Career
He specialised in the traditional music of Greenland and in Arab music His opera Belisa is based on The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden. His major contributions to ethno-musicology included his pioneering work in the music of the Persian Gulf area, especially Bahrain.
Also his concern with "authors" rights", being a jurist himself, besides the fact that he also was a pianist and a composer.
He considered traditional music as a heritage connected though to the persons who performed it therefor always stated the names of performers as he understood that most music of the Middle East was performed with a certain freedom by the performers, and that a good amount of it was created by the performer in what is usually called improvisation, knowing very well that these improvisations were "moments of impromptus compositions" that gave added-value to the original, traditional work. Yunis was sampled in Brian Eno"s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
Olsen"s invitation of Arab-Luth ('Oud) player Munir Bashir to a music festival in Denmark in the early 1970s, brought this instrumentalist together with Indian performe where they played duos in a hybrid style. This exquisite and new style brought Bashir into fame all over the Arab world and in many European countries.
