A musical interlude [Archives:2002/22/Culture]

BY ABDUL KADER BAGUNAID
FOR THE YEMEN TIMES
So, just how good is music in Yemen? Pretty darn good, according to local experts.
The author of the book The Songs mentions that Yemeni people refer to their singing as Alas Bin Zaid De-Gaden. He assumed that De-Gaden was the first one who had sung about Yemen and that he was one of its kings. He was titled De-Gaden for the beauty of his voice. In Yemen De-Gaden means the nice voice.
Yemens old singing is al-Hemyari. It means the music of the Hemyarids. Similarly, the latter means the music of the Hanafids.
The Tunisian Songs tells us that it is obvious that singing and music are regarded as the most important necessities.
They were always considering the Yemeni musicians and the Hadhramids singers as professional singers. The researcher Dr. Hussein Nassar says in his book Arabic Popular Poetry that Yemenis had provided the popular arts with an excellent immortal literature that was sung in each place wherever they settled before and after Islam.
The capable Yemeni poet, the late Abdullah al-Baraddouni identified al-Zamel, that it is from the current dailies of life through which the face of life mixes with the voice of man and that life develops with man as man develops with life.
Dr. Samah al-Kholly mentioned in the Heritage of the International Music which she had translated, that the primitive nations in the prehistoric ages had planted the seeds of which the high level of music in the East and the West came from.

——
[archive-e:22-v:2002-y:2002-d:2002-05-27-p:./2002/iss22/culture.htm]