In 1957, Zaki Nassif helped establish the “Lebanese Folk Art Festival” within the Baalbek International Festival, working with the Rahbani brothers, Tawfiq Al Basha, Marwan Jarrar, Wadia Jarrar, Sabri Al Sharif, Badih Boulos, and others. The event marked a decisive expansion of his career onto a major national stage.
During the first evenings, he presented “Ya Lala Aini Lala” and “Tallou Hbabna Tallou” with chorus voices. The American University of Beirut Libraries exhibit describes the pieces as early attempts to create a square-meter dabke that matched dancers’ steps, with changes in speed used to vary movement patterns and organize the dancers on stage.
Baalbek became a principal gateway for Nassif’s engagement with folklore. His approach lengthened melodic phrases and consolidated the musical form of dabke while creating new melodies on rhythms derived from dalouna, ghazayel, qaradi, popular chants, and muwashshah-related patterns such as the masmoudi rhythm.
He also translated the sound of folk instruments, including the mijwiz and manjira, into orchestral writing informed by European classical rules. His work was therefore not a direct reproduction of inherited material but an artistic reconstruction joining folk rhythm to orchestral structure.
President Camille Chamoun and First Lady Zalfa Chamoun honored the festival’s participants, and the experience helped establish Nassif as both a composer and a lyric poet. The festival was cancelled in 1958 because of confrontations in Beirut, but he returned for the second Lebanese Folk Art Festival in Baalbek in 1959.
His 1959 program included “Darb Al Ghizlan,” “Hala Ya Hala,” “Sabbahna Wa Fajr Al Eid,” “Ramshit Ainak,” “Wa Hayatak Ya Darb Al Ain,” and “Istirad Al Mawasim.” “Tallou Hbabna Tallou” and “Ya Lala Aini Lala” were also presented again in the voice of Wadih Al Safi.
In 1960, “Tallou Hbabna” received the award for the most beautiful melody of a Lebanese song at the Arab Song Festival at Casino du Liban, in the same festival where “Ayazunn” received the award for best Arab song. Nassif opened the program with a mawāl that he wrote and composed, followed by the first presentation of the Al Anwar troupe’s “Hikayat Lubnan,” involving a broad group of musicians, performers, and dance creators.
Nassif composed and wrote most of the program, including “Raqsat Al Abariq,” “Istirad Al Mawasim,” and “Sahirna Sahirna,” and the production closed with a dabke and mawāl. After the Near East Radio ceased operating in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War, he and Badih Boulos co-founded the Lebanese Recording Company in 1960; it later became Studio Baalbek. Tawfiq Al Basha, Nizar Mikati, Kamel Kostandi, Sabri Al Sharif, Samih Al Sharif, and others took part in its founding phase, and several of Nassif’s records were released through the company.