Oum Kalthoum in two songs in Maqam (musical mode)
Kurd
1.
Hagartak [1958] (I abandoned you) [41:52]
2. Faker Lama Kont Gambe [1939] (Do you remember when you were by me) [25:00]
Biography
Early life
Om Kalthoum was born in Tamay ez-Zahayra village in El Senbellawein, Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt. Her birth date is extremely controversial, and even the Egyptian Ministry of Information seems to have given either December 31, 1898, or December 31, 1904.
At a young age, she showed exceptional singing talent. Her father, an Imam, taught her to recite the Qur'an, and she is said to have memorized the entire book. When she was 12 years old, her father disguised her as a young boy and entered her in a small performing troupe that he directed. At the age of 16 she was noticed by Abol Ela Mohamed, a modestly famous singer, and by the famous oudist Zakariyya Ahmad, who invited her to Cairo. She waited until 1923 before accepting the invitation. She was invited on several occasions to the house of Amin Beh Al Mahdy, who taught her how to play the Oud". She developed a very close relationship to Rawyeha Al Mahdi, daughter of Amin, and became her closest friend. Kalthoum even attended Rawheya's daughter's wedding, although she has always tried to avoid public appearances.
Amin Al Mahdi introduced her to the cultural circles in Cairo
In Cairo, she carefully avoided succumbing to the attractions of the bohemian lifestyle, and indeed throughout her life stressed her pride in her humble origins and espousal of conservative values. She also maintained a tightly managed public image, which undoubtedly added to her allure.
At this point in her career, she was introduced to the famous poet Ahmad Rami, who wrote 137 songs for her. Rami also introduced her to French literature, which he greatly admired from his studies at the Sorbonne, Paris, and eventually became her head mentor in Arabic literature and literary analysis. Furthermore, she was introduced to the renowned lute virtuoso and composer Mohamed El Qasabgi. El Qasabgi introduced Om Kalthoum to the Arabic Theatre Palace, where she would experience her first real public success. In 1932, her fame increased to the point where she embarked upon a large tour of the Middle East, touring such cities as Damascus, Baghdad, Beirut, and Tripoli, Lebanon.
Fame
By 1948 her fame had come to the attention of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who would
later become the president of Egypt. At one point the Egyptian musicians guild
of which she became a member (and eventually president) rejected her because
she had sung for the then-deposed king, Farouk of Egypt. Nasser did not hide
his admiration for her. When he discovered that she was no longer allowed to
sing, he reportedly said something to the effect of "What are they? Crazy?
Do you want Egypt to turn against us?"3 It was his favor that made the
musicians' guild accept her back into the fold. In addition, Om Kalthoum was
a dedicated Egyptian patriot since the time of King Farouk. Some claim that
Om Kalthoum's popularity helped Nasser’s political agenda. For example,
Nasser’s speeches and other government messages were frequently broadcast
immediately after Om Kalthoum's monthly radio concerts. Om Kalthoum was also
known for her continuous contributions to charity works for the Egyptian military
efforts. Om Kalthoum’s monthly concerts took place on the first Thursday
of every month and were renowned for their ability to clear the streets of some
of the world's most populous cities as people rushed home to tune in.
Her songs deal mostly with the universal themes of love, longing and loss. They are nothing short of epic in scale, with durations measured in hours rather than minutes. A typical Om Kalthoum concert consisted of the performance of two or three songs over a period of three to six hours. In the late 1960s, due to her age, she began to shorten her performances to two songs over a period of two and a half to three hours. These performances are in some ways reminiscent of the structure of Western opera, consisting of long vocal passages linked by shorter orchestral interludes. However, Om Kalthoum was not stylistically influenced by opera.
The duration of Om Kalthoum's songs in performance was not fixed, but varied based on the level of emotive interaction between the singer and her audience. A typical improvisatory technique of hers was to repeat a single phrase or sentence of a song's lyrics over and over, subtly altering the emotive emphasis and intensity each time to bring her audiences into a euphoric and ecstatic state, and was considered to "have never sang a line the same way twice". Thus, while the official recorded length of a song such as Enta Omri (You Are My Life) is approximately 60 minutes, a live performance could extend to many hours as the singer and her audience fed off each other's emotional energy. This intense, highly personalized creative relationship was undoubtedly one of the reasons for Om Kalthoum's tremendous success as an artist.
Acting
In parallel to her singing career, Om Kalthoum at one point pursued an acting
career starring in six films; however, she quickly gave it up because of the
lack of personal and emotional contact with the audience.
Personal life
Om Kalthoum was rumored to have had a romantic affair with Sharif Sabri Pasha,
one of the uncles of King Farouk in the 1940s. By the mid-1950s, public speculation
regarding Om Kalthum's sexuality focused on her alleged love affairs and courtship
of other women. In 1955, in what was perceived as a possible attempt to quash
rumors surrounding her personal life, she hastily married a dermatologist named
Hassen El Hafnaoui, taking care to include a clause in the marriage contract
that would allow her to initiate a divorce if necessary. The couple had no children.
Death
In 1967, Om Kalthoum was diagnosed with a severe case of nephritis. She gave
her last concert at the Palace of the Nile in 1973. Tests at that time indicated
that her illness was incurable. She moved to the United States, where she benefited
for some time from the advanced medical technology, but in 1975, upon re-entering
her home country, she required hospitalization due to declining health. Om Kalthoum
died in a Cairo hospital on February 3, 1975.
Her funeral was attended by over 4 million mourners – one of the largest gatherings in history – and descended into pandemonium when the crowd seized control of her coffin and carried it to a mosque that they considered her favorite, before later releasing the coffin for burial.
Legacy
Om Kalthoum has been a significant influence on a number of musicians, both
in the Arab World and beyond. Among others, Jah Wobble has claimed her as a
significant influence on his work. Bob Dylan has been quoted as saying "She's
great. She really is. Really great" 45, Maria Callas, Jean-Paul Sartre,
Marie Laforêt, Salvador Dalí, Nico, Bono and Led Zeppelin are also
known to be admirers of Kalthoum's music. One of her best known songs, Enta
Omri, has been the basis of many reinterpretations, including one 2005 collaborative
project involving Israeli and Egyptian artists.
She had been referred to as "The Lady" by Charles de Gaulle, and is regarded as "The Incomparable Voice" by Maria Callas, Om Kalthoum is remembered in Egypt and the Middle East as one of the greatest singers and musicians who have ever lived. It is hard to accurately measure her vocal range at its peak, since most of her songs are recorded live, and she was careful not to strain her voice too much due to the extended rendition of her songs. Even today, she has retained a near mythical status amongst young Egyptians. She is also notably popular in Israel among Jews and Arabs alike, and her records continue to sell around a million copies a year. In 2001, the Egyptian government opened the Kawkab al-Sharq (Star of the East) Museum in the singer's memory. Housed in a pavilion on the grounds of Cairo's Manesterly Palace, the collection includes a range of Om Kalthoum's personal possessions, including her trademark sunglasses and scarves, along with photographs, recordings, and other archival material.6
Her voice
It is known that she had the ability to sing as low as the second octave, as
well as the ability to sing as high as between the seventh and the eighth octave
at her vocal peak; yet she also could easily sing over a range surpassing two
octaves near the end of her career. Her remarkable ability to produce approximately
14,000 vibrations per second with her vocal chords, her unparallelled vocal
strength (no commercial microphone utilized for singing could withstand its
strength, forcing her to stand at a 1-3 meter radius away from one), her ability
and capability to sing every single Arabic scale, and her voice’s unique
and breathtaking beauty that surpasses convention, arguably makes her the most
incomparable voice of all time. In her final few years, recordings show a slight
coarsening of her voice, a loss of the silken golden thread of coloratura which
in her earlier years, in songs such as Bairam al-Tunsi's Beredaak, she displayed
with an ease and stupendous nonchalance.
Maqam Kurd
Arabic maqam (Arabic: ?????; pl. maqamat ?????? or maqams) is the system of
melodic modes used in traditional Arabic music, which is mainly melodic. The
word maqam in Arabic means place, location or rank. The Arabic maqam is a melody
type. Each maqam is built on a scale, and carries a tradition that defines its
habitual phrases, important notes, melodic development and modulation. Both
compositions and improvisations in traditional Arabic music are based on the
maqam system. Maqams can be realized with either vocal or instrumental music,
and do not include a rhythmic component.
The designation maqam appeared for the first time in the treatises written in the fourteenth century by Al-Sheikh Al-Safadi and Abdulqadir Al-Maraghi, and has since then been used as a technical term in Arabic music. The maqam is a modal structure that characterizes the art of music of countries in North Africa, the Near East and Central Asia. In this area we can distinguish three main musical cultures which all belong to the modal family, namely the Turkish, the Greek, the Persian and the Arabic.
A strong similarity exists between these three families in which the same modal structure is known as Makam in Turkish music, Dastgah in Persian music, Mugam in Azerbaijan, Meqam in Kurdish music, Makam in Assyrian music, Shash Maqom in Uzbek music and Muqam in Uyghur music.
The maqam was preceded by seven centuries, by the Dastgah of Persia, developed by Barbod. Many Arabic maqams can trace their names to the Persian language, e.g. Nikriz, Farahfaza, Suzidil, Suznak, Rast, Sikah (from Se-Gah), Jiharkah (from Chehar-Gah) and Nairuz (from Nowruz). The reverse is also true, with Persian Goosheh names taken from Arabic, e.g. Hejaz (from Hijaz), Hoseynî (from Husseini), Oshshagh (from 'Ushshaq) and Hodi. Similarly, many Arabic maqam names come from the Turkish Makam, such as Sultani Yekah, Buselik and Bastanikar, while the following Turkish Makam names trace their origin to Arabic: Hiçaz, Irak, Huseyni, Sunbule and Ussak.
The Arabic scales which maqamat are built from are not even-tempered, unlike the chromatic scale used in Western classical music. Instead, 5th notes are tuned based on the 3rd harmonic. The tuning of the remaining notes entirely depends on the maqam. The reasons for this tuning are probably historically based on string instruments like the oud. A side effect of not having even-tempered tuning is that the same note (by name) may have a slightly different pitch depending on which maqam it is played in.
Many maqamat include notes that can be approximated with quarter tones (depicted using the half-flat sign or the half-sharp sign ), although they rarely are precise quarters falling exactly halfway between two semitones. Even notes depicted as semitones sometimes include microtonal subtleties depending on the maqam in which they are used. For this reason, when writing Arabic music using the Western notation system, there is an understanding that the exact tuning of each note might vary with each maqam and must be learned by ear.
Another peculiarity of maqamat is that the same note is not always played with the same exact pitch. The pitch may vary slightly, depending on the melodic flow and what other notes are played before and after that note. The idea behind this effect is to round sharp corners in the melody by drawing the furthest notes nearer. This effect is sometimes called the law of attraction or gravity, and is common in other musical traditions (e.g. in Byzantine music).
* Maqam: Musical mode
