Miniatures Algériennes Five Pictures for Piano
Written in Turin in the winter of 2009, "Miniatures Algériennes" is a cycle of five piano pieces that traverses Algeria from north to south — from the Berber highlands of Kabylie to the Tuareg desert of the deep Sahara. Performed across four continents, recorded by Rebecca Omordia, and now the subject of a Master's thesis at California State University, these five pictures have become among my most widely distributed works.
The Miniatures Algériennes were born from a dream that had been waiting years for the right moment. In 2009, the Japan Foundation and the Embassy of Japan in Algiers invited me to write pieces for a co
ncert by the Japanese pianist Keiko Hyakutake, scheduled for early 2010 in Algiers. I used the occasion to develop an idea I had carried since 2007: a cycle of piano pieces that would traverse Algeria from north to south, translating the country's musical landscapes into sound the way a painter captures light and memory on a small illuminated panel.
Written between November and December 2009 in Turin, Italy, these five pieces are my first long piano composition. They are dedicated to Mohammed Racim (1896-1975), the father of the modern Algerian miniature — an artist who spent his life encoding the memory and beauty of his people within tiny, intricate, inexhaustible images.
Dada is a composer with an original voice, most evident perhaps in the last two pieces in the set.
From Racim's Brush to the Keyboard
The concept of the musical miniature, as I understood it in this composition, is not simply a short piece. It is what I would call a condensed poetic space — an intimate canvas where memory, narration, and imagination coexist within a deliberately restricted frame. Racim's paintings work in precisely this way: densely layered, inexhaustible, each viewing disclosing new elements. His works depicted pre-colonial Algerian life: historical scenes, domestic moments, celebrations, with a precision and dignity that amounted to a genuine act of cultural resistance during the French occupation. He was not producing nostalgic decoration. He was reconstructing a memory, redressing a visibility that the colonial narrative had effaced.
When I decided to dedicate this cycle to him, I was declaring an intention: these pieces would not merely borrow Algerian colour for a Western audience. They would attempt, through sound, to do what Racim did through paint — to make visible (or audible) what is too easily overlooked, and to insist that a cultural memory is not something to be preserved in a museum, but something to be reinvented in living expression.
The cycle also engages, from the inside, with the question of multiple identities. Through the piano (a universal instrument, at home in every tradition) Amazigh, Arab, African, Mediterranean, Western and Oriental influences meet and coexist, without hierarchy and without opposition. This multiplicity is not a problem the music must solve. It is the very substance of its language. Algeria is all of these things simultaneously; the Miniatures simply accept that as a compositional fact.
My sources were my own ethnomusicological transcriptions, archival recordings, and the traditional material I had personally performed and studied over many years. For the fourth miniature, I drew in part on transcriptions made by Béla Bartók during his 1913 field research in Biskra. But my aim was never quotation. Like Bartók himself, I was seeking to absorb traditional material and recompose it into a personal musical language — one where the modal logic, rhythmic structure, and expressive spirit of Algerian music could inhabit the fixed, equal-tempered world of the concert piano.
A Journey Across Algeria
The cycle is structured as a geographic journey — from the mountains of the north, through the ancient cities and the coast, into the deep Saharan south. Five regions, five distinct musical traditions, five emotional worlds, during an imaginary day, from dawn to night.
The Piano as Orchestra — and as Percussion
I am not a pianist, and I never formally studied the piano. This distance has been, I believe, a creative advantage. Approaching the instrument as a composer rather than a performer allows me to think in terms of texture, colour, and instrumental layers — to hear, behind the keyboard, the orchestra I spend most of my professional life writing for. In these miniatures, the piano is asked to do many things that the instrument does not naturally do: to produce the augmented seconds of Arab-Andalusian modes on a fixed equal-tempered scale, to evoke the breathing of a Kabyle singer, to suggest the microtonal inflections of the gasba, to simulate the rhythmic attack of the bendir or the buzzing resonance of the guembri.
The solution is never imitation, it is translation, evocation and stylisation. Heavy ornamentation replaces quarter-tones. Percussive attack replaces the physical energy of communal drumming. Structural silences, not harmonic cadences, articulate form. Modal pitch-centricity replaces Western functional harmony. The result, as Bachir Rezagui's analysis demonstrates (Master of Music thesis, California State University Northridge, May 2026), is a score where "through strict compositional control, Dada encodes freedom."
Dada does not merely quote folk melodies to provide exotic colour. Instead, he reconstructs the foundational mechanics of Algerian music — he encodes freedom.
The Performers Who Brought It to the World
Keiko Hyakutake: First Partial Performance · 2010
After studying piano at the Tokyo College of Music and completing graduate studies there, Keiko Hyakutake went on to earn a first prize in accompaniment and chamber music at the Paris Conservatoire, where she studied with J. Kernel, Satoshi Yamado, and C. Ivaldi. She was awarded a 2007 Cultural Affairs Agency Fellowship for Overseas Artists, and won first place in the chamber music section of the French International Competition. While still a student, she served as an official accompanist at the Rontibaud International Competition and the Casals Music Festival, and performed regularly with members of the Orchestre National de Paris and the Orchestre National de France.
After returning to Japan in 2009, she gave a recital in Algeria in early 2010 with the support of the Japan Foundation and the Agency for Cultural Affairs — the concert that provided the direct occasion for the composition of the Miniatures Algériennes. The Japanese pianist premiered Movements 1, 2 and 3 at Salle Cosmos, Algiers, on February 18, 2010.
Todor Petrov — World Complete Premiere · 2012
Todor Petrov graduated from the Sofia Academy of Music and from 1975 participated in numerous international masterclasses with Géza Anda, Ivan Moravec, and Guido Agosti, before completing specialised courses in Paris and Nice with Jeanne-Marie Darée and Pierre Sancan (piano), Huguette Dreyfuss (harpsichord), and Maurice Gendron (chamber music) — under whose direction he performed Brahms' Second Concerto with the Orchestra of Monaco in 1981. He served as State Soloist with the Sofia Radio Orchestra from 1983 to 1989, and held the Chamber Music Chair at the National Academy of Sofia from 1987 to 1991, before establishing himself in Italy, where he has taught piano at the Arts Academy in Rome since 1999 and performs as soloist with the Accademia Ottorino Respighi Orchestra under Maestro Francesco La Vecchia. As much a scholar as a performer, he discovered and gave the world premiere of an unknown concerto by Saverio Mercadante, which he recorded for Naxos with the Rome Symphony Orchestra, and reconstructed lost concertos by Boccherini and Hoffmeister.
It is within this singular trajectory — combining concerto virtuosity, musicological rigour, and deep Mediterranean roots — the Bulgarian pianist gave the first complete performance of all five miniatures at Dar Sébastien, Hammamet, Tunisia, in May 12, 2012. Unfortunately, I received no audiovisual record of this concert.
Marouan Benabdallah — Global Touring · 2016-2023
Born in Rabat, Morocco, to a Moroccan father and a Hungarian mother — herself a music teacher and choir conductor — Marouan Benabdallah began studying piano at the age of four. At thirteen he moved to Budapest, where he trained at the Béla Bartók Conservatory and the Franz Liszt Academy. He first attracted international attention in 2003 with victories at the Hungarian Radio Piano Competition and the Andorra Grand Prix, followed by the Naples International Piano Competition, and was awarded the Medal of the Hungarian Parliament in 2008 — an honour he shares with artists such as Plácido Domingo. Praised for his "stunning natural virtuosity" (Nice-Matin), "compelling sense of momentum" (Washington Post) and "resourceful pianism, lyrical instincts and thoughtfulness" (New York Times), he has performed as soloist with orchestras across four continents. He is also a Yamaha Artist.
Marouan Benabdallah performed the three first movements as part of its "Arabaesque" concert program across dozens of concerts on four continents — Carnegie Hall, Wigmore Hall, Library of Congress, Casa Árabe — bringing the cycle its first major international exposure.
Having had the privilege of performing Salim Dada's Miniatures Algériennes in more than 50 concerts across America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, I have witnessed firsthand the remarkable success and global acclaim it has achieved. These captivating compositions transcend cultural boundaries and have resonated deeply with audiences of diverse cultural backgrounds.
Rebeca Omordia — First Integral Recording · 2024
Born in Romania during the Ceaușescu era to a Nigerian Igbo father and a Romanian mother, Rebeca Omordia graduated from the National Music University of Bucharest before continuing her studies at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Trinity College of Music in London, where she is now based. Hailed as an "African classical music pioneer" by the BBC World Service and "a classical music game changer" by Classical Music magazine, she is the artistic director of the African Concert Series in London, a platform affiliated with the Wigmore Hall. Her recording of Errollyn Wallen's Piano Concerto — written for her and recorded with the BBC Concert Orchestra — received the BBC Music Magazine Award. The Times cited her African Pianism series among the best classical albums of the year; Gramophone praised her "sparkling technique, rhythmic panache and deep sympathy with the music." Her mission, as she describes it, is to bring African classical repertoire to global audiences — a commitment shaped equally by her Nigerian heritage and her formation in the European classical tradition.
In July 2024, the Nigerian-Romanian pianist Rebecca Omordia released the first complete recording of the Miniatures Algériennes, as part of her album African Pianism, Volume 2 (SOMM Recordings, London). Omordia contacted me during the preparation of the project. We worked together directly on the interpretation of the pieces, and her engagement with the music went far beyond the technical. She described the experience of translating the physical, geographic origins of these pieces onto the keyboard as a process of "continuous re-discovery" — a testament, she suggested, to the depth of compositional thinking embedded in the score.
The recording has significantly increased the international visibility of the cycle, with broadcasts on several radio stations and numerous critical reviews. It has brought the Miniatures to the attention of musicians, scholars, and listeners who had no previous awareness of Algerian classical piano music.
Since the publication of the score (2023) and the recording (2024), the cycle has attracted growing interest across Europe and the Americas, with radio broadcasts, academic studies at institutions including the Conservatoire de Shanghai and California State University Northridge, and critical attention from publications including The Times, International Piano Magazine, Classical Music Daily, and Diapason — the latter notably underlining the originality of the musical language and the authenticity with which traditional Algerian materials are treated.
Traditional Algerian motifs are used in this Debussy-inspired suite — with an authenticity that Western composers' 'oriental' music misses.
Identity, Memory, and an Open Invitation
The Miniatures Algériennes were conceived for the concert hall, but they speak to something larger than any performance context. At a time when questions of identity cross through our societies with particular intensity, these pieces propose — gently but deliberately — that multiple heritages need not be experienced as contradiction. The Amazigh mountains, the Arab city, the Mediterranean bay, the Bedouin plains, the Saharan night: these are not competing identities. They are chapters of a single, complex, living story. The music does not resolve this complexity into a tidy synthesis. It holds it open, as a question and as an invitation.
The cultural memory these pieces carry is not nostalgia frozen in the past. It is a living material — recomposed, reimagined, offered again to each new listener who encounters it. Like Racim's paintings, which reveal new details with each viewing, the Miniatures Algériennes are not exhausted by a single hearing. They remain, in the most precise sense of the word, open.
Score and Practical Information
The score is available from Sonitus Edizioni (Italy). The pieces may be performed as a complete cycle or in selected movements. The total duration is 15 mn, difficulty advanced.
Pianists wishing to discuss interpretation are welcome to contact me directly.
Purchase your score here.
You can also listen to Rebeca Omordia's performance here.