Riad Abdel-Gawad composes music and performs on the violin, which, although does not fit easily into any "box" or genre, points towards likely frontiers that music has taken and will take in the 21st-century. Having composed in three very distinct styles of composition — "contemporary and avant-garde", "polystylistic postmodern", and "international authentic world", his music crosses and fuses a variety of Western and Eastern genres and canons. Having immersed himself for over a decade in a unique guru-based artistic school in Cairo, Riad Abdel-Gawad is considered amongst his peers to be one of the finest artists of his generation whose linage to a remarkably distinct school of Arab music and a mastery of its improvisatory practice is undisputed.

This unique Arab music school was developed by Abdo Dagher, legendary violin accompanier to Egyptian singer Oum Kalsoum, the "Incomparable Voice" so-named by Maria Callas. Riad Abdel-Gawad links and preserves a tradition whose roots reach to the Medieval Arabic writers’ and practitioners’ old sources. This school, is the only such teacher-disciple school to develop in recent (c. 100 years) documented Cairo history. Baghdad experienced the development of a similar unique stylistic school, (of Mouneer Basheer) c. 30-40 years ago that focused on `oud—"lute" performance. This Iraqi school now has a small number of renowned second-generation performing artists (e.g. Nasheer Shama, Adel Sallameh).

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Riad Abdel-Gawad is a graduate of the University of Southern California, the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and Harvard University. He studied with Bernard Rands at Harvard. Mr. Abdel-Gawad also spent one year of study with Frederic Rzewski at the Conservatoire Royal de Liège in Belgium.

www.riadabdelgawad.com