Here is another composition worth watching/hearing. It’s by the Nader Abbassi Orchestra a Swiss/Egyptian Conductor also with solid classical music conducting experience; his profile site here. The performance is of Egyptian movie scores; here a composition by Moudy Al Imam for a film named “A Message to the Governor”. Reason I believe it’s worth watching because to me what is fascinating is how east/west musical traditions diverge both in musical structures and tunes. This not to mention the divergence of the origins of many of the musical instruments. I strongly believe that the use of non-traditional instruments and foreign tunes or merely listening to music from different regions is a source of musical enrichment of local musical structures/traditions – this is NOT a theory but rather musical history holds the proof. That is exactly what you see in these compositions like this one and many others where full orchestra’s are utilised along with accompanying eastern traditional instruments like the wooden flute, called the “Nay” and the horizontal harp-like instrument called “Qanoon”.
Finally this piece is quite simple and uses 3 distinct musical phrases, the intro and 2 other phrases that are repeated – which makes the composition easy to follow. You can feel a mix of Scheherazade with a light touch of Lawrence of Arabia, for me anyway. You can find more western style or eastern style composition equally beautiful – here is a more western style version (a beautiful composition especially the 2nd section) – but I thought this one represents a balanced mix and is a simple composition.
Hope you enjoy!
PS: As I am currently doing plenty of reading on the history of Music – mainly western style classical music – I will be sharing shortly “Musical Nuggets” each week which highlight what I believe to be interesting aspects for people to know – as knowledge sharing approach – on the evolution of musical styles as well as about composers and places. I will also use these posts to share image retouches I’ve done to images of composers and instruments. If all goes well I may even do interviews with existing musicians. Will see how it goes.