CEDRIK FERMONT

Hello !

I had seen the article by Nyokabi Kariũki, but I haven’t got the time to read it. I’m already scared of what she says about El-Dabh… It’s the third time I read somewhere of Halim being credited for one of the first electronic pieces or even by some for the very first one…

First, this is not an electronic music piece, no synths or oscillators were used to compose it. Musique concrète, or pre-music concrete, that’s what it is and before him there was Walter Ruttman in the 1930s who also composed some pre-musique concrète but with different tools.

Second, this is in the Soviet Union that the Theremin was invented and that some of the first electronic music pieces were composed in the 1920s and then during the 1930s, synthetic sounds were produced by Yevgeny Sholpo, Nikolai Voinov, etc. And we can even go back in time with the Telharmonium in the USA, 1895, another synthesiser.

I need to read again about the first electronic music pieces that were really composed – I remember that the first electric and electronic instruments were used to play existing compositions but original compositions made for electronic instruments were written at least from the 1920s and 1930s (like Yohanna Beyer’s Music of the Spheres in 1938), so before Halim.

El-Dabh composed his first electroacoustic music pieces in the 1950s and was a student of Vladimir Ussashevsky. Apart from Wire Recorder Piece, it seems that all his electro-acoustic works have been recorded from 1959. Which is early but many composers had already recorded at an earlier time: Kagel, de Meester, Carvalho, Chevreuille, Sala, Lecaine, Amenabar, Eimert, Henry, Xenakis, Franci, Tal, Bandings (in South Africa but not being a South African), Mayuzumi, Moroi, and many more.

He’s definitely one of the first composers and most likely the first African composer to have experimented with sound in such a way and what I admire is that he had no Western references when he experimented, that’s a major difference between him and many other pioneers. He’s part of history, fortunately and he was very original but there were many people before him. Anyway, it’s been several months since I didn’t post my newsletter, I need to make one this month and will include your new issue.

Best regards.