Special Events
Pie Festival and Silent Art Auction Fundraiser
-15th annual Pie Festival/Silent Art Auction fundraiser for SRCA
-Jewelry, Ceramics, Photographs, Paintings, Prints and more
Proceeds provide exciting cultural activities for our area in 2012, including:
-New World Children's Theatre program
-10th Annual Standing Rock International Short Film Festival
-Downtown Innovative Community Events.(D.I.C.E) "Make Mine with Ice" Ice Carving Exhibition and other Events Year Round.
-7th Annual "Who's Your Mama?" Earth Day and Environmental Film Festival. www.whosyourmama.org.
-Summer Chalk Festival
-Monthly Open Poetry with Maj Ragain
-Public Art Projects, Murals, Historical Plays
-Monthly Art Exhibitions and a whole lot more!
WHEN: Saturday, December 8, 10am to 8pm
WHERE: North Water Street Gallery, 257 N. Water St., Kent, OH
CONTACT: Jeff @ 330-673-4970 for info, to donate art or pies. Or to order a pie.
ABOUT THE PIE FESTIVAL:
Now in its fifteenth year, It’s Pie Time at the gallery! Come on down
for a slice, or buy a whole pie. We’ve got apple, blueberry, blackberry,
raspberry, peach, organic, vegan pies. We’ve got pies of all sorts to
please your palette, pies that don’t even have a name yet. There will be
other donated baked goods for sale. And we have some fine art by local
artists as well. Ceramics, Photos, Paintings, Jewelry, Collage, and
more. Bids starting as low as $5.
Proceeds benefit the Art & Education Programs of Standing Rock Cultural Arts.
Standing Rock Cultural Arts is a non profit 501(c)(3) art and education organization based in downtown Kent, Ohio.
Donations are tax-deductible and greatly appreciated.
Checks payable to:
SRCA
257 N. Water St.
Kent, OH 44240
Please feel free to contact me with any inquiries? Happy Holidays.
Standing Rock Cultural Arts is honored to present
Celebration of Halim El-Dabh’s 4,091st
Birthday!
-Halim is a professor emeritus at Kent State University
-Halim is one of the premier classical music composers living in the world today.
Sunday, March 4, 2012. 7:00pm
North Water Street Gallery 257 N. Water St., Kent
MORE INFO: 330-673-4970
ADMISSION: Free
HALIM’S WEBSITE: www.halimeldabh.com
Bring Instruments, Beverages, And Good Vibrations to help celebrate the achievements
of this incredibly Creative Spirit in our community!
Halim continues to astound the world with his everlasting effervescence, avant
garde compositions, and amazing vitality.
We are honored and privileged to celebrate his birthday here in Kent, Ohio, once
again. All are Welcome!
Bring your Drum and Dancing Shoes!
Feel Free to Bring A Covered Dish
PERFORMERS INCLUDE:
Joe Culley (Tabla) with Brian Thomas. (Standup Bass): 7:30pm
Kent African Drum Community (Drummers): 8:30pm
HALIM EL-DABH
BIOGRAPHY:
(b. Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh, Cairo, 4 March 1921)
Composer, performer, ethnomusicologist, and educator Halim El-Dabh is internationally
regarded as Egypt's foremost living composer of classical music, and one of the
major composers of the twentieth century. His numerous musical and dramatic works
have been performed throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Among
his compositions are eleven operas, four symphonies, numerous ballets, concertos,
and orchestral pieces, works for band and chorus, film scores, incidental music
for plays, chamber and electronic works, music for jazz and rock band, works
for young performers, and pieces for various combinations of African, Asian,
and Western instruments. His extensive ethnomusicological researches, conducted
on several continents, have led to unique creative syntheses in his works, which,
while utilizing contemporary compositional techniques and new systems of notation,
are frequently imbued with Near Eastern, African, or ancient Egyptian aesthetics.
Born into a musical family in Cairo, El-Dabh studied piano and derabucca (goblet-shaped
ceramic drum), and began composing at an early age. Although trained for a career
as an agricultural engineer, his musical talent and immersion in Egypt's cosmopolitan
musical life (including village drumming and local festivals, Arabic and European
classical music, and the jazz clubs of Alexandria) increasingly led him toward
a life in music.
Arriving in the United States in the summer of 1950 (and later
acquiring U.S. citizenship), El-Dabh traveled to the Aspen Music
Center in Colorado, where he met and assisted Igor Stravinsky.
After researching Native American music in New Mexico, he began
studies with Aaron Copland and Irving Fine at the Berkshire Music
Center in Massachusetts. Later, in New York's vibrant musical
scene, he developed close associations with many prominent and
like-minded figures in twentieth-century music, including Henry
Cowell, John Cage, Alan Hovhaness, Leonard Bernstein, Edgard
Varèse, Otto Luening, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Ernst K_enek, and Luigi
Dallapiccola. During the 1950s and ‘60s, El-Dabh was grouped with fellow
composers Hovhaness, Lou Harrison, Colin McPhee, Paul Bowles, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks,
under the rubric “Les Six d’Orient” (the term
coined by Glanville-Hicks), representing the vanguard of contemporary
composers writing music inspired by musics of the East.
In addition to his compositional activity, El-Dabh has also conducted musical
field research and recording throughout Egypt and Ethiopia, as well as in Eritrea,
Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire, Central African Republic, Nigeria, Ghana,
Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Morocco, Greece, Macedonia, Uzbekistan,
Brazil, Mexico, and Jamaica. He has also studied the Native American cultures
of the American Southwest and the African American cultures of the southeastern
U.S. El-Dabh is also considered an expert on the subject of traditional Egyptian
and African puppetry, and has helped to present a number of such puppetry troupes
in the United States. While in Ethiopia (1962-64), he formed Orchestra Ethiopia,
the first pan-Ethiopian performing group.
In his works, El-Dabh frequently draws on his Egyptian heritage, as in Mekta'
in the Art of Kita' (1955), The Eye of Horus (1967), Ptahmose and the Magic Spell
(1972), Ramesses the Great (Symphony no. 9) (1987), and many others. He has created
new systems of notation for the derabucca, and has revived interest in ancient
Egyptian language and musical notation. Many of his works from the 1960s on are
also heavily influenced by West African traditional musics, such as Black Epic
(1968) and Kyrie for the Bishop of Ghana (1968), and still other works bear the
influences of the musics of Ethiopia, Brazil, India, China, Japan, Korea, and
other nations.
Also a pioneer in the field of electronic music, El-Dabh began early sonic experiments
with wire recorders at the Middle East Radio Station of Cairo in 1944. In 1959
he was invited by Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky to join the first group
of composers at the newly set up Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in
New York, where he created a number of significant works.
El-Dabh's recent works include the ballet score In the Valley
of the Nile (1999), composed for the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance
Company; the piano concerto Surrr-Rah (2000), written for pianist
Tuyen Tonnu; and Ogún: Let Him, Let Her Have
the Iron (2001), for soprano and chamber ensemble. His most recent
project, the opera/theater piece Blue Sky Transmission: A Tibetan
Book of the Dead, was presented in September 2002 in Cleveland,
Ohio and in New York.
El-Dabh has served on the faculty of Kent State University's School of Music
since 1969, and has also taught at Haile Selassie I University in Ethiopia (1962-64)
and Howard University in Washington, D.C. (1966-69) He is one of only eight Kent
State University faculty members to hold the title of University Professor, Kent
State's highest faculty distinction, and is a recipient of the Distinguished
Teaching Award (1988). Retiring in 1991, Emeritus Professor El-Dabh continues
to teach and compose prolifically, in addition to conducting workshops for children.
El-Dabh holds degrees from Cairo University, the New England
Conservatory of Music, and Brandeis University. He has served
as a cultural and ethnomusicological consultant to the Smithsonian
Institution’s Folklife Program (1974-1981),
and his numerous grants and awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships
(1959-60 and 1961-62), two Fulbright Fellowships (1950 and 1967),
two Rockefeller Fellowships (1961 and 2001), the Cleveland Arts
Prize (1990), a Meet-the-Composer grant (1999), and an Ohio Arts
Council grant (2000). In May 2001 he received an honorary doctorate
from Kent State University. In 2001, the composer celebrated
his eightieth birthday with a festival of his music, which included
more than 15 concerts and lectures, both in the U.S. and around
the world. In March 2002 he was invited to celebrate his eighty-first
birthday with a series of four concerts of his music at the recently
reconstructed Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Library of Alexandria)
in Alexandria, Egypt.
He has performed at The Haymaker Farm Market in Kent in 2009-2011. He also continues
to teach African Cultural Expressions in The Pan African Studies Department of
Kent State University.
Halim El-Dabh has produced numerous scores, as well as 12 CDs which represent
the range of styles of his writing over his lifetime.
More info on Halim and his life can be found at
www.halimeldabh.com
