartiers d'Ivry and composed a lucid and human work. But equally important are Salah Abdel Sabour and Ahmed Chawqi, the pinnacles of local poetic dramaturgy, Tawfiq al-Hakim and his immense work on Egypt and human nature, or Youssef Idriss, a proponent of a national theatrical style.
