Musician Issa Fayyad: The flame of creativity in Syria is alive and we are able to restore our pioneering role in all the arts

Hummus-Sana

An artistic march that spanned nearly half a century inside and outside the homeland, where heritage was the most prominent present in which musician Issa Fayyad achieved many achievements and presented our Syrian identity within Western forums.

Fayyad, who was passionate about Arab and Syrian heritage, presented new experiences that adopted the merging of music and literary figures within a combination he called (Mughniyah).

During an interview with SANA reporter, Fayyad talks about his beginnings with the world of music, in which he took his first steps at the age of nine years from school theater until he received in 1972 the Al-Farabi Medal for Solo Singing from the Ministry of Education.

He points out that despite his studies in a scientific branch, the College of Civil Engineering, his artistic passion did not stop. Since 1973, he performed several concerts with the Arab Institute of Music and with the Bells of Aleppo ensemble under the supervision of the late artist Nadim Al-Darwish that included composing and directing lyrical operas.

Fayyad’s own experience began when he founded the Homs Ensemble for the Revival of Heritage in 1979, and led it for years and provided original heritage art to the giants of Syrian and Arab music, such as Abd al-Ghani al-Sheikh, Kamil Shambir, Omar al-Batsh, Bahjat Hassan, Amin al-Jundi, Muhammad Khaled al-Shalabi and Najib Zain al-Din. The band also participated in international activities, including European Music Year Festival in Greece in 1985 and others.

Fayyad’s desire to explore the depths of music made him travel to Iran in 1991 to learn there Persian instruments, the style of playing them, and the styles of music and singing to enrich his experience.

During the years Fayyad spent in the emigrant, homesickness continued to reside in him, and he expressed that by participating in many activities in Germany, Spain and France, through which he carried a Syrian musical identity, so he joined with his music and music to the SOPF Orchestra in the German city of Magdeburg in a rare phenomenon in which nostalgia for the oud was identified with Western instruments as he was associated with the year 2015 for the Ottonen theater group and succeeded with it in introducing Arabic music into the German theater.

Fayyad's artistic experience in the West was also enshrined in the launch in 2016 of an Arabic band called Oud, who participated in several German festivals and composed a hymn in German that became sung at the annual Magdeburg festival.

Among Fayyad’s achievements in the expatriate community is also his contribution with a group of Spanish artists in a musical project that included a documentary film about music in Syria titled “The Desert Air” and he formed a Syrian-Spanish band called “The Orentus Ensemble”.

In terms of honors and certificates, Fayyad received a number of certificates of appreciation and merit from a number of official and private technical bodies and institutions in Syria and abroad.

Fayyad confirms in the conclusion of his speech that the flame of creativity in Syria is still alive and its people are generous and he has a will capable of restoring our country to its pioneering role in all fields of arts, pointing to his follow-up via the Internet to all artistic activities that are held in his motherland and the level of the Syrian cadres graduated from the Faculty of Music Education at the University The resurrection and its great impact on the revival of artistic achievement and its imprint locally and internationally.

Okay El Hassan