Marcel Khalife

Marcel Khalife is a Lebanese composer, singer, and oud virtuoso born in 1950 in the coastal town of Amchit, north of Beirut, who is one of the most widely heard Arab musicians of his generation and a touchstone figure in the modern revival of the oud as a concert instrument. His settings of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish are sung across the Arabic-speaking world.

Khalife studied at the Beirut National Conservatory of Music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where he later taught oud, before founding the Al Mayadine Ensemble in 1976 against the backdrop of the Lebanese civil war. With Al Mayadine he toured extensively and released a long string of albums that fused classical Arabic forms with contemporary orchestration, jazz harmony, and choral writing.

His repertoire ranges from intimate oud-and-voice songs to large symphonic works, including the oratorio-like Arabic Coffeepot and the orchestral suite Jadal. Several of his Darwish settings, among them Rita and Ummi (My Mother), became anthems of Arab cultural memory; in 1999 a Lebanese court attempted to prosecute him for blasphemy over a song that quoted a Quranic verse, but he was acquitted after wide international protest.

UNESCO named him an Artist for Peace in 2005 in recognition of his cultural diplomacy, and he has performed with both of his sons, the pianist Rami Khalife and the percussionist Bachar Mar-Khalife, at major venues from Carnegie Hall to the Royal Albert Hall.

The name Marcel is the French form of the Latin Marcellus, a diminutive of Marcus; it carries the sense of little warrior and is masculine.