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121 chapter four The “People’s Artist” and the Beginnings of the Twentieth-Century Arab Avant-Garde : saed muhssin This chapter concerns a musician who lived a few months short of thirty-one years (1892–1923). Sayyed Darwish grew up in poverty and held a day job as a laborer. At the age of sixteen, he was “discovered” and, from there, went on to change the face, and some of the internal organs, of Arab music forever. Darwish’s life coincided with great social and political change in his homeland , Egypt, and he responded to this deeply through his music. As we will see in this chapter, he incorporated the politics of the era into the subject matter of his songs, yet, beyond this, he led a musical revolution, parallel to the social one, that challenged some of the very foundations of the Arab and Turkish musical traditions.We will see that Darwish’s work was not only itself avant-garde but that it has also inspired later composers to explore unfamiliar forms and innovative ideas. His accomplishments are truly multilayered. First, there are his tangible contributions, such as the invention of new song forms. Here, his phrasing deviates from the traditional aesthetic that had been in place for centuries. He introduced tonal elements that were unacceptable within the traditional maqam system, molded the melody and musical structure around the semantics of the lyrics, and created a new relationship between the singer and the listener. His subject matter was social in nature, aiming to raise awareness and trigger change. Much of this chapter will be dedicated to detailed musical analyses of these particular achievements. saed muhssin / 122 Beyond these concrete and quantifiable musical innovations, Darwish has been influential in other, less calculable ways, which will also be touched on in the course of this chapter. Foremost of these is how he legitimized experimentation and the pursuit of musical visions that fall outside tradition. His broadening of the possibilities of what Egyptian music could be through a radical break from expectations and training is summarized by one of the scene’s other great composers and singers, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab. On hearing Sayyed Darwish perform for the first time, ‘Abd al-Wahhab declared that Darwish had “ruined his life” (‘Abd al-Wahhab, undated interview). Furthermore, Darwish set an example of innovation and individualism that captured the hearts of the masses, not just the appreciation of other musicians. Indeed it is remarkable, and a bit unusual, for an avant-garde artist not to be obscure. Not to be only a musician’s musician. To be sure, Sayyed Darwish had known failures and rejections early in his career (Sahhab 1987, 17–19). However, at this point, he was being judged for his performance abilities alone and compared with singers like Saleh Abdel-Hayy and Salama Higazi, for whom he was no match. Even then, his potential was not lost on these musicians. When, in 1917, Darwish sang in between acts during Salama Higazi’s play Ghaniyat al-Andalus (The Female Entertainer of Andalusia), the audience complained to Higazi about his poor choice of a singer. To this Higazi responded, “But still, he is the future of music and singing in the east, and my successor” (Sahhab 1987, 20). His early setbacks aside, Darwish was, on the whole, respected, especially as a composer and musical visionary. Never marginalized for his departure from the Arab and Turkish musical traditions, he has, to this day, enjoyed the popularity and respect of both other musicians and the general public. Four factors can be gleaned to explain this widespread acceptance. Firstly, it was to his advantage that he was a revolutionary musician during a time of social and political revolution and that many of his thematic preoccupations were social and political in nature. He wrote songs about longshoremen, day laborers, farmers, hashish smokers, bread kneaders, clerics, and waiters , to name just a sampling of his everyday-life-centered subjects. Many of his songs also foreground revolutionary-nationalistic proclivities, including Egypt’s modern-day national anthem, “Biladi Biladi” (“My Country, My Country”). A second contributing factor is that, throughout his life, he composed numerous traditional works that enjoyed extensive popularity, such as his adwar and muwashshahat, two song forms that were well liked at the time. Third, many of his avant-garde compositions were meant for musical theater. Since these times marked the very beginnings of musical theater in Egypt, the novel context may have prepared the audience for...

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