Om kalthoum biography of william

Asian Music. The Guardian. University of Chicago Press. ISBN In Sadie, Stanley ; Tyrrell, John eds. London: Macmillan Publishers. Retrieved 23 May Columbia University Press. Michal Goldman. Omar Sharif. Arab Film Distribution, The National. Retrieved 18 February Archived from the original on 5 June The New York Times. Torino Film Fest. Archived from the original on 16 January Arab News.

Retrieved 8 August Retrieved 8 September Retrieved 29 June Archived from the original on 24 December Retrieved 23 December The Independent. Retrieved 30 August Retrieved 23 October For me, through Umm, Egypt became more than a country, it is a concept of meeting, of sharing what we have in common. Retrieved 18 March Retrieved 6 January Asharq al-Awsat.

Archived from the original on 21 November Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 28 April Sources [ edit ]. Danielson, Virginia Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Virginia Danielson. Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces film, This DVD contains an extra feature short film that documents Arab film history, and it contains several minutes of an Umm Kulthum public performance.

Al-Ahram Weekly. Archived from the original on 29 August Retrieved 22 October Great Lives. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. Umm Kulthum. Biography [ change change source ]. Professional Career [ change change source ]. Political Value [ change change source ]. Challenging the position of women [ change change source ]. Contributing to the vision of Pan-Arabism [ change change source ].

Remembrance [ change change source ]. References [ change change source ]. The University of Chicago Press. ISBN Al Fusaic. Retrieved 26 April Archived from the original on 29 June Al Jazeera. Shaping tradition in Arabic song: The om kalthoum biography of william and om kalthoum biography of william of Umm Kulthum. Illinois, Chicago: Urbana.

The Guardian. The New York Times. Arab News. Her father helped her alter this perception by hiring music teacher and mentor al-Shaykh Abu al-Ila Muhammed, as well as the poet Ahmad Rami also spelled Ramywho instructed her in poetry and classical Arabic. Of the nearly songs recorded by Kalthum during her career, were written by Rami. Upon first arriving in Cairo, Kalthum relied on the songs taught her by her father.

She later added popular songs and Arabic poems and adopted a more upscale, European style of dress. She also replaced the vocal accompaniment of her brother and father with a takhtan ensemble of musicians, who played ouda stringed instrument resembling an acoustic bassas well as a violin, qanun a flat zither-like instrumentand riqq a small tambourine.

In she recorded several songs for the Odeon label, which became successful throughout Egypt. For the remainder of the decade her recordings were played extensively all over the country. In the meantime, she continued to perform at concert venues in Cairo and, byhad become one of the most popular and successful entertainers in Egypt. In she was asked to perform on the first broadcast of Egypt's state-run radio station.

Her subsequent radio performances were to catapult her to the pinnacle of Egyptian stardom. In the late s, she began broadcasting a weekly Thursday-night concert over the radio, a tradition that she maintained until As her popularity increased, Kalthum began commissioning songs from Egypt's best composers that were based on poems she selected.

She appeared in five films between andand was named a member of the Listening Committee, a group that chose the music played on Egyptian radio. Friday being the Muslim day of rest, the Thursday-night events occupied what was considered prime time. This concert series lasted for more than thirty-five years and became that by which she was known throughout the Arab world.

Eventually, stories were told about life in the Arabic-speaking world coming to a stop for these monthly concerts. Radio remained a critically important patron of musicians throughout World War IIwhen material for the production of recordings became scarce and communications with European production facilities interrupted. It took on greater social importance than ever following the Egyptian Revolution of under the government of President Gamal Abdel Nasser who supported the broadcast of entertainment to ameliorate the daily stresses of economic difficulty and who strengthened broadcasting facilities as a means of advancing his political agenda.

Along with many of her compatriots, Umm Kulthum welcomed the Egyptian revolution and sang songs in support of the new regime throughout the s. She had also, by this time, accepted leadership roles in the world of music. She served as seven-term president of the musician's union in the late s and s, sat on the Listeners' Committee that selected songs suitable for broadcast on Egyptian Radio and, in the s and s, served on governmental committees on the arts.

During the late s and early s, she also suffered from a variety of health issues including a thyroid problem that seems to have originated in the late s, and problems with her vision prompting her near-constant use of dark glasses. The number of her performances and her production of new songs decreased in the s. In she married one of her physicians, Hasan al-Hifnawi; their relationship seems to have been important and companionable, although they had no children.

As she regained her health in the s, Umm Kulthum took note of the successes of young singers, notably Abd al-Halim Hafiz, and began to seek new songs from younger composers while maintaining her continuing collaboration with al-Sunbati. She and Ahmad had parted ways in a legal dispute and he died in Baligh Hamdi, Kamal al-Tawil, and Muhammad al-Muji composed for her on texts from popular song lyricists and a new, modern style of song emerged for her, one that was not always valued by her older listeners but that has remained popular nonetheless.

In the s, apparently at the behest of President Nasser's government, she and her rival al-Wahhab agreed to a collaboration that produced ten songs, beginning with "Inta Umri" You are my life ina song that has remained wildly popular ever since. Especially compared to her younger colleague, the Lebanese singer fayruz, in the s, some listeners began to critique Umm Kulthum as insufficiently engaged with the myriad problems with which the Arab world was occupied.

Many felt that, with her growing stature as a cultural figure, she should serve as a more outspoken advocate for the rights and plights of Arabs, notably the Palestinians. Perhaps motivated by this view, following Egypt's defeat at the hands of the Israelis inUmm Kulthum launched one of her most famous endeavors: her concerts for Egypt.

Traveling both in Egypt and the Arab world, she launched a series of fund-raising concerts to benefit the Egyptian war treasury, which garnered more than 2 million pounds sterling, an enormous sum at the time. Often, she solicited poetry by local poets, including nizar qabbani from Syria and al-Hadi Adam from Sudan, which were then set to music by al-Sunbati especially for her concerts.

Beginning in aboutUmm Kulthum's health began to fail for the final time and she died on 3 February Her funeral, which was delayed for several days to allow for the arrival of foreign dignitaries, was reported to be larger that that of Nasser's—itself one of the largest funerals in history. Umm Kulthum brought historically Arabic aesthetics and music into the twentieth century and gave them new life.

Working from her prodigious native ability and single-minded devotion to singing and with the help of teachers, she became probably the best singer of Arabic poetry of the century anywhere in the Arabic-speaking world. Arguably, al-Wahhab was equally accomplished in his youth, but his voice began to fade in the s and he turned his attention to composition.

Her position at the pinnacle of Arabic song derived from her command of the language in both its colloquial and sophisticated literary forms; her vocal power and wide range; her command of the complexities of the Arab melodic system of maqamat melodic modes, singular, maqam ; and, most of all, her ability to fashion one rendition after another of a single line of poetry, each different from the other and each bringing the impact of the meaning of the line to the listener is a slightly different way.

This extended the performance of a or minute composition to an hour or more engaging listeners in feeling for poetic sentiment that enveloped them with the rapture called tarab literally, ecstasy from listening to her. Her Thursday night performances, which began at or at night, lasted until 3 or 4 in the morning, making this experience the highlight of the month for millions carried by radio waves across the Arab world.

At the same time, Umm Kulthum carefully controlled her public image. She persisted in following the stylish but modest dress of a wealthy Arab woman. Her chignon mimicked the bun in which many working-class women tied their hair. She spoke and acted as a devout Muslim woman of her day. She deflected media attention from her personal life at all times.

Om kalthoum biography of william

Thus she enacted a model of feminine respectability in public life that resonated with the widely held mores of modesty in her society and helped instantiate her as a model of cultural accomplishment. Riyad al-Sunbati —a composer, began his life in a village in the Egyptian delta. His father sang at local weddings and special occasions. Later in life, he and Umm Kulthum realized they had met each other as children, their paths crossing in a train station where both families were in transit to performances.

He learned to play the ud oud as a young man and came to Cairo first to study at the new Institute for Arab Music and very soon thereafter to teach there. The young Farid al-Atrash, a nascent ud virtuoso and soon-to-be film star, was one of al-Sunbati's early students. Al-Sunbati's skill at instrumental improvisation soon developed into a prodigious compositional talent.

He developed an extraordinary gift for setting poetic texts of all sorts from simple film songs to complex classical qasa'id.