FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE · 6 October 2026

School of Oud Online participants who have never met their master in person join Ramy Adly on stage on 6 December

Ramy Adly and the School of Oud Online Ensemble perform Adly’s own compositions and the Arabic classics of Sayed Darwish with a string quartet at the Washington DC Temple Visitors’ Center’s Festival of Lights. Free admission.

KENSINGTON, MD — On Sunday 6 December, participants of the School of Oud Online will walk onto a stage beside their master, Egyptian-American oud performer and composer Ramy Adly. For many of them, it will be the first time they have ever been in the same room with him.

The program pairs Adly’s original compositions with the music of Sayed Darwish, the Alexandrian composer widely regarded as the father of modern Egyptian music, arranged for oud ensemble and string quartet. The concert takes place at the Washington DC Temple Visitors’ Center, home to one of the most iconic landmarks in the Washington area, as part of the annual Festival of Lights.

A tradition that once required the same room

The oud is the ancestor of the lute and the guitar, and for almost all of its history it was taught one way: a master played a phrase, and a disciple sitting in front of him answered it. Nothing was written down. If master and disciple were not in the same room, nothing passed between them.

Adly learned that way himself — in Assiut, Upper Egypt, from his grandfather Naguib Ebbed, who studied under Riyad al-Sunbati, the composer who wrote for Umm Kulthum; and then in Cairo under the Iraqi oud master Naseer Shamma, a UNESCO Artist for Peace.

The accident that changed the method

What changed everything was a collision. Driving from Utah to Virginia, Adly hit a deer at full speed. The car was destroyed; he walked away from it. “Sitting on the side of that road,” he says, “I understood that twenty thousand hours of skill could end in a second, and that none of it existed anywhere except inside me.”

He began writing the music down — thousands of pieces, note by note, in a notation he built for the instrument: Ramy Adly’s 7-Layer Sheet Music. Ornament, inflection, and the intervals that fall between the keys of a piano are set on the page rather than absorbed by sitting beside a master. Around it he built a full four-year curriculum and founded the School of Oud Online.

Trusted to play beside the master

The participants performing on 6 December — physicians, working professionals, and young people still at university — learned this music through the School of Oud Online’s programs and the 7-Layer Sheet Music, in their own hours, from wherever they live. They speak different first languages and come from different backgrounds and faiths. Several have never met Adly in person, or one another.

Yet the method has prepared them well enough to be trusted with something the old tradition would have thought impossible: performing live, on one stage, alongside the master they have only known through the page and the screen.

“Some of them I have never seen in person,” Adly says. “I picture one of them tall, and he turns out to be short. I picture another short, and she is tall. On 6 December I finally find out.”

Not every participant could make the trip this time. Several international members of the ensemble were unable to travel to the United States because of visa constraints. For the next performance, the School of Oud Online will help prepare US visa applications for these participants, so they can come and perform live alongside their colleagues.

Adly first performed at the Festival of Lights seven years ago. This year’s fifty-minute program ends with Adly lowering his instrument while the music continues in his participants’ hands. The last sound of the evening is not his.

The Performance

The Broken Guitar Ramy Adly, oud, with the School of Oud Online Ensemble and string quartet Music by Ramy Adly and Sayed Darwish Sunday 6 December 2026, 6:30 pm · Free admission Washington DC Temple Visitors’ Center, 9900 Stoneybrook Dr, Kensington, MD 20895 Part of the Festival of Lights

About the School of Oud Online

Founded by Egyptian-American oud performer and composer Ramy Adly, the School of Oud Online teaches the oud and Arabic music to participants through a four-year certificate program built on Ramy Adly’s 7-Layer Sheet Music. schoolofoudonline.com

Media Contact

Ramy Adly · contact@ramyadly.com ·High-resolution images and interview availability on request.

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