Nubian Music of Aswan:
Tambour, duff, oud, and kaff

New Album:  Nuba Yonna produced by Hamoudi Tannoum, now available on all platforms

Local musical traditions are not merely entertainment for aesthetic pleasure, icing on the sociocultural cake.  Rather, they are a basic, critical tool for community creation, maintenance, wellbeing, and empowerment, and hence essential for social and cultural development. 

Participatory performing arts (music, song, dance, drama, storytelling) sustain - and are sustained by - social solidarity and sociocultural continuity, binding communities and generations. Along with communal food and ritual, local participatory musical traditions form a kind of social glue that connects us, beyond family, through common emotional experience, and standing as potent symbols of community identity. Their vibrancy and vitality is crucial for civil society to flourish.

This project, providing resources (interviews, songs, and -- importantly and unusually -- transcriptions and translations of song texts) for the teaching and learning of Nubian music, based on collaborative community research, represents one small but important contribution towards the goal of music cultural revitalization.  The contents of this website are for the entire Nubian community, and for teachers and parents to use in transmitting these musical and poetic traditions to their children. They are also designed for Egyptians and Nubians more generally, and for the whole world to learn about these precious musical traditions.  Please contact us with any questions (contact information is below).

NB: Torya (pictured below) and  the onsite Hamoudi Tannoum Records, in Gharb Seheil, Aswan, were the primary sites of research in 2022. At the left are images at Torya of some of the greatest singers in the region, both Egyptian and Sudanese. Click on the images for sample recordings.

Credits:

All the participating performing artists, especially Adel Mekha, Ahmed Abd Elmaged, Ahmed Hemat, the Holle Holle Ensemble from Ambarkab, Mahmoud Rabie, Ramadan Mahgoub, Thabit Tebd, and Zizo Tag

Sound engineer: Hamoudi Tannoum
Research assistant:  Ayaat Mohamed
Principal Investigator: Michael Frishkopf, Department of Music, University of Alberta

Interviews were conducted in Torya's courtyard, and studio recordings were made by Hamoudi Tannoum, at Hamoudi Tannoum Records 

This project was completed thanks to generous support from The Aga Khan Music Programme, as well as the Presidents' Fund (Department of Music) and SAS Fund (Faculty of Arts) at the University of Alberta.

All materials on this site are licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International) (نَسب المُصنَّف - غير تجاري - الترخيص بالمثل 4.0 دولي).  You are free to Share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and Adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material), provided you meet three conditions: (1) Attribution: you give appropriate credit to the creative artists, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use; (2) Non Commercial: You may not use the material for commercial purposes; (3) Share Alike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.