Halim El-Dab

Born in Cairo in 1921, El-Dabh is often credited with producing the earliest known work of electronic music: his 1944 "Wire Recorder Piece," made by processing sounds from a zār ritual, predates the European musique concrète movement by several years. He moved to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship in 1950 and worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the late 1950s. His ballet score for Martha Graham's Clytemnestra became a landmark in American dance, and his sound-and-light composition for the pyramids at Giza, created at the request of President Nasser, has been performed nightly since 1961. He died in 2017.