Halim El-Dabh, an Egyptian-American composer best known for the haunting, Eastern-infused ballets he wrote for Martha Graham, died on Sept. 2 at his home in Kent, Ohio. He was 96.
His death was announced by Kent State University, where he was university professor emeritus of music, specializing in composition and African ethnomusicology.
Mr. El-Dabh, who began his professional life as an agricultural engineer before succumbing to his passion for shaping sound, settled in the United States in 1950. In the years that followed, he was a vigorous presence on the East Coast new-music scene, which included composers like Otto Luening and Alan Hovhaness.
But Mr. El-Dabh’s music, critics agreed, was unlike anyone else’s. Hallmarks of his style included melodic fragmentation, rich sonic layering and lyricism combined with judicious dissonance; rhythmic complexity; unusual instrumentation; and strains of the music of Egypt, where he was born and reared, and that of sub-Saharan Africa, where he did extensive fieldwork.
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Mr. El-Dabh, who composed hundreds of pieces, including symphonies, concertos, chamber music and vocal works, was also known for compositions that combined Western instruments with Eastern ones, notably the darbuka, a goblet-shaped drum on which he was a skilled performer.
He was also in the vanguard of electronic composition, creating pieces in that medium as early as the 1940s.
Writing about Mr. El-Dabh in 1975, The Washington Post called him “a modern composer of stature and accomplishment.”
Mr. El-Dabh’s most famous composition is almost certainly the score for “Clytemnestra,” one of four ballets for which Ms. Graham commissioned him. The only full-evening-length dance she choreographed, it is widely considered her masterwork, spanning more than two hours and reworking the mythic Greek tragedy of murder and retribution.
“Clytemnestra,” with scenic design by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and with Ms. Graham dancing the title role, had its premiere in 1958 at the Adelphi Theater in Midtown Manhattan. It played on Broadway in 1960 and has endured as a foundation stone of the modern-dance repertoire.
Reviewing the premiere in The New York Times, the dance critic John Martin called it “a rare experience.” He praised Mr. El-Dabh’s score, which fused orchestral lines with half-sung chanting, as “enormously effective,” adding, “For once a composer has had no end in view for his music beyond making it an inseparable element in a theatrical collaboration.”
Mr. El-Dabh’s other ballets for Ms. Graham are “One More Gaudy Night” (1961), “A Look at Lightning” (1962) and “Lucifer” (1975).
Although the young Mr. El-Dabh never anticipated a career as a composer, he had carried out his first acoustic experiments as a youth, in the service of insect extermination — or, as he more tenderly put it, insect discouragement.
The youngest of nine children, Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh was born in Cairo on March 4, 1921. As a child, he was captivated by the liturgical music of his family’s Coptic Christian tradition. He also studied Western music, including the piano, at the Szulc Conservatory in Cairo.
As a teenager, he fashioned literal sound sculptures out of scrap metal: Their windblown clangor, he hoped, would keep insects from his family’s crops.
“Through agriculture, I learned how to create noise,” Mr. El-Dabh said in a 2016 interview. “I had the feeling that noise would make them discouraged, and they would stay away from the plants.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering from what is now Cairo University, he combined vocation and avocation, traveling to outlying Egyptian villages to assist with agricultural development and, while there, soaking up traditional music and dance.
Increasingly fascinated by the possibilities of manipulating sound, he borrowed a wire recorder — an early, unwieldy ancestor of the tape recorder — from a Cairo radio station and took to the city’s streets, recording folk songs, religious rites and vendors’ cries.
That experience gave rise to an early electronic composition, “The Expression of Zaar.” It was born of Mr. El-Dabh’s recording of the zaar, a traditional exorcism ritual, which he manipulated in the studio to yield echoes, reverberations and other distortions.
“I was carving sound,” he told The Christian Science Monitor in 1974. “I used noise like I would a piece of stone.”
“The Expression of Zaar” received its premiere at a Cairo gallery in 1944. That work, later released as “Wire Recorder Piece,” together with Mr. El-Dabh’s writing for the piano, became the catalyst for his full-time composing career.
After moving to the United States, Mr. El-Dabh studied at the University of New Mexico, where his teachers included the Austrian atonalist Ernst Krenek, and later earned a master’s degree in music from the New England Conservatory and a master of fine arts in composition from Brandeis.
At the Aspen Music Festival, he worked with Igor Stravinsky; at Tanglewood, he studied with Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein. Moving from Boston to New York in the late 1950s, he became associated with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, a hotbed of sonic ferment.
Mr. El-Dabh, who became a United States citizen in 1961, made field recordings over the years in Egypt, Ethiopia, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Brazil and elsewhere. He taught at Haile Selassie I University (now Addis Ababa University) in the early 1960s and later at Howard University in Washington before joining the Kent State faculty in 1969.
His other compositions include the monumental “Symphony for 1,000 Drums,” whose title is a literal accounting of the instrumentation involved; “Leiyla and the Poet,” an electronic work; and “Opera Flies,” a music-theater allegory inspired by the killing of four Kent State students by National Guardsmen in May 1970.
“Opera Flies” was performed at Kent State in 1971 and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music later that year.
In Egypt, an orchestral work by Mr. El-Dabh has been played nightly, from the early 1960s to the present day, as part of a son-et-lumière show at the Great Pyramids of Giza.
Mr. El-Dabh’s first marriage, to Marybelle Hyde, ended in divorce. His survivors include his second wife, the former Deborah Jaken, whom he married in 1978; two daughters, Shadia and Amira, from his first marriage; a son, Habeeb, from his second marriage; and two grandchildren.
Mr. El-Dabh, whose work has been recorded on the Centaur and Without Fear labels, is the subject of a biography, “The Musical World of Halim El-Dabh” (2003), by Denise A. Seachrist.
To the end of his life, Mr. El-Dabh saw his music as representing a marriage of traditions ancient and modern, Eastern and Western. In a 1957 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, he articulated what would be an enduring credo.
“I stand in the 20th century,” he said, “and I experience 20th-century phenomena, but the roots of ancient times are in me. I use their insights to understand the West and contribute to its music.”
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