About Dada's Sinfonietta per archi
The first Algerian symphony for strings — composed in Algiers, for both cinema and concert, recorded in Sofia, premiered in Brussels, and inseparable from the shadows of the unconscious mind.
A Dream Long Carried
Every composer carries unfinished dreams — ideas too large, too personal, or too difficult to approach directly. For me, writing a symphony for string orchestra was one of those long-held ambitions: a rêve de jeunesse, a wish I had carried from my earliest years as a composer, knowing it was not something to be rushed. Between September and December 2021, in Algiers, that wish finally became a score.
The result is the Sinfonietta per archi: five movements, twenty-one minutes, twenty-five string players. And with it, what I believe to be the first Algerian symphony composed specifically for string orchestra. Not a curiosity or a footnote, but a complete, ambitious work: a full dramatic arc, a philosophical argument, and a musical portrait of the inner life of a person in a state of radical psychological suspension.
An Inner Monologue in Five Movements
The Sinfonietta per archi does not tell an external story. It has no landscape, no folklore, no picturesque surface. Its subject is interior: the permanent, often painful dialogue we conduct with ourselves around a single irresolvable dilemma. I articulated it in three questions that governed the entire compositional process:
- What we would like to do?
- What we could do?
- What we should do?
This is not an abstract philosophical framework, it is the lived texture of consciousness: the gap between desire and duty, between aspiration and possibility. Each of the five movements reflects a distinct facet of this inner drama: debates, contradictions, moments of emphasis, moments of quiet, dreams and disillusions. The music does not resolve these tensions — it inhabits them.
"Contrairement à mes précédentes compositions pour cordes, la Sinfonietta per archi ne sonne ni pittoresque ni galante, au contraire ; c'est une musique de rétrospection, un dialogue intérieur nourri de débats, de contradictions, de rêves et de désillusions, de périodes d'emphase et d'autres d'accalmie."
Salim Dada, El Watan, February 2, 2022
A Diptych: Music and Film
The Sinfonietta per archi was never conceived as a standalone concert piece — from its earliest conception, it existed in dialogue with a film. Hypnotisia, directed by Marwan Lakhdar Hamina and produced by Sunset Entertainment (2022), is a psychological drama whose protagonist exists in a hypnotic trance: a state of heightened attention, heightened suggestibility, and vivid internal fantasy. The film needed music that could map the unconscious from the inside.
The score I wrote for Hypnotisia is a cinematographic adaptation of the Sinfonietta — or more precisely, the two works fed each other. The film's atmospheres and characters shaped the score as the score was being composed; the score, in turn, became the sonic architecture of the film's psychological world. Since hypnosis is a trance-like mental state of focused attention and vivid fantasy, the Sinfonietta functions as the musical voice of the protagonist's unspoken inner life — the feelings that cannot be said aloud, translated into strings.
The Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra-SIF 309, under conductor Deyan Pavlov, recorded the soundtrack score in Sofia in January 2022.
The composition and the recording received support from the Institut français d'Alger (IFA) and the Office national des droits d'auteur et droits voisins (ONDA), whose recognition of this diptych meant a great deal to me.
Brussels: The World Premiere
The World premiere of the Sinfonietta per archi was entrusted to Boho Strings, a magnificent Belgian string orchestra with whom I have collaborated since 2015 and whose artistic vision perfectly matched the introspective nature of the work. Their director, David Ramael, had commissioned the piece (the symphonic version) specifically for what would become a remarkable concert on July 16, 2022 at the Walden Festival in Brussels — held in the atmospheric garden of the Museum of Natural Sciences.
The programme that evening was itself a statement: the Sinfonietta per archi a longside Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and my Miniatures Algériennes 1 & 2. Three works, three registers — the familiar and the new, the European and the Algerian, the classical and the contemporary — woven together into what the festival described as a "colourful tapestry" of eastern and western music. It was an evening that placed Algeria, quietly and without proclamation, at the centre of a European concert stage.
The concert was broadcast live on Radio Klara, Belgium's leading classical music radio station. The Sinfonietta has since been programmed several further times on the station — a recognition that extends the work's reach well beyond the concert hall and into the daily listening of a broad Belgian and European audience.
"(Boho Strings) weaves eastern and western music together — binding together Mozart's "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" with work by the Algerian composer Salim Dada. A world premiere!"
Walden Festival, Brussels, Programme Notes, 2022
A Historical Claim
The designation of the Sinfonietta per archi as the first Algerian symphony for string orchestra is not made lightly. Algeria has a rich and complex musical heritage — from Amazigh, Arab and Andalusian classical traditions to a vibrant modern scene — but the specific genre of the string symphony had not previously been claimed by an Algerian composer at this scale and ambition.
This is not simply a patriotic gesture. It is a compositional position: a statement that Algerian music can inhabit the full range of orchestral forms without apology, without exoticism, and without the obligation to display its origins decoratively. My Sinfonietta does not quote Algerian melodies or reference North African rhythms in any programmatic or folkloric sense. Its Algerian identity runs deeper than that — embedded in the work's very DNA through the implicit use of a scale drawn from Algerian Bedouin music (chaoui), a kind of sonic fingerprint that surfaces most clearly in the fifth and final movement. This scale is not announced, not labelled, not explained. It simply inhabits the music, the way a mother tongue inhabits thought even when one is speaking another language.
The Sinfonietta per archi is Algerian not because it sounds Algerian in any recognisable surface sense, but because the consciousness that shaped it — its dilemmas, its silences, its particular way of navigating tension and release — carries within it a musical inheritance that no amount of European orchestral writing can erase.
That's enough. And perhaps it's the most honest way to be from somewhere while embracing the universality of artistic expression.
Available Sources
The full score and orchestral parts of the Sinfonietta per archi are published by Sonitus Edizioni (Italy). The publication includes a conductor's score (32 pages, A4) and separate parts in PDF format. An audio extract of the work, performed by the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra, is available on the Sonitus website.
Conductors and ensembles interested in performing the work are welcome to get in touch directly here.
You can also read my interview about this work with Nacima Chaabani for the newspaper El Watan (photo below or in this link)
