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Abstract
Often overlooked in histories of electronic music are the contributions of Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh (1921–2017), who first experimented with wire recorders in Cairo in the late 1940s and extended related projects at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) from 1959 to 1962. The CPEMC was founded in 1958 as a vibrant site for cultural diplomacy, supported by a massive Rockefeller Foundation grant. This event testified to an era when public and private agencies scrambled to invest New York City with a cultural infrastructure befitting its global status as a symbol of ascendant U.S. power. At mid-century, Columbia University's longtime nickname ‘the acropolis’ gained new value in public discourse. This term figured the university in a contradictory way as a cosmopolitan center and fortress, an emblem for U.S. democracy and dominion during the Cold War. Globally the CPEMC attracted visiting and immigrating composers who pursued projects of cultural diplomacy. El-Dabh's own journey followed a path from elite Egyptian emissaryship in 1950 to U.S. citizenship in 1961, enmeshing a story of soft power strategy with one of internal minoritarian experience. Drawing on interviews, archival research, El-Dabh's electronic oeuvre, and reception history, this article examine the CPEMC's contradictions as a lively cultural crossroads and a defensive bastion for restrictive ideas of ‘Western culture’. As such, the CPEMC emerges as more than just an incubator for the ‘uptown’ composition scene, but rather as a sound laboratory at the heart of imperial circulations of labor, expertise, and subjectivity.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on Contributor
Brigid Cohen is Associate Professor of Music at New York University. She has taught and published on the politics of twentieth-century avant-gardes, archive studies, diaspora and cosmopolitanism theory, twentieth-century German-Jewish thought, histories of genocide, and intersections of music, literature, and the visual arts. Her book Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2012) won the Lockwood Award from the American Musicological Society. She also edited and convened the round table ‘Edward Said and Musicology Today’, published in Journal of the Royal Musical Association in 2016. Her second monograph, Musical Migration and Imperial New York (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), explores questions of displacement and citizenship through a study of New York concert avant-gardes, jazz, electronic music, and performance art in the 1950s and 1960s. This book trains its focus on the cultural-political dilemmas navigated by uprooted creators in New York as a capital of empire during the Cold War. Her recent work has been supported by the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Wellesley College.
Notes
1 Relatively little scholarship addresses El-Dabh’s work in depth. Denise Seachrist’s biography (with an excellent foreword by Akin Euba) is the primary authority, alongside work by Delinda Collier (Citation2020), Michael Khoury, George Lewis, and Nicolas Puig. Thom Holmes provides a short and helpful overview of his electronic composition activities. Kamila Metwaly has written a vivid ‘sonic letter’ to El-Dabh. Laurel Hurst has also played an invaluable role in publicising El-Dabh’s music and organising his archive. I am grateful to her for having made possible my interviews with El-Dabh in December 2014.
2 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
3 Discussing his experimentations with tape in 1952, Ussachevsky recalled, ‘I was quite ignorant, as I think I mentioned before, of anything that was going on in Europe in electronic music, and I also hadn’t heard any musique concrète, so I thought that I was inventing it all by myself’. Vladimir Ussachevsky, interview with Joan Thomson, Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, 17 February 1977, written transcription, Oral History of American Music, Yale University.
4 Roger Sessions also provided nominal support and served as a silent co-director. Elzabeth Kray Ussachevsky’s previously unacknowledged support for the CPEMC and its founding becomes apparent in numerous documents in the Ussachevsky Papers in the Library of Congress, which I explore in a pattern of invisible female labour in my book manuscript ‘Musical Migration and Imperial New York’.
5 ‘A Draft of a Proposal to the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation Outlining a Program of Support to Encourage the Development of Electronic Music Throughout the Universities in the United States’, Otto Luening Papers, box 23, folder 11, New York Public Library.
6 ‘A Draft of a Proposal to the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation Outlining a Program of Support to Encourage the Development of Electronic Music Throughout the Universities in the United States’, Otto Luening Papers, box 23, folder 11, New York Public Library.
7 ‘A Draft of a Proposal to the Humanities Division’.
8 ‘A Draft of a Proposal to the Humanities Division’.
9 ‘Area Studies’, The Rockefeller Foundation: A Digital History, rockfound.rockarch.org/area-studies, visited 10 September 2019.
10 This summary is based on my reading of policy documents in the John Marshall Papers. Folders 35, 36, 38, Box 2, Series 1 General Files, RF, FA 053, John Marshall Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center. I examine these documents in detail in my forthcoming book manuscript ‘Musical Migration and Imperial New York’.
11 Marshall uses this vocabulary in the following papers: John Marshall, ‘In returning to officer responsibilities in Europe’, undated, Folder 38, Box 3, Series 1 General Files, RF, FA053, John Marshall Papers, Rockefeller Foundation records (RF), Rockefeller Archive Center; Marshall, ‘By direction of the trustees, the foundation is giving particular attention to the underdeveloped countries of Asia’, undated, Folder 38, Box 3, Series 1 General Files, RF, FA053, John Marshall Papers, Rockefeller Foundation records (RF), Rockefeller Archive Center.
12 These themes and terms appear prominently in Charles Burton Fahs, ‘The Program in the Humanities: A Statement by Charles B. Fahs’, in The Rockefeller Foundation Confidential Monthly Report For the Information of The Trustees’, ed. George W. Gray, 1 February 1951, Folder 38, Box 3, Series 1 General Files, RF, FA053, John Marshall Papers, Rockefeller Foundation records (RF), Rockefeller Archive Center. They also appear retrospectively in John Marshall, ‘In reviewing [the] program in the Humanities toward 1960’, 1959, Folder 36, Box 3, Series 1 General Files, RF, FA053, John Marshall Papers, Rockefeller Foundation records (RF), Rockefeller Archive Center.
13 Charles Burton Fahs, ‘The Program in the Humanities: A Statement by Charles B. Fahs’, in The Rockefeller Foundation Confidential Monthly Report For the Information of The Trustees’, ed. George W. Gray, 1 February 1951, Folder 38, Box 3, Series 1 General Files, RF, FA053, John Marshall Papers, Rockefeller Foundation records (RF), Rockefeller Archive Center.
14 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 7 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
15 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording. Laura Robson, ‘A Civilizing Mission?: Music and the Cosmopolitan in Edward Said’, Mashriq & Mahjar 2 (Citation2014): 107–129.
16 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, written notes.
17 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, written notes, 5.
18 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, written notes.
19 Composer’s Forum Concert, 1959 January 17, recording. Archives of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, Columbia University.
20 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
21 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
22 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
23 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording, El-Dabh’s accounts to Michael Khoury and Nicolas Puig emphasised that he entered into the ceremony together with his friend Kamal Iskander. He did not include this element of the story in his interview with me.
24 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording, El-Dabh’s accounts to Michael Khoury and Nicolas Puig emphasised that he entered into the ceremony together with his friend Kamal Iskander. He did not include this element of the story in his interview with me.
25 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording, El-Dabh’s accounts to Michael Khoury and Nicolas Puig emphasised that he entered into the ceremony together with his friend Kamal Iskander. He did not include this element of the story in his interview with me.
26 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
27 El-Dabh’s use of sound recording technologies resonates here with Michael Veal’s discussion of dub’s echo effects. Veal Citation2007, 196–219.
28 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
29 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, written notes.
30 ‘A Draft of a Proposal to the Humanities Division’.
31 Halim El-Dabh’, Collection RF, RG 10.1, Series, 200E box, 7, folder 182, Rockefeller Archive Center.
32 See note 3.
33 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio.
34 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 8 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
35 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
36 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
37 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
38 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
39 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 6 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
40 El-Dabh, interview with the author, 8 December 2014, Kent, Ohio, transcribed from digital recording.
41 Halim El-Dabh, interview with the author, Kent, Ohio, 7 December 2014. The majority of this monologue unfolded at a moment when the recording device was off, although he referred back to his monologue during our recorded conversation. He provided a similar version of this story to Seachrist, who quotes him as having told Luening, ‘Hey, if you don’t watch it, I know this place is going to fly … the whole building is going to end up in space’. She writes, ‘El-Dabh eventually became aware that, following this incident, Luening left him alone most of the time’ (Seachrist Citation2003, 62).