Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh (Arabic: حليم عبد المسيح الضبع, Ḥalīm ʻAbd al-Masīḥ al-Ḍabʻ; 4 March 1921 – 2 September 2017) was an Egyptian-American composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, and educator, who had a career spanning six decades.

[3] El-Dabh was born and grew up in Sakakini, Cairo, Egypt, a member of a large and affluent Coptic Christian family that had earlier emigrated from Abutig in the Upper Egyptian province of Asyut.

[1] Having borrowed a wire recorder from the offices of Middle East Radio, El-Dabh took it to the streets to capture outside sounds, specifically an ancient zaar ceremony, a type of exorcism conducted in public.

[1] According to El-Dabh, "I just started playing around with the equipment at the station, including reverberation, echo chambers, voltage controls, and a re-recording room that had movable walls to create different kinds and amounts of reverb."

His final 20–25 minute piece was recorded onto magnetic tape and called The Expression of Zaar, which was publicly presented in 1944 at an art gallery event in Cairo.

Emigrating to the United States in 1950 on a Fulbright fellowship (as expanded to include Egypt via the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948), El-Dabh studied composition with John Donald Robb and Ernst Krenek at the University of New Mexico; with Francis Judd Cooke at the New England Conservatory of Music; with Aaron Copland, Irving Fine, and Luigi Dallapiccola at the Berkshire Music Center; and with Irving Fine at Brandeis University.

[5] El-Dabh soon became a part of the New York new music scene of the 1950s, alongside such like-minded composers as Henry Cowell, John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Alan Hovhaness, and Peggy Glanville-Hicks.

Many of his compositions draw on Ancient Egyptian themes or texts, and one such work is his orchestral/choral score for the Sound and Light show at the site of Great Pyramid of Giza, which has been performed there each evening since 1961.

[7] El-Dabh's unique approach to combining spoken words, singing and percussion sounds with electronic signals and processing contributed significantly to the development of early electroacoustic techniques at the center.

[12] Leiyla and the Poet also featured a "sonorous, echoing voice, sonar signals, distorted ouds, percussion that sounds like metal," and "shadowy, shifting dream music."

Like Béla Bartók before him, El-Dabh conducted numerous research trips in various nations, recording and otherwise documenting traditional musics and using the results to enrich his compositions and teaching.

From 1959 to 1964, the most significant of these trips included investigations of the musics across the length and breadth of Egypt and Ethiopia, with later fieldwork being conducted in Mali, Senegal, Niger, Guinea, Zaire, Brazil, and several other nations.

He was invited back to his homeland in April 2002 for a festival of his music at the newly constructed Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt; most of the compositions presented were heard by the Egyptian public for the first time.

[16] In 2003 he was part of a three-day tribute to the late Olatunji called the SpiritDrum Festival,[17] with Muruga Booker, Badal Roy, Sikiru Adepoju, Jeff Rosenbaum, and Jim Donovan of Rusted Root[1].