Anis Fuleihan: A Lebanese-Cypriot  American Composer, Pianist, and Scholar Rooted in Eastern and Western Musical Traditions

Anis Fukeihan, photo from original 1919 document. Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection.

Perhaps the best-known musician, pianist, composer, record manufacturer, in early twentieth-century Arab America was Alexander Maloof. Born in 1884, a composer of sheet music by 1900, and contributor to the idea of submitting a potential U.S. national anthem.  We’ve featured both Maloof and the composer Leon S. Nahmee on Midwest Mahjar. While going through stories the name of composer, musician, and pianist - Anis Fuleihan.

 

 

Born to Lebanese parents, Yasmine Nassif and Milheim Fuleihan, on 2 April 1900 near Kyrenia, Cyprus, Anis T. Fuleihan began playing piano at the age of four. Fuleihan claimed there had been no other musicians in his family except a “amateur lute player of some distinction” on his mother’s line of the family tree. An unknown local police bandleader, of unimpressive and questionable music teaching ability, became the young Fuleihan’s first music instructor. However, neither time spent in Cyprus nor Egypt seems to have contributed to his musical education. This changed when Fuleihan immigrated to the United States from Egypt onboard a ship called the King Constantine.  The date was 2 October 1915. Anis enrolled in Brooklyn’s Polytechnical Preparatory Country Day School where he studied music under Hazel Hulva in the school’s music department. He then took lessons with Spanish virtuoso Alberto Jonas and under Jonas’s direction he and five other pupils had their first recitals May 12, 1919.  Within five months, on October 29, Fuleihan made his concert debut at Aeolian Hall in Manhattan. According to press reports, he performed “his own Arabian compositions,” “Arabian Sketches,” and “Oriental Fantasies,” and was the first Arab American concert pianist, although he demonstrated “no particular breadth of grasp or imaginative power.” Other sources suggest five of the day’s ten numbers were Fuleihan originals including “Bedouin Dance,” “Monajat,” “Serenade in the Dessert,” and “Dance of the Dervishes.” The remainder included selections by Beethoven, Schumann, Debussy, Jonas, and Liszt.  In all, the press was not at a loss for Orientalist metaphors to describe Fuleihan’s own compositions. His less ceremonious second recital was also at Aeolian Hall on 26 March 1920. The following year Fuleihan scored his first ballet - “Arab Fantasia.”

Ad from New York Tribune, 27 October 1919. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

 

While mainstream audiences were the target for some of his concert performances, Fuleihan was also socially and professionally connected to Arab American communities in New York and Boston.  When William Ghiz gave a New Year’s Eve costume party in Brooklyn in 1920, Anis Fuleihan and several of his family members were among the noted guests. Several prominent Syrian and Armenian Brooklynites attended the soiree at 142 Amity Street. Similarly in April 1922, Boston’s Syrian community hosted a benefit concert at the Church of All Nations on Shawmut Avenue under the direction of E.P. Malouf and Anis Fuleihan.

Original Ad for Anis Fuleihan’s first major recital at Aeolian Hall. Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection. 

 

Both praised and belittled in newspaper reviews, Fuleihan seems to have impressed the right people enough to record piano rolls for Aeolian Company’s Duo-Art mechanism brand. In June 1920, Anis Fuleihan recorded #6305 “Serenade in the Desert” followed by #6350 “Serenade” in October 1920, and #6367 “Bedouin Dance” in December. Interestingly, the creation of piano rolls and production of sheet music prompted concerts where pianists and other musicians might offer performances of Fuleihan’s compositions without his physical presence. For example, on different occasions in 1921and 1922, a Mrs. Marshall M. Day performed Fuleihan’s “Serenade in the Desert” and “Bedouin Dance” for a charity benefit recital; Anis Fuleihan was not physically present at this event. In October 1922, when Mrs. Velma Balcom at the Sacred Heart Convent near Fall River, Massachusetts. Balcolm, a well-known soprano, gave a concert using the Duo Art reproducing piano playing the music of “Josef Hofman, Harold Bauer, and other great pianists” while Fuleihan was physically present to play the “Berceuse,” pieces from Chopin, “and a Serenade of his own composition. This was immediately followed by the Duo Art reproducing Mr. Fuleihan’s playing of the same piece.”  According to one article, “this gave the audience…the interesting opportunity of comparing the warmth and expressiveness of the production of the Duo Art with the actual playing of a pianist who is present in person.” This concert was not a one-time affair but rather part of a series 45 Duo Arts concerts across New England beginning around March 1922 and ending in Aril 1923. Radio stations WGI in Medford and WNAC in Boston broadcast some of these concerts.  

Ad from 4 May 1922 Holyoke Daily. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

To further promote himself and his Aeolian Duo Art piano rolls, Fuleihan also went on a demonstration and lecture tour in the Fall of 1923. His lectures extolled the wonders of the reproducing piano or automatic player piano and compared his live demos to what costumers could enjoy in the luxuries and comforts of their own homes. Of course, player pianos found increased competition from phonograph records. This likely explains why Fuleihan’s contemporary Alexander Maloof produced and sold piano rolls, phonograph records, and sheet music. A.J. Macksoud, too, produced and sold records and piano rolls. Less successful than Maloof, Leon S. Nahmee also made a living composing music, selling sheet music and music books, and occasional collaborations with Rev. Khalil Bashara.

Ad from 17 February 1925, Meriden Daily. Courtesy of Newspapers.com

In the midst of one of the most tumultuous periods in immigration and naturalization history, Anis Fuleihan initiated the process of becoming a United States citizen. First, Fuleihan arrived just after the Supreme Court’s Dow decision and two years before the 64^th Congress passed the 1917 Immigration Act. Huge swaths of this legislation barred a host pf people considered “undesirables,” “illiterate,” and from the Asian-Barred Zone. This included much of East Asia (sans Japan and the Philippines) and the Arabian Peninsula. Greater Syria was not a part of this but did get included in the restrictions of the 1924 Immigration Act. Sandwiched between these two pieces of legislation was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921 limiting immigration from southern and eastern Europe and the Ozawa and Thind cases; it was perhaps a combination of Fuleihan’s status as a Syrian (Lebanese) immigrant from British-Controlled Cyprus in 1915 that helped him dodge various immigration and naturalization barriers. Anis Theodore Fuleihan became a naturalized United States citizen 3 September 1925. 

 

While some sources suggest Fuleihan left the US on tour between 1919 and 1928, this seems inaccurately impossible. It appears Fuleihan moved to Boston for a time from 1922 to 1924 before leaving the United States. What’s more possible is that he toured the Middle East from September 1925 or March 1926 to 3 October 1927 with stops in Cairo, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon. He came back to the United States via Naples, Italy on the S. S. Patria. Performances resumed and included the 1929 recital sponsored by the Men’s Club of Saint Paul Episcopal Church and the Aeolian Company. Fuleihan accompanied Elizabeth Hilliard and Alice Nixon Baxter.  The 1930 U.S. Census shows Fuleihan living Brooklyn with his widowed mother, three sisters, and a younger brother. In the same year, he scored a Syrian American play titled “The Blue and Green Hat.” Within two years, music publisher Gustav Schirmer’s G. Schirmer Inc. music publishing company employed Fuleihan from 1932 to 1939. In the meantime, the Saint Louis, Detroit, and Cincinnati orchestras performed his “Mediterranean Suite” and in 1936 the Philharmonic Society of Brooklyn premiered one of Fuleihan’s symphonies. In 1939, he received one of sixty-nine Guggenheim Fellowships awarded that year. The career achievements, continued publication of his sheet music, and a desire for greater creative independence led Anis Fuleihan to work for himself. 

Researcher Julian Dyer possesses one of the few known existing copies of Fuleihan’s 1929 piano roll containing “Bedouin Dance” and “Serenade of the Desert.” Dyer also has a copy of “Chopin’s Waltz in F Minor Op. 69 No. 2” played by Fuleihan. See his link here and listen.

“Serenade in the Desert” & “Bedouin Dance” :https://youtu.be/GefoxLB7jos?si=IfwMKWFm8W1gXL8_

 

“Chopin’s Waltz in F Minor Op. 69 No. 2” - https://youtu.be/X3plZjxhQIY?si=v-38fTnCypgyL8PM

Composition and academic lectures about music and the history of musical composition garner more and more of Fuleihan’s attention. At the relatively young age of 40, Fuleihan still lived with his mother in New York City; his siblings no longer resided with them. Yasmine Fuleihan lived at 78 West 55^th Street as did Anis. Turning forty-one or forty-two meant increased recognition and that translated into more orchestras around the country played his symphonies from Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Saint Louis to Baltimore. At private lectures, such as the one sponsored by the Friends of Music of the Jewish Community Center in Newark, Fuleihan theorized on the complexities of modern versus classical composition. Some modern compositions, he reasoned, have been rendered unplayable even by the composer themselves.  Originality becomes more of a challenge with each generation. Yet, like Alexander Maloof and Leon Nahmee, Fuleihan mixed western and eastern idioms -blending atonal and microtonal scales with chromatic or 12-tone scale. He even composed a concerto for the theremin with a debut by the New York Philharmonic in 1945. In 1946, Fuleihan secured a post at Indiana University. 

Anis Theodore Fuleihan, World War II draft card. Courtesy of Ancestry.com

 

During his time at Indiana University, he taught and worked undergraduate and graduate students. He also became one of three University scholars to earn a Fulbright grant in 1951. Fuleihan studied Egyptian folk music and the American Research Center in Cairo. His time in Egypt birthed his “The Pyramids of Giza” symphonic poem. Back in Bloomington, Fuleihan taught Herbert Hermann and Mary McCarty Snow. He taught at Indiana University for approximately seven years.

Sheet music by Anis Fuleihan. Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux

 

A longtime student, fan, and teacher of Arabic folk music, especially from Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia, Fuleihan left Bloomington, Indiana for Beirut, Lebanon where at the request of Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, he directed the Lebanese National Conservatory of Music.  The Lebanese National Conservatory began in the 1920s as a music school founded by Lebanese national anthem composer Wadih Sabra. Upon Sabra’s death in 1952, Fuleihan took command of the National Conservatory for almost nine years starting in1953. Moreover, during his time in Beirut, Fuleihan served as a founding advisor of the annual Baalbek International Festival in 1956. Both the National Conservatory, now the Lebanese National Higher Conservatory of Music, and the Baalbek International Festival (performed at the 3000-year-old Baalbek Temple ruins complex) remain fixtures in Lebanese culture and history. In its first fifteen or so years, Fairouz, Wadih El Safi, Sabah, and Umm Kulthum all performed at Baalbek. Fuleihan remained in Lebanon but traveled back and forth between the United States, Europe, and Lebanon from 1953 to 1960.

 

A United States Department of State tour took Fuleihan to Tunis, Tunisia in 1962. The use of cultural ambassadors by the United States has a long history but its Cold War tours employing African American and white American jazz musicians to combat what was believed to be Soviet Union propaganda are well documented. Led by Dwight Eisenhower and black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in collaboration with the Voice of America at the US State Department, musicians Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, and Louis Armstrong, apprehensively traveled to Asia and Africa in efforts to downplay contradictions in America’s professed and applied ideals. Fuleihan first found himself in Tunis on a State Department visit subsidized by the Ford Foundation in 1962. His arrival in Tunisia six weeks early gave him added time to compose a symphony. Two additional years in Tunis, as head of the Classical Orchestra of Tunis from 1963 to 1965, preceded Fuleihan’s return to the United States. Soon, Tunisia launched its own creative and cultural arts festival similar to Baalbek.

 

Amiram Rigai, performed piano pieces by several Near Eastern composers including Anis Fuleihan. Courtesy of Richard M. Breaux collection. https://youtu.be/yNu1r1GDKf8?si=EsHaS4eLGva9ow0_

Much had changed in the United States by 1965. Passage of Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and immigration reform made the United States a more livable and equitable place, at least on paper. Fuleihan took up work conducting his “Symphony No. 2” with the New York Philharmonic and broadcast on the Philharmonic’s radio network in 1967.  Listeners in cities as far away as El Paso, Texas, Richmond, Virginia, and Jefferson City, Tennessee, tuned in.

 

Although Anis Fuleihan eventually returned to the Midwest in the late 1960s, life took him all the way to the Pacific coast. He temporarily settled for a year in Champaign-Urbana at the University of Illinois – rival institution to Indiana University where he spent time in the latter 1940s. It’s likely he visited old friends in Indiana. Bloomington is only 170 miles southeast of Champaign-Urbana. Fuleihan then continued westward to Northern California. Why he traveled to California remains unclear, but he likely had planned to teach or research at Stanford University.

 

The year before his passing, Anis Fuleihan composed “A Piano Trio” (1969) and “Le Cor anglais s’amuse.” These marked the end of a long storied and celebrated career as a pianist, teacher, lecturer, and composer. On Sunday, 11 October 1970, Anis Fuleihan died of post-surgical complications at Stanford University Medical Center near Palo Alto, California. His piano rolls are the closest things we have to 78 rpm recordings of him playing piano. Others, of course, recorded renditions of his work and his music largely lives on through these, his sheet music, and his published work.

 

Richard M. Breaux

 

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