Sounds of the Cold War Acropolis: Halim El-Dabh at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center

Abstract

Often overlooked in histories of electronic music are the contributions of Egyptian-born composer Halim El-Dabh (1921–2017), who first experimented with wire recorders in Cairo in the late 1940s and extended related projects at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (CPEMC) from 1959 to 1962. The CPEMC was founded in 1958 as a vibrant site for cultural diplomacy, supported by a massive Rockefeller Foundation grant. This event testified to an era when public and private agencies scrambled to invest New York City with a cultural infrastructure befitting its global status as a symbol of ascendant U.S. power. At mid-century, Columbia University's longtime nickname ‘the acropolis’ gained new value in public discourse. This term figured the university in a contradictory way as a cosmopolitan center and fortress, an emblem for U.S. democracy and dominion during the Cold War. Globally the CPEMC attracted visiting and immigrating composers who pursued projects of cultural diplomacy. El-Dabh's own journey followed a path from elite Egyptian emissaryship in 1950 to U.S. citizenship in 1961, enmeshing a story of soft power strategy with one of internal minoritarian experience. Drawing on interviews, archival research, El-Dabh's electronic oeuvre, and reception history, this article examine the CPEMC's contradictions as a lively cultural crossroads and a defensive bastion for restrictive ideas of ‘Western culture’. As such, the CPEMC emerges as more than just an incubator for the ‘uptown’ composition scene, but rather as a sound laboratory at the heart of imperial circulations of labor, expertise, and subjectivity.