A Groundbreaking International Composers Gathering with a Long-term Outreach
Heritage and Modernity
The forum lasted for four intensive days and featured many events that shed lights on the relation between music tradition and European modernism with focus on Arab music and music instruments. Certainly, developing the parallel Composers platform led us to dedicate the next two issues of our annual festival, the Cairo Contemporary Music Days, to present the compositions will result from this rich and intensive experience. We were also surprised by that the memories and notions of conference of Arabic Music of 1932 still haunted us when planning for Heritage and Modernity. Even if our forum is totally diffident and artistic matters nowadays cannot be separately discussed from many other aspects we hope that the outreach of Heritage and modernity may last that long as the 1932’s.
The forum called for and hosted more than 40 of the world’s promising and established composers and amongst them Oscar Bianchi, Hanna Hartman, Zaid Jabri and Vykintas Baltakas. There were composition masterclasses, meetings with the mentor composers, presentations by the younger generations of composers, and plenty showcases. The showcases part was very diverse and very important for such forum because it helped shed light on Arab and Egyptian instruments that we would like to explore its integration possibility in contemporary compositions. Sonority, performing technique, notation etc.
Already more than 7 new compositions are planned to be premiered in 2017. The Forum’s promising results were enormous for our team and that could be seen in the artistic, social and cultural impact of holding such international gathering in this part of the world.
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