Music for martyrs: AUC highlights songs of 1919 revolution
A hundred years after Egypt’s 1919 revolution led to the country's formal independence from Britain, the American University in Cairo paid homage to the artistic legacy of the revolution with the songs of Sayed Darwish.
The audience at the American University in Cairo’s newly dedicated Tahrir Cultural Center moved from passive listening to meditative, reflective swaying as Nesma Mahgoub sang the aggrieved melody “This Is What Has Come To Be,” its words urging the powerless to join for a different future for Egypt. The song is one of the best known of the more than 100 “taqtuqas” composed by Sayed Darwish (1892-1923), music that functioned as the collective soundtrack for the 1919 revolution, whose centennial is celebrated this year.
Taqtuqa is a genre of light music accompanied by politics-infused lyrics sang in colloquial Egyptian. Alaa-Eldin Adris, associate dean for research, innovation and creativity at the American University in Cairo (AUC), headed an interdisciplinary team that compiled and organized the most influential songs of the genre written amid the 1919 revolution.
“By 1919, with the advent of the phonograph, popular song and music were no longer localized to specific areas or groups,” Adris told Al-Monitor. “Powerful lyrics in colloquial Egyptian sung to lively music inspired feelings of nationalism and shared welfare among Egyptians.”
In contemporary republican Egypt, March 9 is officially observed as Martyrs Day, which honors Abdul Munim Riad, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s chief of staff who died in 1969 in an Israeli mortar attack in the Suez Canal zone. This year, AUC also chose that day for a tribute to Darwish — the father of the popular Egyptian music and who is thought to have died a “rock star” death, likely from a cocaine overdose, at the age of 31 — and share its newly digitized musical archive of revolutionary music from 1919.
