The Second Festival for the Oud in Khartoum, Sudan
Tag: Egypt
Instrument collections and their stories
… collections are memories of peoples, each with their own traditions and languages …
Nur al-Din and the green satin bag
What lies within…?
But is it an oud?
… a Tunisian instrument in London …
The oldest surviving oud?
… even the oldest surviving Arab string instrument?
Egypt to France c.1800
By Rachel Beckles Willson An oud travelled to Europe as a consequence of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Musician and writer Guillaume André Villoteau (1759-1839) had joined the 159 men Napoleon took along with him as a “Commission of the Sciences and Arts”, and while in Egypt he collected instruments to bring back home…
Alexandria to Brussels, 1839
By Rachel Beckles Willson The second oud in Europe whose journey we know about arrived thanks to the Belgian musician and scholar François-Joseph Fétis (1784-1871). Thanks to the note he made in his Histoire Generale de la Musique we can trace how it happened. Led by his ambition to understand music from all over the…