Mohamed Garfi

Mohamed Garfi was born in Tunis on 17 November 1948. He studied at the Conservatoire national de musique de Tunis and continued at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. He later earned a DEA and a doctorate in musicology at the Université Paris-Sorbonne.

From his student years he combined Western and Arabic musical languages and, as he later recalled in interviews, sought a polyphonic writing practice inspired in part by Arab symphonic broadcasts and by the Rahbani school. He would spend part of his professional life between Tunisia and research stays linked to his Sorbonne work.

In 1969 Garfi joined the newly created Tunisian Symphony Orchestra as a violist. He founded Orchestre 71 (Groupe 71), then in the 1980s directed the Orchestre arabe de la ville de Tunis, introducing théâtre chanté as a sustained municipal practice. After leaving that ensemble he founded Zakharef arabiyya, presenting festival programmes with Tunisian and visiting instrumentalists.

As a composer he set poems by Chebbi, Darwish, Khraïef, Smadah, Abu Nuwas, Amel Donkal, Negm, Mansour Rahbani, Said Akl and Souilmi Boujemaa. His stage works include the operettas Branches rouges, Cantate pour le Liban and Histoire de Carthage. Film credits include Et demain...? (Brahim Babaï) and Pique-nique in Au pays du Tararanni (Férid Boughedir).

He collaborated with Tunisian artists such as Noureddine El Béji, Asma Ben Ahmed, Hassen Doss, Dorsaf Hamdani, Amani Souissi, Dhekra Mohamed and Sonia M'Barek, and with Arab figures including the Rahbani brothers, Marcel Khalifé, Julia Boutros and Ali El Haggar on Voices of Freedom. He taught at the Institut supérieur de musique de Sousse and worked for periods at Tunisian national radio.

His double album Wijhat Nadher appeared on Phonie in 2008. In February 2025 Zakharef 25 marked a return at the Théâtre de l'Opéra de Tunis. On 19 July 2025 Men Gaâ El Khabia opened the 59th Carthage International Festival, his last major public creation.

Garfi was the father of Chadi Garfi, a Tunisian conductor who has led symphony and philharmonic formations in Tunisia. Public sources identify the family home at the time of the funeral as Cité Ennasr 1 in Tunis, with burial directed toward the Jellaz cemetery.

Beyond family life he was known in Tunisian cultural circles as an outspoken musician who combined academic research with stage work and advocacy for the profession.

In a May 2011 interview with Hela Hazgui, Garfi described the artist as first of all an intellectual and argued that every artist should carry a social project, while insisting that political commitment should serve artistic performance rather than dominate it. He called his music engaged insofar as it announced a revolt against established systems, and he located Tunisian identity within a wider Arab-Muslim cultural space from Morocco to Bahrain.

He criticised narrow official definitions of Tunisian music limited to malouf, while expressing respect for institutions such as La Rachidia that conserved urban traditions. Across decades he pressed for institutionalised conservatories, diversified stage genres, a musicians' social fund and a clearer statut du musicien. His line that "la nature a horreur du vide" summed up a warning that culture, left empty after political change, would be filled by non-culture.

In March 2018 arabesque.tn reported that Tunisia's then Minister of Culture had filed a complaint against Mohamed Garfi. Contemporary coverage linked the action to critical remarks he had made about cultural authorities; detailed court outcomes were not authoritatively summarised in the open sources used for this profile.

The episode sat within a longer pattern of public disagreement between Garfi and successive culture ministers, which he later recounted in Tunisian press interviews about disputes over cultural policy. This profile records the complaint as reported and does not invent legal findings.

Mohamed Garfi died on 13 September 2026. The Tunisian Ministry of Cultural Affairs announced his death and described him as one of the most innovative musicians of his generation, stressing research and innovation from his beginnings. The cause of death was not made public.

Family notices said funeral prayers were planned after the afternoon prayer, with the procession leaving his home in Cité Ennasr 1, Tunis, for the Jellaz cemetery. Major Tunisian and regional outlets, including CNN Arabic, Réalités, Mosaique FM and Univers News, carried tributes the same day.

Garfi's legacy spans three intertwined roles: practical musician (viola, conducting, composing), builder of ensembles (Orchestre 71, the Tunis City Music Ensemble, Zakharef Arabiya), and scholar of Arab lyric theatre and Tunisian instrumental forms. Festival openings at Carthage and the Medina, municipal théâtre chanté, and collaborations that brought Lebanese and Egyptian voices onto Tunisian stages made him a bridge figure between national institutions and pan-Arab repertoire.

His books remain reference points for researchers of Arab musical theatre, while Men Gaâ El Khabia (2025) closed his public career by returning twentieth-century Tunisian creative memory to the Carthage amphitheatre. The Ministry's farewell framed him as a renewer; audiences and colleagues remember a demanding maestro who treated music as research as much as spectacle.

• Les formes instrumentales dans la musique classique de Tunisie: étude comparative des formes arabo-turques (Tunis, 1996)
• Pages de la musique universelle / صفحات من الموسيقى العالمية (1997)
• Annotated translation of Antonin Laffage, La musique arabe (Beirut, mid-2000s; often dated 2005-2006 in notices)
• Musique et spectacle: le théâtre lyrique arabe. Esquisse d'un itinéraire (1847-1975) (Paris, L'Harmattan, 2009)

He also published essays on artists' rights and cultural policy in the Tunisian press, including pieces cited from the early 2000s onward.

Open sources used for this profile emphasise institutional roles, festival commissions and ministerial tributes rather than a fixed list of competitive prizes. His recognition rested chiefly on leadership of major Tunisian ensembles, openings and closings at Carthage and Medina festivals, teaching at Sousse, and the scholarly reception of his L'Harmattan monograph on Arab lyric theatre.

After his death the Ministry of Cultural Affairs publicly called him one of Tunisia's foremost innovating musicians and researchers.