I was born in 1976 and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  My father is a Palestinian immigrant to the United States, my mother an American of mixed European descent from upstate New York.  I feel that in many ways my bi-cultural background has given me a different perspective on both American and Arab cultures—and neither parent tried to impose their way of thinking on me above that of the other.  I was very interested in mathematics and science as a child, but I also began classical (Western) music training on piano and violin when I was young.  Eventually I became more interested in composing music than performing it.  When I entered college, I quickly switched from my intended major of mathematics and physics to music composition and theory.  I eventually sought to expand my horizons beyond the narrow world of modern classical composition, and like many musicians in these times I was very attracted to improvisation and ornamentation in music—ways in which the performer has more creative freedom.  In my senior year I took an ethnomusicology course on the music of the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey—music based on the maqam modal system—and fell in love.  Simon Shaheen was invited to our class to demonstrate improvisation and he played violin and oud.  I immediately realized I had to study this music as performance and practice (rather than as theory), and I thought it would also be a good excuse to pick up the violin again, which I had dropped for many years.  When I graduated, I began Arabic violin lessons with Simon, and for a number of years I also attended his yearly Arabic Music Retreat.  I learned a lot about Arabic music and the maqam system in those years, but it wasn’t until I traveled to Egypt that I really began to develop as a performer.  Being immersed in the music for a year really ingrained it in my ears and fingers.  My teacher there, Alfred Gamil, taught me first and foremost how to learn music.  I had to learn how to learn by ear (not an easy skill for someone trained in Western music), how to hear ever subtler details, how to apply layers and layers of repetitions until something fundamental changes.  I totally changed my understanding of music in that time.  One of the most important lessons I have learned over the years is that the way music is taught and learned has the deepest effect on how it sounds, what it communicates—even on the structure of the music itself.  But more on that in another section. (Click here for Sami's Writings.) After studying in Cairo, Egypt, arguably the most important center for music in the Arab world, I traveled to Aleppo, Syria, also the repository of another branch of the Arabic music tradition.  I began to study singing, and I learned many Muwashshahat (traditional songs using old Classical Arabic poetry) and Qudud (lighter songs), in addition to studying violin with two teachers there.  Since returning to the states after my travels I have returned a number of times to Egypt and Syria, to deepen my knowledge of their musical traditions. Over the last few years, I have performed with several different groups mostly in New York City, but also in Boston and Minneapolis and Chicago.  I think the most rewarding performance experience for me was playing with my dear friend Amir El-Saffar, who has been studying and performing the Iraqi Maqam tradition—related to but significantly different in many respects from the Egyptian and Syrian repertories (which are more similar to each other).  Like me he is an American-born half-Arab who came to Arabic music after being trained first in another tradition (in his case, he was already an accomplished jazz trumpeter before beginning to study Iraqi music).  Now he is a brilliant singer and santur player, and I was lucky to be the first to perform Iraqi Maqam with him when he began exposing American audiences to that relatively unknown art form.  I have learned as much through performing with him as from my teachers; perhaps because we easily get on the same wavelength.  Now I feel it is time to begin giving back what I have learned, and I find that I love teaching at least as much as I enjoy performing.  There is something more intimate about teaching Arabic music than about teaching Western classical music, perhaps because, unseparated by the medium of music notation, teacher and student are able to exchange more of themselves.  Or perhaps it is just that I love every detail of this music, and I want to share all of it with those who want to learn. Please contact Sami for a copy of his Resume