Blog:
The Abdo Dagher school of Arabic music performance inherits an even earlier layer of musical ancestry that helps to delineate historical anteriority and continuity in the Arab World, namely from Ancient Egypt. Tabulating unearthed relics and statuaries of musical instruments, and relief and painting iconography of instrumental technique, music notation, multisonous polyphony and chironomy (conducting), Hans Hickman, musicologist and cataloguer at the Cairo Museum traces, as he says, Egypt's "forty-five centuries" of "perennial melopoeia" (melodic composition). As Hickman points out, the folk musician who plays the Red Sea lyre (semsimiyya) displays technique that resembles the lyre musician's dexterity portrayed from the 18th dynasty Middle Kingdom.
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