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WonderMusic biography fact

Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian singer known as 'the Star of the East', was one of the most celebrated voices of the twentieth-century Arab world. Her monthly radio concerts of classical Arabic poetry, sung with long improvised passages, drew listeners across the region.

Umm Kulthum

MusicCultureBiographyHistory

The story behind the card

Born in a village in the Nile Delta in the early 1900s, she learned to recite the Qur'an as a child and sang religious songs in her father's small troupe, dressed as a boy so she could appear on stage. That training shaped the ornamented, flexible phrasing she later brought to love songs. From 1937 she gave a concert on the first Thursday of each month, broadcast live across the Arab world. A single song could last more than an hour as she repeated and varied a line in answer to the crowd, building the shared musical ecstasy known in Arabic as tarab. After Egypt's defeat in the 1967 war she gave concerts at home and abroad and handed the proceeds to the state. Her funeral in Cairo in 1975 drew an estimated four million people.

Türkçe oku
Mısırlı şarkıcı Ümmü Gülsüm, “Doğu'nun Yıldızı” lakabıyla 20. yüzyıl Arap dünyasının en çok sevilen seslerinden biri oldu. Klasik Arap şiirini uzun doğaçlamalarla söylediği aylık radyo konserleri, bütün bölgede milyonları radyo başına toplardı.

1900'lerin başında Nil Deltası'ndaki bir köyde doğdu. Çocukken Kur'an okumayı öğrendi, imam olan babasının küçük topluluğunda dinî ezgiler söyledi; sahneye çıkabilmesi için erkek çocuk kılığına sokuldu. Bu eğitim, sonradan aşk şarkılarına taşıdığı süslü ve esnek okuyuşu biçimlendirdi. 1937'den itibaren her ayın ilk perşembesi, Arap dünyasının dört bir yanına canlı yayımlanan bir konser verdi. Dinleyicinin coşkusuna karşılık bir dizeyi yineleyip her seferinde farklı söylediği için tek bir şarkı bir saati aşabiliyordu; şarkıcıyla dinleyicinin birlikte kapıldığı bu coşkuya Arapçada tarab denir. Mısır'ın 1967 savaşındaki yenilgisinden sonra yurt içinde ve dışında konserler verip gelirini devlete bağışladı. 1975'te Kahire'deki cenazesine yaklaşık dört milyon kişinin katıldığı tahmin ediliyor.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Umm Kulthum
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