GSSC Seminar Series
15 October 2024
Reconsidering Multimusicality through the Making of “The Unknown Spanish Levant Series” in Cologne
Luis Gimenez Amoros (University of Cologne)
12:00-13:00
The Unknown Spanish Levant series” covers the compilation of nine albums recorded in Spain, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Egypt from 2021 to 2024. The album series entails the author´s compositions inspired by the revitalization of the “cancionero popular Villenense” (Soler 2006) - awarded by the Institute of Musicology of Spain in 1949 as one of the most extensive musicological documentations of southeastern Spanish popular music- and its historical coexistence with certain musical cultures across the world. Specifically, this presentation focuses on the making of “The Unknown Spanish Levant series” in Cologne in 2024. In this album, there are musical collaborations with German nationals and migrant communities from Cuba, Iran, Spain, and Greece residing in Cologne, as well as with two musicians residing in Alicante. In so doing, this presentation further develops the notion of “recording multimusicality” – a concept previously used by the author to reconsider musical practices of Saharawi music moving between refugee camps in Algeria, Mauritania and Europe (2004-2015) or during the revitalization of the African sound archive in southern African countries (2011-2019). This presentation considers how the notion of recording multimusicality is perceived differently across continents where the series was composed and by reconsidering the above-mentioned research.
Luis Gimenez Amoros is a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Global South Studies Center located at the University of Cologne. Previously, he has been an Ethnomusicology lecturer at the University of Cologne (Germany), Universidade Federal da Bahia (Brazil), Rhodes University (South Africa), Sultan Idris University (Malaysia), and a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Center for Humanities research.
His academic research focuses on music and refugees in the Sahara Desert (doctoral dissertation), sound repatriation and revitalization of historical recordings from African sound archives, and the historical circulation of Iberian music within an Afro-Asian context and in Latin America. His publications include the monograph ´Tracing the Mbira Sound Archive in Zimbabwe´ (Routledge, 2018) and the awarded album series ´The Unknown Spanish Levant´ (recorded in Egypt, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, South Africa, Germany, Turkey and Spain). [https://luisgimenezamoros.com/]
His latest podcast: Multimusical by Luis Gimenez Amoros