Tag Archives: Lebanon

Bechara El-Khoury, composer and poet

The French Lebanese composer Bechara El-Khoury began his musical training at an early age, studying in Beirut with Agop Arslanian. Celebrated as a child prodigy, he composed around 100 works between 1969–when he was just 12 years old–and 1978. According to El-Khoury, “I began to compose melodies and simple songs when I was around 7 years old. I quickly moved to writing for orchestra, when I was about 12. I composed many pieces when I was young, but my first official work (that appears in my catalogue) was not until 1979, when I arrived in Paris.”

In addition to his musical pursuits, El-Khoury published three collections of poetry between 1971 and 1973, and from 1973 served as capo at the Church of St. Elie in Antelias, near Beirut. In 1979, he moved to Paris, where he refined his skills in composition and orchestration under the guidance of Pierre Petit. He became a French citizen in 1987.

In 1983, the Orchestre Colonne, conducted by Pierre Dervaux, recorded two CDs of Bechara El-Khoury’s music with pianist David Lively. That same year, a televised gala concert featuring El-Khoury’s works—performed with pianist Abdel Rahman El Bacha—was held in celebration of the Khalil Gibran Centenary. In 1985, El-Khoury composed the symphony Les Ruines de Beyrouth, followed in 1996 by a violin sextet commissioned by Shlomo Mintz. He has received numerous honors for his work, including the Prix des Arts et de la Culture from the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation International (1994), the Prix Rossini from the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Institut de France (2000), and the title of Chevalier of the Ordre National du Cèdre du Liban (2001). In 2003, he was a finalist in the London-based Masterprize composition competition with his orchestral work Les Fleuves engloutis (2001).

Cover art for Variations orientales (1975).
Cover art for Souvenirs d’amour (1978).

In 2006, El-Khoury’s violin concerto Aux frontières de nulle part (2002) received its premiere in Paris, performed by the Orchestre National de France under the baton of Kurt Masur. That same year, the London Symphony Orchestra recorded two of his major orchestral works: Les Fleuves engloutis and New York, Tears and Hope (2005), the latter composed in memory of the victims of the September 11 attacks in New York.

El-Khoury is also an accomplished poet, and he often speaks about the symbiotic relationship between his poetry and music. In an interview, he explains: “With many of my pieces I write a poem linked to it, either before or after. Sometimes the music creates a poem, and sometimes it is created by a poem . . . My poetic inspiration comes largely from the famous Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran and from Nietzsche.” He adds, “Not necessarily all my music is linked to poetry. And even if a piece has some poetic or programmatic inspiration, it’s still music. You can listen to it without having to know the content.” Nature is another key source of inspiration in El-Khoury’s work. For example, his horn concerto The dark mountain was inspired by childhood memories of the Lebanese mountains.

This according to the entry on Bechara El-Khoury in MGG Online.

Below, El-Khoury’s horn concerto in The dark mountain.

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Filed under 20th- and 21st-century music, Performers

Fayrūz and Lebanese identity

After her breakout performance at Lebanon’s 1957 Baalbeck International Festival (where organizers had initially worried that their sophisticated audience would find homegrown music distasteful) the music of Fayrūz went on to become a powerful emblem of Lebanese identity—a position that it holds to this day.

Fayrūz’s performance, which featured music by the Raḥbānī brothers, was the headline act of the Festival’s first Lebanese Nights series, and its resounding success ensured the continuation of the series, with the Fayrūz/Raḥbānī trio as its mainstay, until the Festival’s suspension at the beginning of the Civil War in 1975. During that time, the trio forged a music that both articulated Lebanon’s national character and aspired toward a future in which the country’s liminal position between the Arab world and the West would bring long-lasting peace and prosperity.

While this element of futurity was rhetorical and discursive, it was also profoundly sonic, manifested in the arrangement, instrumentation, and style of their work. The Fayrūz/Raḥbānī trio’s music was clearly positioned in relation to three major reference points that dominated nationalist discourse at the time: Arab nationalism, the West (conceived as European high culture), and Lebanese culture (conceived as local folklore).

While the style developed by the trio continues to shape understandings what it is to sound Lebanese today, Fayrūz’s voice has become symbolic of Lebanon itself. Notably, she did not sing there during the Civil War; she came back to perform in 1994, and returned to Baalbeck’s stage on the occasion of the Festival’s postwar resumption in 1998. Her wartime silence was publicly received as an act of resistance against violence on Lebanese soil and as a show of solidarity with the Lebanese people—further reinforcing the identification of her voice and persona with Lebanon as a country.

This according to “Hearing cosmopolitan nationalism in the work of Fairuz and the Rahbani Brothers” by Nour El Rayes (Yearbook for traditional music LIV/1 [2022] 49–72; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 2022-16150).

Above, Fayrūz performing in 1971 (public domain). Below, the official music video for the Fayrūz/Raḥbānī song Lebnan el akhdar (لبنان الأخضر/Lebanon the verdant); the recording is the subject of a detailed analysis in El Rayes’s article.

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Filed under Asia, Performers, Popular music, Reception