Harmony Music

Just Music .. Not More .. !

SAYYID DARWÎSH (1892-1923)

Sayyid Darwîsh's life is one of those lightning trajectories in the history of music, the memory and the influence of which go much beyond the actual frame of a musical production. He was to die at the dawn of a striking career, almost ignored by the musical milieu in his lifetime and mythified after his death. The famous name of this Alexandrian singer and composer has too long occulted his predecessor-s school and, more ironically. his own learned production. In the modern Arab historiography of music. Sayyid Darwîsh has become an icon symbolizing Progress. Modernity, and the shift from "Oriental music", an elitist music made for Pachas and still bathing in the original ottoman matrix, to "Egyptian music", the first figuralist expression of a people-s soul and their nationalist demands. This analysis hardly conceals a biased reading of History, and only a return to the recordings of this turn of-the century master can allow a reconsideration of the true dimension of Sayyid Darwîsh's works, the works of an original and experimental artist.