Permanent Seminar of the Research Group on Education, Music and Theater in the Community
23 October 2025, 17.30-19.00,
ESMAE | Politécnico do Porto, Sala 2
Free entrance, both online and in presence
Room Zoom https://videoconfcolibri.zoom.us/j/91358871116
Luis Gimenez Amoros, University of Cologne, Germany
Abstract: The central aim of this recital-lecture is to demonstrate how the revitalization of historical songbooks can illuminate the long-standing history of interculturality and musical coexistence across regions, transcending the limitations of contemporary state borders. Grounded in participant observation—as both a local scholar of the musical traditions under study and as a composer actively engaged in the revitalization process—the recital shows how musical structures preserved in songbooks can be revitalized within contemporary intercultural contexts, where different musical traditions interact and coexist. In so doing, the recital reconsiders the territorialization of popular music in many European songbooks, often marked by the exaltation of national and traditional values since the nineteenth century.
Luis Gimenez Amoros | Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Global South Studies Center located at the University of Cologne., and currently a visiting researcher at INET-md. 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 (more than 30 publications) focuses on music and refugees in the Sahara Desert (doctoral dissertation), sound repatriation and revitalization of historical recordings from African sound archives and southeastern Spanish cancioneros: 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).