Ahmed Essyad is a composer born in 1938 in Salé, Morocco. After studying music at the Rabat Conservatory, he moved to Paris in 1962, where he became a pupil and then assistant to Max Deutsch. Interested in ethnomusicology, he focused his research on orality and notation (Le collier des ruses, 1977), as well as on musical time and pulsation (Le cycle de l’eau, 1980–1993; «Héloïse et Abélard», 2000). His music is a blend of Berber oral tradition, serial writing, and Gregorian and modal influences.