Granada Early Music Festival

The Three Cultures of the Mediterranean Foundation, in collaboration with Samsaoui Producciones, is participating this year in the Granada Early Music Festival with the conference-concert by Manuela Cortés and Aziz Samsoui, as well as the recital of Andalusian poets by Iman Kandousi:

Festival de Música Antigua de Granada aims to be a music festival that brings together the artistic and musical heritage of the city and province of Granada, thus recovering the legacy that for so many centuries was developed in these lands. The aim is to encourage a multidisciplinary meeting, where consolidated musical groups and new groups share their music, and to combine concerts with conferences and meetings with specialists on various subjects related to ancient music (medieval, renaissance and baroque). In this sense, the aim is not only to promote and disseminate the music of these periods, but also to present citizens with a global proposal on the rich culture of these centuries, covering topics such as art, history and literature, as well as the way in which these disciplines dialogue with the musical expressions in question.

10 May 2016. Euro-Arab Foundation

Instruments in Andalusian Culture 

Concert of Andalusian music: Manuel Cortés & Aziz Samsaoui

Manuela Cortés García:

PhD in Arabic and Islamic Philology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (1996). Doctoral thesis: Edition, translation and study of the "Kunnash al-Ha'ik", Tetouanese songbook of the Andalusian-Maghrebi musical tradition (18th century).

Arabist, researcher, musicologist and translator.

Lecturer in the Department of History and Science of Music. Faculty of Philosophy and Arts. University of Granada (2005 - ).

Member of the Heritage Experts Network (MEC, 2011 - ).

Member of the Royal Academy of History of Andalusia (2012 - ).

Member of the Technical Commission of the Alcazaba of Almería (2001-2007).

Member of the Scientific Committee of the Master's Degree: UNIA-UGR: Musical Heritage.

Member of the Scientific Committees of music journals:

Itimar (University of Valencia); Música Oral del Sur and Papeles del Festival de Música Española de Cádiz (Centro de Documentación Musical de Andalucía); Revista Mar: La Música en la red (University of Granada).

TEACHING:

As a lecturer she has taught at Cairo University and the Cervantes Institutes in Baghdad and Cairo; UNED (Madrid).

Lecturer at the University of Granada, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, she has taught undergraduate courses in the Departments of Art and Music and the Department of History and Sciences of Music; as well as undergraduate studies; Degree in Musicology and Master's Degree (UNIA&UGR): Musical Heritage in the Department of History and Sciences of Music (UGR, 2005- ). Also, Gender issues in the Master's Degree in Arab and Hebrew Cultures: Department of Semitic Studies of the University of Granada: "Arab women in literature and music". Dr. Celia del Moral & Dr. Manuela Cortés (2010-2011; 2011-2012; 2012-2013); Master of the Faculty of Theology (UGR): Islam and Christianity: Subject: "Islamic Mysticism and Christian Mysticism" (2015-2016).

19 May 2016. Corral del Carbón. Granada

Andalusian Poets: clouds and melodies of al-Andalus

(850th anniversary of the birth of Ibn Arabi)

Iman Kandousi: 

The music of the Near East and the Maghreb was the source from which Andalusian artists drank for centuries. Inexhaustible melodies, sensual rhythms and improvisation combine in an artistic knowledge that was highly esteemed in the courts of caliphs and sultans. This music achieves its greatest splendour in the refinement of its classical manifestations and the casualness of its popular side. Islamic music takes on the heritage of ancient Asian culture, where the dryness of the steppes and deserts sometimes makes the instruments sound arid, penetrating deep into the listener and leaving an indelible mark, like the footprints left in the desert. But at the same time, this music retains another feature that makes it somehow inimitable: it has the refinement of the vaults of palatial rooms and the splendour of ancient oriental civilisations. It worships sound, dressing it in geometric forms, rough nobility and delicate ornamentation. It designs and propagates an oriental culture of courtly pomp mixed with the purity of the intricate labyrinths of the medinas and intertwined with old Ottoman chants, Andalusian poems of love and heartbreak, or vague improvised melodies, where the full moon over indigo skies retains the melancholic crooning and rhythmic fire lit by nomadic peoples.

Songs from Ottoman Turkey, Greek and Macedonian folklore, rhythms from Iran and Kurdistan and dances from Andalusian and Maghrebi culture are recreated and fused with Western aesthetic currents. In this way, the Andalusian musical itinerary stimulates linguistic, poetic and musical exchange to foster a better understanding between peoples through a spontaneous language of its own, a mixture of instruments from the East and West and music impregnated with the aesthetics of the South. It is an eclectic and luminous sensibility that evokes, at the same time, the sonorous sensuality of the East and the Mediterranean with the dynamism of Western trends.

In contrast to the naked voice of the muezzin's psalmody that recalls those fragile miniatures in which the artist, in intimacy, draws with tenacity and delicacy a whole palette of colours, shapes, landscapes and contours that reveal thousands of secrets, the voices of the singers transmit the beauty of the Andalusian poems immersed in the symbolic colours of the five strings of Ziryab's lute: yellow (anger), red (blood), blue (the soul), blue (the soul), blue (the soul), blue (the soul), blue (the soul), yellow (the soul), blue (the soul), blue (the soul) and blue (the soul).

Programme  | Andalusi Poets: clouds and melodies of al-Andalus

• Nawba al-Istihlal /
• Andalusian Instrumental Dance
• Ya wahida ...................en Istihlal Mode

(Ibn al-Khatib, Loja (Granada) in 1313).

• Blessed is He who gave to the Imam

Nawba Mode: Ramal al-Maya(al-Shushtari, Born in the village of Sustar, near Guadix in the /1212 and died in Tina, Egypt, 668/.1269)

4- Ah Ya Ya Mokabil Imchi, Ya Rasul .............. Garnati tradition in Algeria. (Ibn al-Barraq (Guadix, 1134- 1200)

5- Divine Love - Kulu man yahwa Rasul - (Ibn al-Barraq /Guadix, 1134- 1200)

6- El Bulbul (el canario y la Lluvia primaverales) ….. T. Garnati Argelia  (Al Rusafi, Valencia, 1141- Málaga, 1177)

INTÉRPRETES:

Iman Kandoussi, voz

Fauzia Benedete, flauta

Aziz Samsaoui, kanun

Mouhsine Kouraichi, percusion

Hamid Ajbar, violín

Oussama Samsaoui, viola