PERMANENT SEMINAR IN HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES IN MUSIC
The Permanent Seminar of the research group Historical and Cultural Studies in Music of INET-md intends to be a forum where all its members (integrated and collaborators), as well as other invited researchers from the academic, cultural and artistic circles, may present their work and discuss ongoing projects and research.
21-10-2025 | 4 pm | NOVA FCSH, Av. de Berna, Lisbon | Tower B – Room B309 & Online
Free access, in person and online:
Revitalization of songbooks through music practices and digital humanities beyond the Iberian Peninsula: A case study on Cancioneiro Villenense
Luis Gimenez Amoros | University of Cologne
During my ongoing revitalization of the Cancionero Villenense songbook in Villena—a small city of approximately 35,000 inhabitants near Spain’s eastern Mediterranean coast, in the region known as the Spanish Levant—I have engaged with over 300 local citizens, ranging from children in five primary schools to elderly community members. Through this intergenerational exchange, and by integrating music practices that connect the Cancionero with musicians across four continents, the project reveals broader geographies of musical circulation—both historical and contemporary—extending beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Approaching this ambiguous setting from both musicological and cultural-historical perspectives, the following question arises: Can the revitalization of songbooks serve as a means to advocate for the history of cultural coexistence within and beyond present-day state borders? This question is highly relevant to interdisciplinary studies on music revitalization and music practices between the Global South and North, and it is particularly urgent for fostering collective memories of coexistence.
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/NOVA FCSH. 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), The blues of Western Sahara (Routledge forthcoming) and the awarded album series The Unknown Spanish Levant (recorded in Egypt, Brazil, Mexico, Malaysia, South Africa, Germany, Turkey and Spain).