Hamza El Din

Hamza El Din (Arabic: حمزة علاء الدين; 10 July 1929 – 22 May 2006) was an Egyptian Nubian composer, oud and tar player and vocalist, born in the village of Toshka in southern Egypt. ^{1 2} Trained first as an electrical engineer, he turned to music, collected the old songs of Nubia before the Aswan High Dam flooded its villages in the 1960s, and carried Nubian music to Western audiences and American universities; he is regarded as the father of modern Nubian music. ^{2 3}

He was born in Toshka, a Nubian village near Wadi Halfa in the governorate of Aswan. ^{1 2} He came to Cairo and studied electrical engineering at King Fouad University (now Cairo University), worked for the Egyptian national railways, then left engineering: he studied the muwashshah at Ibrahim Shafiq's Institute of Music and the oud and Arab music at the King Fouad Institute for Middle Eastern Music, continued at the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, and received a grant to study Western music in the United States. ^{2 1}

He returned to his home region and travelled from village to village on a donkey, collecting the old Nubian songs and playing the oud — work the French article describes as preserving Nubian oral heritage before the High Dam dispersed the villages; his own village was flooded in 1960 and his family moved away. ^{2 3}

His performances attracted the attention of the Grateful Dead, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan in the 1960s, which led to a recording contract with Vanguard Records and emigration to the United States; in 1963 he shared an apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area with the folk musician Sandy Bull. ^{1 3} After appearing at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964 he recorded his first two albums for Vanguard. ¹

Between the 1970s and the 1990s he held teaching positions in ethnomusicology at Ohio University, the University of Washington and the University of Texas at Austin; in the 1980s he lived in Japan to study the biwa; he eventually settled in Oakland, California. ^{1 2} His last visit to Egypt was in 2000, for a symposium at the Cairo Opera House. ² He died on 22 May 2006 at a hospital in Berkeley, California, after complications following gallbladder surgery. ^{1 2}

His first albums were Music of Nubia (1964) and Al Oud (1965) for Vanguard. ¹ His best-known recording is Escalay: The Water Wheel: the French article dates its recording to 1968, while the English article dates its Nonesuch release, produced by Mickey Hart, to 1971, and describes it as one of the first world-music recordings to gain a wide Western release, claimed as an influence by the American minimalist composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley. ^{1 3}

He performed with the Grateful Dead, most famously at their Egypt concerts of 1978, and with the Kronos Quartet on an arrangement of Escalay for their album Pieces of Africa (1992); shortly before his death he played with the Quartet on "The Visitors" for the soundtrack of Babel (2006). ^{1 3} The Arabic article also credits him with the score of Francis Ford Coppola's film The Black Stallion. ² Later albums include Eclipse (1978), A Song of the Nile (1982), Lily of the Nile (1995) and Muwashshah (1996); his last album was A Wish (1999), with Hani Naser. ^{1 2}

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum.

Standing. The Arabic article calls him "the father of Nubian music" and the French article says he is considered by some the father of contemporary Nubian music, for his collecting of Nubian oral heritage before the flooding of the villages. ^{2 3} The Arabic article notes the wide attention of American and Japanese media at his death, and what it calls the complete neglect of Egyptian media. ²

His faith. None of the three articles, and not Wikidata either, states a religion, legal school or order for Hamza El Din; his Nubian-Egyptian origin and his work collecting Nubian and Arabic song are background and repertoire, not an attestation of a personal school, so the museum records his faith as unknown. ^{1 2 4}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.