Rim Banna

Rim Banna was born in Nazareth on 8 December 1966 and educated at the Nazareth Baptist School before going to study music at the Higher Music Conservatory in Moscow, where she met the Ukrainian guitarist Leonid Alexeyenko; they married in 1991 and separated in 2010. She raised three children in Nazareth and lived there for the rest of her life.

Her central project was recovery. Palestinian children’s songs, lullabies, and wedding refrains had survived in households rather than in archives, and were thinning out with each generation; Banna collected them, arranged them, and recorded them for audiences who would otherwise never have heard them. She also composed melodies for modern Palestinian poetry, treating the folk repertoire and the literary one as a single inheritance. Her arrangements drew on contemporary production without flattening the modal character of the originals.

She reached European listeners largely through Lullabies from the Axis of Evil (2003), the anti-war compilation produced by the Norwegian Erik Hillestad, on which she sang alongside Kari Bremnes; her own albums include The Mirrors of My Soul (2005), Seasons of Violet (2007), and Revelation of Ecstasy and Rebellion (2013). Diagnosed with breast cancer, she continued to work through nine years of illness and died in Nazareth on 24 March 2018, aged fifty-one.

Selected works

• Lullabies from the Axis of Evil (2003, compilation)
• The Mirrors of My Soul (2005)
• Seasons of Violet (2007)
• Revelation of Ecstasy and Rebellion (2013)

Sources

• Rim Banna — Wikipedia
• Palestinian singer Rim Banna dies at 51 after battle with cancer — Al Jazeera